If things go wrong, I’ll have the rest of a long, lonely life to indulge them.
“What about his son?” Caylon asks when she sounds close to breakdown, not able to provide more off the cuff. “Did you know Andy?”
“Drew? He called him Drew when we were… when we knew each other.” She coughs to clear her throat, then can’t stop, descending into a fit that takes a minute to resolve. “He adopted him but when they split, his mother got custody. Once he reached eighteen, the kid reached out again.”
“Where was she?” I call. “Did she live in Christchurch?”
“She had a lifestyle block just out of the city.” Her voice dials farther into panic as she adds, “I can’t remember where. I’m not sure he ever gave me the address. Do you think…?” Her sobs come over the line. “She’s a fighter, but he’s already in her head. I don’t…”
The nurse steals the phone from her. “I think that’s enough.”
I’m about to burst out with a string of invectives, when Caylon says, “Finally! Here we go.”
He tilts his phone towards me, the tangle of black spaghetti on the screen soon resolving into a map. “She might have been in an armoured car. That’s the kind of thing that can block the signal.”
An armoured car. Not something you usually pick up from your local dealership.
Another sign that whatever torment Jerred has in store for Rosa, he’s been planning it for a while. Planning it, and now we’ve increased his impetus to hurt her by killing his son.
A deep sense of guilt fills me.
This is down to me. I’m the one with the weird proclivities. I’m the one who needed something from her she couldn’t provide. Something she still tried to cater for because she’s special, she’s wonderful, she’s kind and thoughtful and considerate and currently being transported far away from me by a man who’s hurt her before and won’t hesitate to hurt her again.
I stare at the tiny blinking dot. It’s hard to believe the enormous outpouring of affection I have for Rosa could be encapsulated by the small collection of pixels on the screen.
“Zach?” Caylon asks as my eyes snap back to the road, my foot pressing harder on the accelerator, looking for any break in traffic to take advantage, to get us closer towards where we need to be. “I’m sending you a location. Meet us outside.”
“You need firepower?”
“We need anything you can lay your hands on immediately. Anything that takes time is ruining her chances.”
“It’s on the way,” he says, then I have to concentrate because I’m speeding through a red light and dodging the vehicle that correctly thinks it has the right of way.
“Try not to kill us before we get there,” Caylon says, grabbing the handle above the door as I continue onward, pushing the car to the max as I hurry towards the girl I love, hoping I’ll make it in time.
CHAPTERTWENTY-EIGHT
ROSA
I fight.
Elbows, knees, teeth, anything goes in my mad burst at freedom. I run straight at Edwin, but he doesn’t move aside like I’d hoped, instead turning himself into the rumpled equivalent of a brick wall.
Jerred waits, ready to intervene at a moment’s notice. When he grows sick of me squirming and wriggling and kicking, biting, scratching at any bits of the investigator that come into view, he walks over and punches me in the face, punching again when I sag.
He grabs me in a headlock, hauling his bent arm against my throat until the room goes dark and a high whine sounds in my ears, then he drops me. The world feels so far away, my body so resistant to movement, that I can’t get my hands up in time to break my fall.
I break it with my face instead. Slamming against the hard concrete of the garage floor. There’s a white-hot blast of pain, rousing me only to make everything hurt.
“Get up.” Jerred kicks at me with the steel toe of his boot. “I’m not paying him to carry you.”
Up is such a long way I don’t think I’ll make it, then a burst of anger propels me to my knees and from there, it’s not such a stretch.
My uncle walks over, stopping an inch away. I could attack him, he’s close enough, but I already know how that goes. I’m better off preserving my strength.
“Look at you,” he says with a curl of his lip. “To think we went to all this trouble to track you down and now you look like absolute shit.”
I run my tongue around the inside of my mouth, wincing as it travels near the incisor that was floor side down when I fell. It doesn’t feel like it’s long for this world and it’s sure screaming bloody murder about it.
