by Eden Rose
“Your husband is still looking for you. Your family and friends are still looking for you. Look, we have thirty minutes to get out of here before she comes back. Do you want to stay here or do you want to live?”
My mind's made up quickly and I slip the hood over my face. The whole time that I’m sitting there, I can’t help but think how easily it would be for him to kill me like this. Was that his plan the whole time? For me to cover my face so I can’t see him? Is he not man enough to kill someone while looking in their eyes?
“Little girl, if I wanted to kill you, I would have already done it by now.”
I choose to not say anything and wait for the next direction before I do anything else. I’m freaked out beyond belief and I’m more scared of what is going to happen to my baby. The baby that I haven’t even named or saw on the screen. A baby whose heartbeat I haven’t heard yet.
Once I’m secured in the hood, the man reaches over me and helps me stand up. I’m wobbly on my legs and I can feel all of the blood rush to my feet. I feel dizzy and drunk as I try to gain stability on the floor.
He places his hand on my back to help me and then leads me out of the room that we are in. The onslaught from the sun seeps through the fabric of the hood and I wince at the harshness of it. It’s been six months since I have seen the sun and it’s definitely blinding me.
“We are going to go into a car and once I say climb up, I need you to climb up.”
“Okay.”
As we approached whatever it was that we were going to, he placed his hands on my back and said: “I don’t know what kind of shit Liz has on you, but she’s not going to stop until she gets it.”
“What are you talking about?” I blurt out and then lift my knee up to my chest in preparation for the climb. “I thought you knew what her fucking problem was.”
“Audrey, I don’t have any idea but I’m done with this shit. It’s time for you to move on with your life and get over this.”
I refuse to be a victim again. I was a victim with Martin Porter and now I’m a victim with Liz. I’m so fucking sick and tired of being a victim.
Before I could say anything more, I felt the force of a punch against my face and it cracked the bone on my face.
“That is when I woke up in here.”
I can feel the tears as they flow down my face and I grab onto my stomach to help me get through this.
Damien
You think it’s over. It’s only begun. Meet me at Anderson’s Mill at 10 tonight. Come alone. Only you and Garrett are allowed. I will know if you have brought someone with you and I will come after Audrey and Liz. Don’t fuck with me.
Garrett and I have made a plan and we are about to execute it. It’s important that we have everything in order before we do anything because it’s only a matter of time before Liz strikes again and this time she won’t let Audrey go.
Audrey came home a couple of days ago and she’s already complaining about being bored. I have a feeling a lot of this boredom has to do with the fact that I’m not letting her do shit around the house. I hired a maid to cook and clean Monday through Friday and that created an all out war here at home.
“You are not spending money on a fucking maid while I just sit here and stare at the ceiling!” Audrey yells at me and then groans because she jostled her arm.
I circle around the bed until I’m sitting next to her blanket covered knees. “I did and we have one. Her name is Maria and she’s a fucking nice woman. Don’t make her feel bad or anything. I mean it, Audrey.”
“This is bull shit. I’m not an invalid,” she stresses the last word with her normal attitude.
“I’m not saying you are,” I say to her as I place my hand on her knee. I squeeze gently and then look at her with compassion even though right now I want to throttle her. “I know this is tough for you but you have to protect our little butterbean.”
She snorts and then thrusts her nose in the air to attempt to hide her amusement. “You are not calling our daughter that. She’s going to have a beautiful name.”
“Don’t give me that attitude.”
“I’m thinking Gabriella or something.”
“I’m thinking you need to listen to what I’m saying and not avoid what I’m trying to tell you.”
“I’m thinking that the both of you need to shut up,” Liz and Jerry say as they stroll into our room.
Audrey looks at them with curiosity and wonder. “What are they doing here?” She asks me.
Liz huffs and sticks out her chest. “Way to make us feel wanted, bitch.”
“Girl, I was hoping to get lucky. You know, sex and all of that. Whatcha doing here?”
I look at all three girls and then say: “I need to handle some personal matters so I’m going to be leaving for the day. I will be back in a little while. Don’t worry about anything while I’m gone. ”
Jerry rolls her eyes and then sticks her foot out. “You should know better than to tell a pregnant woman not to worry.”
My fear is confirmed when Audrey starts crying. “No! No. Fuck you.”
“Audrey, baby. Come on. It’s nothing bad.”
She shakes her head and her bottom lip sticks out a little bit. “Then what is it like? Wanna know how I see it? You’re leaving your pregnant wife when she just gets home from the hospital.”
Well, if she puts it that way… I do seem like an asshole.
“My lovely, I’m not going to let anything happen to you. I promise. I’m just going to go out for a little bit and I will be back before you go to sleep.”
“Damien, you should just go. She’s not going to listen to anything you have to say,” Liz says to me.
