“No, it’s fine,” I murmured, but it wasn’t until I felt Nash’s fingers close around mine beneath the table where I had my fisted hand resting on my thigh that I felt like I could breathe once again. I let him link our fingers. “It took the cops four days to match a set of prints on her car to a suspect. They arrested him, but he wouldn’t talk. It took them a week to get him to admit he’d taken her and to say where she was. But they were too late,” I murmured.
Both men were, not surprisingly, at a loss for words. I worked to pull my emotions back, but I could feel the anxiety building in my belly.
“It’s been tough without her,” I admitted.
“Is Charlie named after her?” Nash asked.
I nodded. “That was Grace’s idea when we found out we were having a girl. Charlie’s middle name is Grace. I wanted her to carry the names oftwoamazing women with her.”
Nash squeezed my hand, but my emotions were still raw, so I tugged my hand free. Pain and rage swirled in my belly and it quickly became impossible to sit still. “I should probably go check on her,” I blurted right before I pushed my chair back. “She reallyloves that stupid chicken,” I said, trying to laugh off the remark, but the attempt at humor sounded forced, even to my own ears.
I hurried out the back door and began walking around the side of the house so I could just have a few seconds to myself, but when I heard footsteps behind me, I automatically said, “Not now, Nash.”
He ignored me and quickened his pace so he could cut me off.
“I just need a minute,” I said as I tried to step around him.
“Then take a minute with me,” he said. He tried to reach for my hand, but the emotions churning through me were too intense.
“I need to run to the store,” I said lamely. “Can you tell my dad and Charlie I’ll be back in a bit?”
I brushed past him, but when he touched my arm a moment later, I lost it and grabbed him by his sleeves. I shoved him away from me, but he had a hold of my shirt, so he took me with him. We ended up hitting the side of the house and Nash quickly maneuvered us so it was my back against it. He grabbed my face. “No, you don’t get to do this, Gage!” he snapped.
“Do what?” I asked as I tried to pull free of his hold. The last thing I wanted to do was hurt him, but the need to flee was too great.
“You don’t get to always be the strong one. Finish your story.”
I shook my head.
“Finish it. Tell me what happened to your mom.”
“I told you?—”
“You told us the sanitized version. Now tell me all of it.”
“No! You don’t need to hear that shit! No one needs to hear that shit!”
“I’m not no one! I’m the man who loves you and I hurt when you hurt. And right now, I want to fucking explode. I want to hunt that asshole down and tear him apart for daring to touch you and your family like that.”
I shook my head again, but he was unrelenting. And I could feel my will cracking under the strain to share the horrible things that were running through my head. I forgot that he was an officer of the law and I forgot that I needed to always be strong for the people who needed me.
“I killed him,” I whispered. “But I made him suffer the way she suffered.”
Unfazed, Nash softly said, “Tell me.”
“He put my mother in a box in his basement. There was one small hole for air and for him to give her food and water. He only let her out long enough to rape her on a dirty mattress next to the box. When he was done with her, he’d put her back in it. Four fucking days, Nash!”
“I’m sorry, Gage,” Nash whispered over and over. It was his voice that I clung to instead of the actual words. I matched my breathing to the softly spoken phrase until my head no longer felt like it was going to twist off my body.
“I’d gotten leave to come home to help find my mother,” I explained. “A friend of mine who worked for the police department as a sketch artist called me as soon as the cops got a location on where my mother was. I got there about five minutes after the police did. They wouldn’t let me see her… they had two officers restraining me, but I didn’t care. I was going to get into that basement and no one was going to stop me.”
I let out a choked sob as I managed to say, “God, Nash, why the fuck couldn’t they have stopped me?”
I couldn’t hold back the tears anymore. Nash pulled my head down so it was pressed against his throat. “You saw her?” he asked.
I nodded my head. “When they arrested him, he was silent long enough to make sure she wasn’t going to get out of that box alive. She didn’t have any food or water for seven days. There was no light and the top of the inside of that box…”
“Don’t, Gage,” Nash whispered in my ear. “Don’t look,” he murmured, because he knew I was back in that basement. “Stay with me.”
