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“We need to keep an eye on Callie,” I announce to my best friends. We’re bound to one another with a bond tighter than blood: death, pain, and suffering. And okay, a lot of blood...just not ours. Besides, we’re closer than any brothers.
Right now a mixture of reactions cross their faces. East, the eldest, knows exactly what I’m talking about, whereas Tex, the baby of our trio, is clueless.
“Really? Why do you say that? She’s okay,” he insists, pushing his glasses further up the bridge of his nose.
Yep, clueless. I sigh and watch as East runs his hands through his shoulder-length curly brown hair. It’s especially wild today against his sculpted beard, but he hasn’t had time to tie it back out of his way yet like he normally would. He looks as stressed as I feel.
“No-one can go through what she’s been through and come out of it okay,” I tell Tex.
“She seems fine,” he grumbles, defensively.
“Seeming fine is not the same thing as being fine,” I snap. I try not to lose my patience, I really do, but the situation is tense right now and everything hangs in the balance.
“She’s been having nightmares again,” East confesses. I nod, I suspected as much. I would love nothing more than to curl up in bed beside her, but I’ve been pulling twenty-four-hour shifts trying to make our revenge plan a reality. I don’t even remember the last time I slept, let alone spent any time actually lying down in a bed.
“It’s not enough to just carry out our plan, guys, we have to protect her too, and that will take a lot longer.”
“We did protect her! We found and saved her before it was too late,” Tex counters.
He’s so innocent it hurts. Sometimes I wish I could see the world the way he does. Simply. In black-and-white with no grey areas. I love and hate that about him in equal measures.
“No. We didn’t. We arrived too late, and she already had to endure more atrocities than anyone should ever have to. Just because we stopped them from moving her on and killing her, doesn’t mean we saved the day.”
“There are worse things to endure than death,” East adds in. At least he gets it.
“We’re not heroes, Tex,” I explain. “But we will be once we slay her demons for her.”
“But she’ll need protecting from herself. That’s what you mean, isn’t it?” Finally Tex is catching on. I nod at him.
“Right, let’s go over the plan again,” I insist, laying out our papers and letting East talk us through everything from the top.
While he talks, I allow my mind to wander to Callie and what she went through all those months ago.
* * *
“Callie! Callie!” I scream as we frantically burst through the door of the shack we traced her to and split up to search every room in the house. We used every favour we had to get this location, and it could cost us everything. But it’s worth it to have Callie back where she belongs.
I send East down to the basement and order Tex to search the ground floor while I take the stairs. We all have our weapons drawn, but we needn’t have worried about using them.
Whoever had taken Callie was long gone.
There was plenty of evidence to suggest that someone had been held captive in this place though, and I’d be willing to guess it was her.
I close my eyes for a second as I clear the final room, imagining that I can smell her peach shampoo that she always uses, faint on the air.
“Any luck?” East asks, appearing in the doorway with Tex.
“No.” I kick the nearest piece of furniture – a huge, heavy solid-wood dresser – in anger. How late were we? She’d been gone for a couple of days now and it was a bitch to trace her this far. I was so sure we’d find her here.
“Do you smell that?” Tex asks.
“Smell what?” I reply.
“Peach. Like Callie’s shampoo.”
“I thought I was imagining it. At least we know she was here,” I admit. For all the good it does us. The trail had officially gone cold, and it was like finding a needle in a haystack in the first place. “Damn it!”
“Hey, calm down,” East murmurs to me, placing his huge paw of a hand on my shoulder. “We’ll go home and regroup. Go over the evidence again. We must have missed something before, but we’ll find it. We’ll find her. We have the connections.”
