Page 15 of Unbound

I’d leaned on Sarah for help with the boys, even more than usual, but she didn’t seem to mind. She was like a mother to me, much more than my own mother, who was useless.

My mother had sent a card and flowers when she heard about my husband, my father. But she didn’t come. She called but we had nothing to say to one another. I knew her husband was dying, too. And she wouldn’t have helped me even if she had flown here for me and my siblings. She was practically a stranger.

She was probably relieved Pop was gone. He was a monster to her, her worst nightmare. She didn’t talk about it, not ever, but you saw it in her eyes whenever their paths had to cross after their split.

She’d tried to be a mother right after their split, but saw us once a year until we were sixteen and seventeen. And then it was every other year for the next few years. I hadn’t seen her since the day Luc married Ed. She’d come to both of our weddings but hadn’t met any of her grandkids. She missed Dare’s wedding.

What I needed was Sarah right now, anyways, because my boys who were usually angels had both been out of sorts, likely picking up on my mood, so they were both cranky and bickering over toys, skipping naps, napping at the wrong time so not going to bed on time, and thus making my currently complicated life more complicated.

After dropping them at daycare, which was good because it was routine for them, I was stopped at a light, lost in thought about Leese, thinking about what she must have endured, and thinking that if Jim were here, he’d tell me to talk to her, tell her I loved her. Because I did.

Lisa was my best friend and yeah, I’d been shocked, but she’d be there for me no matter what. And she’d only done what she had to do all this time. And I had left her to wonder if she had a place in my life for too many days.

I was missing Jim a lot today, thinking I definitely needed to stop by my house after I helped at the restaurant, just to walk through, go into the master bedroom closet and bury my nose in a row of his suits, see if I could catch a whiff of his scent.

I missed the way he smelled so much. I missed his lips, his hands, which would hold me and touch me. I missed the way he made the boys giggle. How he’d bite my ass cheek to get me out of bed in the morning so playfully.

I was having that thought, stopped at a pedestrian crosswalk that had a little old lady ambling across the road with a buggy of groceries, when a teenage girl started hammering her fists on my front passenger window of my SUV screaming, “HELP!” at me with a frantic look on her face.

She should win an Oscar for that performance; it was that convincing that I hit the button to make the window roll down.

“Let me in! Please, please! He’s after me!”

I was about to hit the unlock button to let her in, but she reached inside the window and grabbed the button and pulled it up and then opened the door. She did this lightning fast. And then a man squeezed by her and jumped into my passenger seat. He put the barrel of a gun in my ribs and ordered me to drive down the side street after the intersection, pointing the direction he wanted me to take. The girl had already backed away.

I’d never seen him before. He was likely in his late thirties, dark complexion, some sort of European, and the look he gave me told me he meant business.

My father may have tried to shelter me and Luc, for the most part, but we weren’t stupid. And things were said, at times, designed to give us the skills to survive in this world. Little lessons, little tests. And if we failed, he’d lecture us and tell us how we should have behaved. I still, to this day, heard his voice when I fucked up and it told me the way whatever I’d fucked up should’ve been done.

‘Contessa, how should you have handled that, my precious?’

We always knew we were in the midst of dangerous people, people who would take a bullet for us because they were paid to protect us. We also knew that when they had a job, they frequently carried that job out with a gun at the ready and they didn’t hesitate to use it.

I’d been to more than a few funerals in my life for employees of my father who’d died in the line of duty carrying out ordersby Pop or one of my brothers. Heck, I was a widow because my husband died in that line of duty.

“Pull over. There.” He gestured with his gun towards the curb.

I wasn’t about to test this guy’s level of seriousness about his job. My phone started to ring from my console and I saw it was Nino.

My captor took my phone and threw it out the window and then when I stopped the car, on his orders, he leaned over and hit the button to unlock all the locks. I heard the back door of my SUV open and then close as someone got in. The guy in front undid my seatbelt and not-very-gently tossed me into my own back seat where another guy, in a balaclava, caught me and then put a balaclava over my head backwards so that I couldn’t use the eye holes. And then my hands and feet were taped.

And all I could think about wasn’t regarding my safety or where they’d take me or what they’d do to me. My brain was frozen, mid-thought, on my smashed cell phone, out in the street, and the fact that I couldn’t remember the last time I’d unloaded the pictures on my cell. How many pictures of my husband, the boys’ father, were on there that I hadn’t saved, that they’d never get to see?

I got to Pop’s house, which it would always be known as, and when I got inside, Tia was sitting in the living room with Sarah, Luc, Lisa and the kids. The kids were on the floor playing with Marley. Sarah had baby Nicky in her arms.

Tia rushed to me. The dog did, too. So, Serena and Katrina also threw their arms around my legs and gave me hugs with squealing laughter. The dog started jumping up against my legs.

I patted their heads and clipped, “Marley sit.”

I lifted Tia off her feet and buried my nose into her hair. I was worried sick about Contessa and relieved that Tia and Luc were all here safe.

“Hey,” she whispered against my lips.

“Hey.”

“What’s happening? Where’s Tess?”

I put her on her feet and looked to the room. “Sarah, get the kids to the other room, all right?”

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