“I’m not ready to see them yet,” she protested. After talking with Fiona yesterday she and Ryder had slipped quietly away, and her plan had been to basically never see any of them again. Okay, so that wasn’t really her plan, but today? She couldn’t face them when she still felt like her entire world was spinning out of control no matter how much she tried to contain it.
“Honey, you know the guys love you, and they’ve all dealt with some heavy stuff.”
“You too, huh?”
“Yeah, babe, me too.”
“I don’t like to think of your job getting you hurt,” she said, lifting her hands to his cheeks. The idea of anyone hurting Ryder made her feel sick inside.
“Same way I feel about you, all those months you were gone it was like being trapped in Hell. No matter how hard we looked for you we couldn’t find you.” Ryder leaned over to touch his forehead to hers.
“But you did find me,” she reminded him.
“By accident.”
The way he said it made it sound like that made a difference, but in the end she didn’t care if they’d known she was there or found her by accident because in the end the outcome was the same, she got to come home. “It doesn’t matter, Ryder. You found me, you saved my life, and you got me safely through the jungle and back home. That’s what matters. This is what matters.” Standing on her tiptoes, she touched her lips to his. That first second of contact always felt like the stars aligning, the world falling into place, the missing pieces of her heart clicking back together.
The sound of the doorbell had them reluctantly pulling apart.
“Your decision, Abby, you want me to tell them you’re not ready to see anyone yet and I’ll send them away.”
With the ball in her court she felt like a little of her control returned, and she nodded, may as well get that first awkward out of the way now. “They can stay.”
“I’m proud of you, Abs, don’t ever doubt your own strength.” Ryder gave her another quick kiss then went to answer the door while she gathered her courage.
When she heard voices, she turned to face the room. There was no point in hiding, yes they’d seen her lose it, but it was done, she couldn’t change it, so she just had to do her best to put it behind her.
Pasting on a smile, she walked into the living room to face her fear straight on. “Hey, guys.”
“Hey, Abs,” Owen “Fox” LeGrand said, coming to wrap her in a tight hug.
“It’s so good to see you back where you belong,” Charlie “King” Voss told her, taking his turn hugging her.
“It wasn’t the same around here without you,” Logan “Shark” Kirk added as he gave her a hug.
“It really wasn’t,” Grayson “Chaos” Simpson agreed as he ruffled her hair and kissed her cheek.
“I missed you guys too,” she said as the four men took seats, their presence dominating her cozy little apartment. Abigail noted that Eric was the only one who hadn’t come to say hi and give her a hug, and she hated the distance between them. They might not be close, but he was the only family she had, and she didn’t want this. Walking over, she wrapped her arms around his waist and rested her head against his chest. “I’m still angry with you, Eric, for what you did, but I love you.”
She felt relief shudder through his big body and his arms came around her, holding her just a little too tight, not that she would tell him that because she sensed he needed this even more than she did. “I’m sorry, Abby, I never should have gotten involved, I should have let you and Spider be happy, but please believe me when I tell you I regret it, you have no idea how much.”
“It’s okay, we can work past it,” she assured him.
After another squeeze he released her, and they both joined the others in the sitting area of the living room. The guys had taken over the couch and pulled over chairs from the table leaving both armchairs free, Eric took one, and she took the other, Ryder perched on the arm of her chair, his arm around her shoulders.
They were all looking at her.
It was then that she realized this wasn’t a social call.
Darting her gaze up to Ryder, she asked, “Why did you invite them over? It wasn’t just to hang out was it?”
Ryder exchanged a glance with the others then shook his head. “They did want to see you, but no they aren’t just here to hang out. I would prefer to wait until you have your feet back underneath you, but I’m not sure that we can wait.”
“Because we think that someone targeted me and we’re worried that they might come back,” she said. They’d discussed this already back at the safehouse. “But I already told you everything that I remember.”
“You’ve told us everything your conscious mind remembers,” Ryder corrected gently.
“What do you mean?”
“You know you talk in your sleep,” he started slowly.
“Yeah, it’s embarrassed me more than once over the years,” she said. When they were kids Eric and Ryder had loved sneaking into her room at night to see what she would say in her sleep and then tease her about it the next day. “I’m guessing I said something in my sleep that makes you think my subconscious remembers more.”
“It started when we were hiding out in the shack on Perez’s compound,” Ryder explained. “Your fever spiked, you were delirious, hallucinating, and you were terrified that someone was in the room with us, that they were going to take us back, you begged me to kill you rather than let them take you again.”
“I don’t remember saying that,” she said. If her conscious mind was blocking out what had happened to her then she didn’t want to remember. Abigail lifted her hand and looked at the fingers that were a little crooked. If someone had tortured her did she really want to know?
“One night in the safehouse you talked about not knowing anything,” Ryder continued.
Okay, so that pretty much confirmed it.
She had been tortured.
“We’ve been trying to figure out why Perez had taken you and then kept you for so long. We wondered if maybe he wanted to keep you and he was working on breaking you, or if he thought you had seen something you shouldn’t have.”
“But now you have a different theory,” she said. It was written all over Ryder’s face and on the faces of the other men on his team.
“Unfortunately, we do,” Eric said.
“Last night you started talking in your sleep again,” Ryder said, sounding troubled, almost guilty. “In your nightmares someone was asking you questions, you kept saying over and over that you didn’t know anything.”
“Yeah, you said I dreamed that already.” There was obviously more happening than they had let on yet, and the longer they took to just say it the more her anxiety amped up. “Would someone just say what you guys came here to ask me about?”
Ryder opened his mouth, then let it fall closed, his blue eyes tormented.
Since it was obvious Ryder couldn’t say whatever it was that needed to be said, Eric leaned over and rested a hand on her knee. “Abby, you mentioned our names; whoever was questioning you was questioning you about us.”
She didn’t understand