I watch as the two girls climb into bed with my wife. I’m pushed out of the way by all three of them and I crawl across the bed and kiss her stomach. “Daddy loves you, Gabriella.”
All three of the girls give me a loud: “Awww!”
Beaming with fatherly happiness, I look up at Audrey who has a smile on her face. A little watery one, but it’s a smile nonetheless. “Love you, be safe with whatever you’re doing.”
“I will. Be home soon.”
I scooch off the bed and stroll out of my bedroom. Garrett’s in the living room looking at his phone. I could tell that he’s not liking what he’s reading because he has a “I’m pissed” look on his face. “What’s goin’ on, man?” I question and reach into the bowl that holds my keys and wallet.
“Is Audrey pissed?”
“She’s not very happy.”
“Damn it. The whole point of this is to make sure she’s fucking happy and safe.”
I slip my wallet in my back pocket and stick my index finger through one of the rings on my keychain and walk over to him. “Would you be happy if Liz were to be going off doing whatever?”
“No.” Garrett stands up and drops his phone in his pocket. “Let’s go get this taken care of so we can get home.”
Audrey
To say I’m pissed would be an understatement. I’m brutally, fucking livid. How can Damien just take off and do whatever when I’m on bedrest? I can’t even leave and go anywhere and it’s bull shit.
“Where do you think they are going?” I ask Liz.
Jerry’s to my right and Liz is to my left with both of them holding my hands. It feels good to be smothered by affection but it’s not the type of affection that I want. I want Damien home and to tell me where the hell he went to.
“Well,” the pretty redhead begins, “I think it’s probably some stupid ass guy shit where they grab their balls and grunt a lot.”
“Where are the twins?” I ask her. I love my nieces. They are stinkin’ adorable with their round faces.
“My mom has them. She’s bringing them over here in a few hours. What should we do to entertain ourselves?”
Liz gets an evil smile on her face and I can tell that she’s excited about something. “I put a tracker on Garrett’s phone about six months ago. I was sure he was cheating on me.”
I look at her, appalled at what she thought would happen and then roll my eyes. “Girl, you are bat shit crazy.”
“Bat shit crazy but at least I can track his phone and know where he’s at.”
“You are not going to track their phones!” Jerry exclaims and then crosses her arms over her chest. I will give her this, after twins, her boobs are still looking good.
I smirk because I know that Liz has already turned on the tracker to their phones. See, the problem with some people is that they don’t know the impulsivity that Liz has. She’s constantly doing first and thinking last. The fact that she’s swinging her phone around, that tells me that she’s doing exactly what I thought.
“You don’t know me that well,” Liz huffs and starts typing on her phone.
Before long, she has a map up with little pin marks all over the map. With one blinking more, she taps the pin and then an address pops up. “That must be where they are,” Liz states the obvious.
Just then my cell phone pings and I reach over to grab it. It’s resting on the other side of Liz. The text message is from an unknown number and my body begins to buzz with anticipation.
UNKNOWN: you think it’s over now? You think you get to escape and send your husband and brother to your rescus
UNKNOWN: e. Think again. Bitch. This is not over. Meet me at the spot with the money and i will give you what
UNKNOWN: you wanted
I read the messages out loud and Liz and Jerry jump off the bed and I look down at my baby bump. I’m not supposed to be doing anything strenuous, but I need to make sure that Damien and Garrett are okay. Plus, I need to make sure that I can get all of the incriminating documents from Liz.
“Jesus. We need to go!” I say as I manage to slide off the bed. The minute my feet hit the floor, I feel all of the blood move around my body. “Woah,” I hiss out and put my hands out in front of me.
“Are you okay?” Jerry asks me and rushes over to stand in front of me. I place my hands on her petite shoulders and she begins to walk me backwards to the bed. “Do you need to lay back down?”
“No. I want to go and make sure that my husband and brother are okay. You don’t know the kind of shit that the bitch did to me! She wants to keep my baby.”
Before I could say anything more, Jerry begins to lead us out the door with her back to it. Liz is meeting us at the doorway with a scowl on her face. “As a medical professional, I have to highly suggest that you go back to bed.”
“And myself as a medical professional, I have to highly suggest that you help me get in the car so we can get Garrett and Damien back!”
Jerry’s silent as she walks behind us and I know it has a lot to do with the fact that she’s missing Barron. Hell, I miss him every day. It sucks more than fucking ever that he was taken from us way before his time.
Damien
The drive to get to where Liz is staying at doesn’t take us that long to get there. I’m pissed off at myself since it’s only about fifteen minutes away from where Audrey and I live. If she lives this close to us, does that mean when Audrey was taken, she was that close?
