Free Beyond Revenge (The Ransom Series) by A.T. Douglas

coming
together again reminds me that I spent time drinking happily with another
Whitford not that long ago.  Morgan and I enjoyed a bottle of wine together on
our day off over a month ago, the evening we found out that our precarious happiness in Mark’s crew was
about to plunge into disaster.
    To anyone else a month would not appear
to be a long time, but to me it’s eternity.  Time seems to move painfully slow
when you’re spending it without the most important person in your life.  When
you’re constantly worried and wondering where she is, what’s happening to her,
what she’s thinking, how her life and her body and everything about her is
changing while she’s gone from your grasp, time moves at a fucking snail’s
pace.  That’s where I am right now in my life, but not at this moment.
    At this moment I’m drinking, and I plan
to continue to do so.
    Sitting back in the chair at the table,
I let the alcohol rush through my body, buzzing my brain but numbing me slightly. 
The liquid smoothes over me in its blissful, calming way.  For five whole
minutes I sit back and observe Cindy talking to Robert like it’s any normal
day, as if he just got home from work and they’re catching up, a perfectly happy
married couple in the suburbs of Phoenix living their
lives.
    You’d never know their only daughter
was currently in the possession of a madman.
    The house phone
rings.  Cindy casually picks up the cordless device from its base and throws
her long brown hair back to hold the phone between her shoulder and her ear.
    Her face blanches.
    The phone falls from her ear to the
counter, clattering loudly on to its surface.  Robert
and I both stand up as our chairs fly backward.  Robert
is closer to the phone and grabs it first, putting
it on speakerphone so that the sound s of the call fill the room around us.
    The waves of pain and suffering echo
off the walls .  I know th ese sound s too well.  I’ve heard them too many times
before.  They’re the sound s that haunt me at night, the culmination of all my failures.
    Her screams.  Morgan’s screams and
cries pour out of the phone, and I feel them squeezing relentlessly and
viciously at what’s left of my heart inside my chest.  She’s begging now,
barely able to speak, pleading with him to stop, and I almost can’t take it.  I
can’t physically withstand the crushing weight of helplessness her sounds
create in me.
    My hands fall
forward onto the table, my body shaking and my mind swirling from the
adrenaline and the alcohol.  My eyes can only focus on the table in front of
me, the lines in the wood so straight and calm then jutting out into chaos
where there is a cross-section of knots in the material , the imperfections that make us appreciate the beauty and
good in what we have.
    With one final muffled scream, the
audible suffering is over , t hen there is silence.
    I look up to see Robert’s whitened
face, his body completely still.  Cindy braces herself against the fridge with
a shaking hand covering her mouth.  I can’t move or think or even begin to
process these last seconds we’ve experienced, the hell that has just been
brought down upon us again.  I feel anger and hatred and sorrow all wound up in
my chest, secured there by my guilt in a tight knot around my heart.
    “You will stop your crusade against
me,” the voice says through the phone.  Mark’s voice.  The voice of evil.  “You
give up even one more of my men, hint anything about my suppliers to the authorities,
stop even a single ounce of product from reaching its
destination, and I will start sending her back to you, piece by piece, and there’s
plenty to go around.”
    The re’s a sharp click followed by dial tone.  
It’s over.
    It takes only a moment for Robert to be
at Cindy’s side.  He’s forcing her to look at him, but I can tell she doesn’t
see him.  He’s calm and offering comforting words, and eventually he gets
through to her.  She collapses into