AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Of the drug, silly. I don’t want you asleep. We won’t have a whole lot of time together.” She looks at her watch and smiles. “I have a plane to catch, after all.”
At the mention of a drug and the memory of the pinch I’d felt in my neck, I will my mind to cling to consciousness. “Yooouudugmeee?”
Alice’s laughter is light and airy, but it hits me like a firecracker to the chest. It’s an odd sensation to feel so much feeling—and yet be incapable of any action at all. I’m sopowerless.
“You have no idea how easy it is to find people willing to steal from hospitals. Christ, these people take oaths to do no harm, right? And here they are selling sedatives on the street to whoever’s got the green stuff to buy it.” She makes a noise in the back of her throat, drumming her fingertips to a tune only she can hear. The radio in the car isn’t on.
Or maybe I just can’t hear it beyond the buzzing in my ears.
She continues, “Guess that’s what happens when the government forces people to live on unliveable wages. They start finding other ways to make money, so long as it puts food in their kids mouths and powder up the nose.” She giggles again. My blood runs hot and then cold and hot again. I can’t regulate.
What did she give me?
“Whahdyouiveme?” I ramble the question, only partially surprised when she answers.
“Fuck if I know. I told him what I wanted, and he told me he’d get it. I didn’t ask questions.”
How is this happening to me? Why?
“Why?” The word comes out clear, if not quietly, in the space between us.
“Why?” She lands wild eyes on me, ignoring traffic for too long. “You really don’t know?”
I can’t shake my head. I just blink at her.
She turns away from me and says through the windshield, “Vengeance,” just as my phone rings. I try to reach for it, just touch it with my fingertips when Alice snatches it between bright red talons. “I’ll take that, thank you very much.”
thirty-four
Cash
Voicemail. Again.
Worry coats my throat in acid as I call her again. Again, same result.
I should have walked down with her.What the fuck happened?
“Come on, Kitten,” I speak into the ring as I call again. I feel too helpless not to call. Not to keep calling.
“Man,” Tav comes close. Wary eyes tracking me as I pace. In the kitchen, Candace turns off the oven and stands, pale, against the counter. “She’s not answering.”
“I know she’s not answering,” I grit, anger I don’t mean to direct at him loudin my words.
I’d been on my way down when I texted her, already having a bad feeling in my gut. When all I found was a broken spiced pumpkin pie laying on the sidewalk half a block from the front door, that bad feeling in my gut twisted like a blade. I can already feel the blood trickling from the wound of her absence. If she doesn’t return home soon, it won’t be long before it’s hemorrhaging.
Flashes of caramel hair against my pillows and bright green eyes, midnight sighs and early morning giggles sweeter than icing sugar on French toast flash through my mind, shooting tiny daggers into my heart.
I can’t live without her.
My fingers curl into my hair, a noise I don’t recognize as my own sounding in the space around me. It reverberates off walls to knock into me like a fist against every inch of my flesh.
“Where is she?” I ask no one as the panic begins to dip its talons into my mind, shredding sense.
“I’ve called the police.” The sound of Ian’s voice has my head whipping to the side, seeing him coming from the hall. Kane and Tav are wide eyed and lost, like neither of them know what to do.
Ian comes to stand beside me, his palms slapping hard against my shoulders as he grips me. “We need to think now, brother. We need to keep our heads level,and we need to think. Who is this bitch who took her? Because she took her. That’s just fact.”
Took her. The words settle like fermenting bile in my belly, burning a path all the way up my throat. I can’t even swallow it down.