I thought for sure she was taken from me for good… And she was only a few miles from me? That pisses me off more than ever. I could have looked for her. Maybe if I looked harder I would have been able to find her. No, I decided to drink and paint instead of looking for her.
For some reason, Audrey forgave me and I don’t even know why. I’m a bastard. I’m a fucking cancer who can’t even take care of my wife. I’m a loser who let’s his wife get kidnapped because I decided to do some kinky ass shit to a psychotic girl who I didn’t even know.
Fuck me.
I need to make a promise to myself that I will make this right with Audrey. I will make sure that I make everyone of her dreams come true and be with her fully. No more of this pretend shit of only being with her because I don’t want her to testify. Fuck that.
If she wanted to testify against me, who cares. I deserve it for all of the torture that I had caused her and the anguish of the pain. I would gladly spend my life behind bars if that meant that she were happy.
“What are you thinking about?” Garrett asks me and busts up my self-pitying party that I’m engaged in.
“I don’t want to talk about it. I want to get this shit done so we can put Liz and her bull shit behind us. I have my pregnant wife to get back to.”
We ride in silence after I declared that I didn’t want to talk about it. I appreciated the silence. That’s the nice thing about Garrett, he didn’t push or hover. Demand to know what I’m thinking like some chick.
By the time we pull into Liz’s driveway, my heart is beating out of control and my nerves are shot. I can feel my blood boil as the anger of everything attacks me.
“Don’t lose your cool, bro. I got your back but we need to be smart. By knowing her crazy ass she’s going to do something insane. Fuck, I want to kill her.”
We each get out of the car and meet in the front of the car to walk over to the house. It’s one of those normal looking houses with no sign that the person who lives inside is a psycho.
It’s a small white house and it’s ranch style. Totally the opposite of what I would expect her to live in. I’m amazed that she didn’t spring for something bigger than this. With little blue shutters that outline the window and flower beds outside, it looks cute and quaint.
We both hover in front of the door, not sure of what to do. I’m the one that breaks the silence and knock on it. It was a matter of seconds before Liz answered the door with a pervious smile. She looked as if she won and it pissed me off more than ever.
“Well, I wasn’t expecting the both of you to be here.”
Garrett shakes his head and then pushes her aside to walk in the house. I take that as a que, and follow him.
The outside of the house is the diversion for how messed up and nasty the inside of the house is. It smells like human waste and pure filth throughout it. I’m disgusted being in here.
“Were you expecting us at all? You would think that you could clean up a little to accept company,” Garrett says as he walks around the room. When he gets to a photo of Audrey, he picks it up and looks at it. “You are one fucked up bitch. You know that? Fucking with me and my life wasn’t enough, you had to choose my sister to mess with?”
I’m at his side in a matter of four steps and I yank the photo out of his hand. It’s of Audrey and she’s passed out on a dirty looking bed with her mouth covered in tape. I can see her beautiful hair is caught in the tape and her cheeks have tear marks on it.
“You did this to my wife? How fucking crazy are you? You’re such a dumb cunt of a bitch!” I lift up my hand to hit her like a man but then I stop myself. This is what she wanted. She wanted me to lose my cool so she could show Audrey how uncontrollable I am.
She starts chuckling and rolling her eyes. We are in a stand off and she’s in front of us with a smiling face. “You wanna hit me? Isn’t that against your code or whatever? You wanna fucking hit me for what I did?”
“Why did you do this? To my sister,” Garrett asks. “What did Audrey do to you that made you target her? You had the videos and the recordings all along. You could have gone to the cops a long time ago but you didn’t. Why? Is it because you wanted money? Fuck money. I would give you every red cent I had if it meant you left us alone.”
“Why? Why! What did Audrey do to me? Let’s see,” Liz looks up to the ceiling as if she’s trying to recall what she’s thinking and then she smiles again. “First, no matter what she was always your priority. With her fucking cutting and accusing that professor of raping her. Who would want to rape her? Seriously. I’m much prettier than she is.”
My hands flinch and I begin to tighten them into fists as I’m ready to punch her but Garrett shakes his head to tell me no. “And then what?” He questions her.
I don’t even see it, but Liz whips out a gun from the back of her pants and begins to wave it in the air. “She constantly kept
you from me with her whiny bull shit. Every damn time we had something going on, she needed you. Or Baron needed you. What about me? What happens when I needed you? You couldn’t be there for me.”
Every word that she’s saying is hitting me straight to the gut. I know that she’s mentally unstable, but I never knew how deep it went. “You felt this way all this time?” I ask her gently.
Of course she doesn’t buy it and sticks her gun out at me. “Did she tell you that I wanted to keep the baby? Did she tell you that is my baby?”
My anger is hitting the roof as she sticks the gun into the waistband of her pants again. We watch her helplessly as she walks over to the television and hits play on the remote.
