“Okay,” I breathed. Then I rattled off my bank details without hesitation.
He was right.
It was only money.
What did I care?
Money was fluid. It wasn’t necessary. The abundance or lack of it wasn’t something that changed the core of who I was. But what would happen because of my abundance—I thought of Craig’s stare—that still might happen regardless, was something that would change the core of who I was.
I hoped it was as simple as money and then I could be released. Wouldn’t that be lovely?
There was more tapping.
A loaded pause as Craig’s eyes darted over the screen.
His face changed again.
It was scary, terrifying to see a person change so quickly from one identity to the other. Scarier too when it was someone you thought you loved, someone you once promised to love forever.
But there was only one person I’d love forever.
The man who I’d been forcing myself not to think of because if I did, I’d break down. Because we’d finally, finally, maybe gotten toward where we should be, after all the pain. And now there was this. I knew he’d know I was gone by now. And I knew it’d be torturing him. I thought I was done torturing him, inadvertently or otherwise.
But with love, and with me, it seemed, the torture was never done.
“Where’s the fucking rest of it, Polly?” Craig asked quietly.
“The rest?” I mimicked.
He looked up. His eyes were cold. “Yes, Polly. The fucking rest. I don’t want games. If you’ve hidden it, I’ll find it eventually. It’ll be the whole amount, but I can’t promise you will be quite as whole at the end. You had over three million dollars in the divorce, there’s fifty measly fucking grand in here, where the fuck is the rest of it?”
“There is no rest of it,” I said quietly.
He blinked. Then he laughed. Like really laughed. Like we were across from each other at a restaurant and were sharing a joke that only two people in love could really understand.
Instead, it was two people who had both pretended to love each other, both for very different reasons. Me, because all of my love was used up, spent on another man. Craig, because he was obviously some sort of creature, some sort of monster not capable of such an emotion.
“Yeah, like you could spend all that in one go,” he said, still speaking in that false jovial tone. “I know you’ve been away. But I also know that you barely spent anything on your trip. You volunteered. You stayed in hostels,” he spat the word. “You’re still in that piece of shit apartment. You’re still driving a piece of shit car. So I know you didn’t spend it. Not my Polly.”
“I didn’t spend it,” I agreed. “I donated it. Half to a charity providing for battered women and half to St. Mary’s Children’s Hospital.” The rest was used to help the people at my shelter find jobs, homes, peace.
There was a silence after my words.
A roaring one. One that rang in my ears.
Then the laptop was no longer on his lap. It flew through the air and then smashed against the wall.
And he was up.
And then he was hitting me.
There was pain then.
For a long time.
And then I broke.
Broke, as Craig promised, in a way that meant I’d never be whole again.
Heath
Twelve Hours Missing
He had gone through a packet of rubber bands.
He was now on whisky.
Though he was limited to two glasses since no way in fuck would he let his faculties be impaired when they got news of where Polly was. When he went to get her. And when he’d find her safe and fucking sound and unharmed.
He snorted as he finished the second glass, slamming it down on his desk hard enough to shatter it. Glass shot in all directions, creating a visible mess in the stark order of his office.
He barely noticed it.
He wouldn’t have noticed if a hurricane flew threw and ruined all the order he’d thought was so important.
Only one hurricane mattered. The one who’d tore through the order of his life, of his fucking soul. The one who believed in peace, even when the world showed her violence. Who believed the best in people even after they’d shown her the worst. Polly who gave everything to the people around her, even when she had nothing left to give. Polly was the one that everyone thought believed in the fairy tales, yet here he fucking was, clinging to one because he was too fucking weak to handle the truth.
That being the chances of Polly being unharmed were slim.
He was a professional. He knew what happened to kidnap victims. Especially when the victims were kidnapped by abusive spouses. Especially when abusive spouses were connected to a human trafficking ring. Especially when the victims looked like fucking Polly.
He squeezed the glass, forgetting it was broken. Warmth spread onto his hand as a jagged edge cut the skin. There was no pain of course. He was in battle mode. It was the state in which he’d trained himself to switch off all human faculties that could be considered weakness in order to do his job without hesitating. Physical pain was a weakness. As was mercy.
He had gotten through a fucking war with ironclad control over this state.
But sitting in his office, with nothing to do but wait and imagine what was happening to Polly right now, he was losing his fucking shit.
His door opened.
His chair was falling to the ground immediately, with the force in which he stood up.
Keltan eyed him, then the whisky bottle, then his hand.
“Gonna need stitches,” he commented.
Heath didn’t reply.
“We got something.”
He pulled the glass from his palm, standing.
And he prepared to go to war. The most important one he’d ever fight. To find his peace.
He hoped to fuck that his peace wasn’t shattered.
Because that would mean Polly was.
They had set up the conference room and the large computer screen in the middle of the table showed a skinny, ungroomed man wearing a Sons of Templar cut. He was in a room full of screens and discarded energy drinks.
“Craig owes a lot of fucked up people a lot of money,” Wire said dispensing with pleasantries and small talk. Heath was glad as fuck for that. He didn’t have the patience, the fucking strength for that shit. “And since our girl Rosie bled him dry, he can’t pay up.” Wire grinned at Rosie, who managed a weak smirk back. “These are not the kind of people to forgive unpaid debts. Unpaid debts are cleared with blood and pain. By the looks of it, Craig can’t handle either, unless of course he’s doling it out to defenseless fucking angels like our Polly.”
Heath clenched his fists at the rage in Wire’s tone. The truth in it. And the emotion. Everyone was affected by this. They’d been through shit before. A lot of shit. Both the men at this table and the men wearing the cut that Wire had on his back.
But this was different. Polly was different. It was unexplainable, but everyone knew it. She was separate from the world that she’d grown up in. She was separate from the fucking world she was born in.
That world shouldn’t have been able to touch her. To fucking hurt her. But it did.
“So he took her to pay a debt,” Keltan surmised, jaw tight. He was composed because the fucker had a poker face that had cost Heath a lot of money over the years. But he saw the cracks emerging with every hour she wasn’t back.