“I’ll keep working on it,” Leah assures me gently. She offers a small, genuine smile that warms up a chunk of the ice that’s formed around my heart. “I have some news that’s going to change everything. He might stop thinking about Edge if he has something else to focus on.”
I turn so sharply that my neck cracks with the movement. “What? Are you…”
Leah nods, and a pretty pink blush creeps up her neck to bloom on her cheeks. “Yeah. I found out a few days before your graduation. I was saving the news until after. I didn’t want to take away from your big day, but now… it’s hard to get a word in to actually tell him. I don’t want to just blurt it out, but I feel like that’s what’s going to happen.”
“Oh my god!” My grin is so wide that it feels like my face is going to crack. I shove out of my chair, spilling half the basin of soapy water all over the floor. I only spare a second of guiltfor it though, because in the next, I’m wrapping Leah up in my arms, hugging her tight to me. “That’s amazing. A baby! I- that’s incredible.”
Christine offers a shy smile, the kind a woman who is already a mother gives to another mother-to-be, that private smile, a welcome to the sacred club of motherhood kind of smile.
I pull away and glance down at the basin I just spilled. “Shit. Do you think if I get back in the chair they won’t notice?”
Leah giggles. “I don’t know. It’s okay. It’s only water. They’ll just bring a mop.”
“I was just so shocked. Oh my god! Wow.”
Leah’s blush deepens to a darker shade of red. “I mean, do you think he’ll be happy? He’s older than me. What if he doesn’t want any more kids? I- we didn’t exactly talk about kids and now he’s in this terrible mood all the time.”
Guilt gnaws at my heart and sinks its claws into my stomach, but I push it away. “Of course he’ll be happy! You’re the best thing that ever happened to my dad. I never had a mother or a sister, and I always thought that it would be nice for him to have someone there for him.”
Leah laughs, the sound soft and beautiful.
“I know when I first found out about you and my dad I was upset. I couldn’t believe he’d choose someone who was a few years older than me. I thought it was just wrong… That you were using him or playing games or something.” I can’t look at Leah, because the heat starts in my own face. “But then I saw how you looked at him, that same day, when he swept into the office to give everyone hell. I saw how he looked back at you, and I just knew you were the right fit for him. I’m glad that you stuckit out. All of it. My dad isn’t an easy man to love.” I shake my head, my smile coming back at the thought of Leah and my dad with a baby. My dad with a newborn. I can’t imagine it. It’s kind of funny, thinking about him changing diapers, even though I know he did it for me. He did everything for me, but I wasn’t around to witness it. “You shouldn’t be worrying about Edge or me or anything. You should just be focusing on this. On that baby.”
“Maybe if I tell him, it will shock him out of this, and he’ll get his head back on right and tell Edge to come back home where he belongs.”
“Maybe he’ll talk to me,” I agree.
“Maybe men always have their heads up their ass,” Christine chimes in.
“That’s probably true.”
“I know a good way to snap them out of it…” Christine gets that twinkle in her eyes, and we both know what’s coming, but her words are interrupted when she swivels her head to the side sharply and I can’t see what, if anything, she finished that up with.
I glance sharply at Leah, but her head is turned too, a sharp frown cutting into her forehead, her lips pursed.
The hairs on the backs of my arms stand on end. Something isn’t right. They’re looking at something. A noise that I can’t hear.
It reminds me of that night at The Canteen. When I knew something was wrong, but I couldn’t define it, couldn’t put my finger on it. The sick churning sensation in my stomach is back,and an icy cold band of fear wraps around my heart, slowing down the beat to a near standstill.
There’s no warning, no screams that I can hear, nothing, before three men in black rush in, huge guns tucked under their arms, ski masks pulled down over their faces. They’re big men, terrifying in their size. I immediately throw myself in front of Leah as they circle us. I feel like I can’t breathe, like someone has sprayed fire into my lungs. All three of us freeze. The only thing I dare move is my eyes, which stare at the first man’s face as he barks orders I can’t hear and can’t see because of the mask over his mouth. I can tell he’s talking though, because the other two incline their heads. They train their guns on us, their eyes, two sets of brown and one set of blue, absolutely frigid.
These men don’t care. They don’t care about our lives. They don’t care if they hurt us, if we live or die. I can sense the ruthlessness in them, the rage and adrenaline rolling off of them in acrid, choking waves.
My heart pounds so hard that I know the vein in my neck is jumping visibly. I reach behind me, so slowly that I know the men don’t see me do it, and clutch at Leah. I catch something, her knee, I think, and squeeze.
It’s not much, but it’s all I can do. She stays frozen to her chair behind me, and thankfully, Christine doesn’t move either. No one does anything that would make the men jumpy or trigger happy. I already know, with a sinking sensation in the pit of my stomach, that they’re going to take us. Kidnap us. I just hope that the staff at the front wasn’t hurt. That when my dad or Edge or any one of his old club brothers comes looking for us, they’ll be able to point them in the right direction.
The third man, the one on the far left, produces three black things from his pocket. Some kind of cloth bags, I realize. They’re huge and when it finally dawns on me that they’re going to slam them over our heads so we can’t see anything, panic claws at my throat.
The second produces a bag of zip ties. He shakes them in the air like he’s just won a prize at the fair and is damn proud of it too. I can’t see his mouth, but I can sense his wicked grin, the elation at the thought of hurting us.
Fear bottoms out my stomach, but I force myself to remain calm. Not to move or do anything that would be considered a threat.
Even as I watch the second man with the ties drag Christine to her feet. He bends her arms behind her back, actually taking some care with the cast, probably because it’s a hard to zip tie her hands with that cumbersome pink block in the way. I don’t move or say anything when the man with the bags in his hand tears me away from Leah, when the second man comes over and cranks my arms behind me so hard that my shoulders snap in protest and burn from the sockets, when the stitches in my upper arm scream in protest. I don’t make a sound.
Not even when Leah is dragged up and roughly handled, her hands tied behind her back the same way mine are.
Not when the thug slams one of those cloth bags over her face, not when he does the same to Christine.
