Abducted (Amber Alert Series Book 2) (8 page)

Chapter 14

Damien pulled onto a dirt road and swept a cloud of dust over the car. The road was bumpy. I hit my head on the roof of the car, was slammed into the door, and the seatbelt was tight around my body. Damien finally came to stop, and I flung myself out of the car to be on solid ground.

“Thank God, land!” I said, as I raised my hands up to the sky and then fell to the dirt.

“Please, don’t be a drama queen, Audrey,” Damien said rolling his eyes as he walked by.

“You drive like a maniac!”

“Just get up and shut up about my driving. I got you away from Steve, you should be thankful. That’s the third time I’ve saved your life,” Damien said, lifting me off the ground and turning me toward a one-story farmhouse.

“We could have died!”

“Either way we could have died, Audrey. Just get inside before someone hears you and calls the cops,” Damien said, opening the screen door and unlocking the wooden door behind it.

“Where are we anyway?” I asked, following him into the house.

“We are at the house I planned to be at before you got out of the car,” Damien said, slamming the door shut.

“You mean before you let me go, right?” I asked as Damien tried to walk further into the house. He stopped suddenly and turned to face me with a confused expression on his face.

“I didn’t let you go. You ran off.”

“You unlocked the car. You gave me a map to escape with. You gave me a coat for the cold weather, and you gave up chasing me rather quickly,” I asserted as I stepped closer to Damien.

He stood his ground and didn’t answer right away. In fact, he turned around again and continued to walk through the house without saying a word. I followed him and waited for him to answer, but he didn’t. I had to push the topic if I was going to get any answers out of him.

“You let me escape on purpose, why?”

“I didn’t let you escape. You just did and you eluded me long enough so that I didn’t want to be in the woods at night.”

“You gave me a map.”

“I had the map and must have left it in the coat,” Damien said, pushing aside all my statements.

I had connected the dots, it took about two months, but everything was starting to make sense. Damien didn’t seem like a criminal, and that’s because he wasn’t. He was helping Steve Bennett, but he was doing it for a reason. Damien was looking for his sister, who Steve must have taken. What I couldn’t figure out was why Damien needed to help Steve to find where his sister was. All the bodies had been discovered, unless there were more than thirteen girls. Thirteen bodies had been discovered, but only twelve bodies had been found. All the bodies had technically been dug up, but one was only an arm—no body. Since the arm was decayed, they assumed animals or something had taken the body. There was still one girl unaccounted for, and that’s who Damien was looking for—his sister.

In order to find his sister he needed Steve. He must have gone to visit Steve in prison, and Steve had given him a choice, help him and find his sister or never find her. Damien didn’t even know I was Anna Cowles’ daughter when we first met, I told him when he woke up the next morning. He had taken me because he had to for his sister, but he never forced himself on me or even touched me while in the house. He had become distant and angry in the time we spent in Steve’s house. Damien must have realized what he was doing, and given me a chance to escape after he realized Steve didn’t intend for me to get out alive.

He let me escape, even though it meant he might not find his sister. Steve hadn’t been expecting to meet me, but found it a pleasant surprise that he could use to his benefit. Damien kicked into action the second he realized Steve was going to come after me. He acted against the one person who knew what happened to his sister and could help him because I meant something to him. If I didn’t, he wouldn’t have cared about giving me up to Steve.

“You fell in love with me,” I said quietly, as Damien placed a microwaved frozen meal in front of me.

“What?” Damien questioned, thrown off by my statement. “You’re mistaken, Audrey. I don’t love you. I didn’t fall in love with you,” he stuttered as he tried to cover up the shock in his voice and the disbelief in his eyes.

“You fell in love with me, Damien,” I asserted again. The ways his pupils grew and his eyes darted, attempting to avoid looking at me, I could tell he was trying to hide it even from himself.

“You’re wrong. I have no feelings for you.” Damien lied, as he turned on the television behind him to drown me out.

“You’ve been teasing me for months and you know it.”

“It’s fun and I was bored,” he answered curtly.

“You made love to me before you even knew who I was. You let me stay the night, and in these times that’s not normal,” I reminded him with a smirk on my lips. I could hear him grinding his teeth together in frustration. I had hit the nail on the head; he did fall in love with me just as Steve said.

“So? You were drunk. Maybe I was just lonely and didn’t want to kick you out of the house for you to get arrested.”

“If you were worried about me making it home, then why didn’t you just kick me out in the morning when you first woke up?” I asked, the frustration on Damien’s face growing more intense.

“Because that would be rude to do to any lady.”

“But I’m not just any lady, am I, Damien?”

“No, you’re not.”

“I knew it!” I yelled once the words left Damien’s mouth, but he stopped me so he could continue.

“You’re the daughter of Anna Cowles, and the only way I will figure out what happened to my sister. You’re not just any girl because you’re the one that’s going to make years of searching and begging that maniac for help worth it. They stopped looking for her after they found her arm. It’s stupid to think an animal did it, they just didn’t want to keep searching in fear of finding more bodies!”

“So you needed Steve Bennett’s help, and he told you the only way you’d find out is if you helped him get my mother back.”

“Oh, look who finally smartened up! Yes, that’s what happened. What I didn’t know is I was going to be labeled as a wanted man, and hunted down.”

“What did you think would happen, Damien? No one would care about a missing girl?”

“I don’t know what I thought!” he yelled back.

“I noticed,” I scoffed, as I picked at the dinner he had given me.

“It’s not my fault, it was you! I had no idea, you were just—”

“I was just what?”

“Too easy. You were so easy to manipulate.”

“Take that back!” I gasped.

“You had an interest in me that I wasn’t going to pass up, not because I loved you, but because I needed some company,” Damien scowled. “Then it was a coincidence that you were just the person I needed for this plan to work out. I don’t love you.”

“You’re lying to yourself!” I screamed as he walked away from the table. I threw the paperback book I had been reading at Steve’s house, and hit him in the head with it. When the book slapped the floor, I realized I shouldn’t have done that. Damien took a ragged breath and snapped when he turned to face me again.

“Fine, you want the truth so bad? I did fall for you! Not at first, at first you were just a girl that I found attractive, but the second I was trapped in that house with you—god, it was like a house of sexual tension! I couldn’t stop from acting on how I felt about you, and every day it grew, but you showed no interest. The only interest you had was escaping, and I couldn’t let that happen because then I’d lose you and my sister. I let you go, because it was the right thing to do, not because I wanted to.”

“I do have an interest, but I had to run because you took me. I didn’t want to be there, I was fighting the feelings the entire time.”

“I don’t care anymore, because it’s not going to work out, Audrey. Look at this! I’m a wanted man and you’re the girl I kidnapped. How would that look to everyone?” Damien asked, pointing at the television behind him. The headline was ‘kidnapper escapes with girl’ and showed a video of Damien carrying me off with Steve behind us.

“What do we do?”

“I don’t know. I really don’t,” Damien said sadly as he walked out of the room to leave me looking at the news feed.

We were labeled and stuck with no way out.

Chapter 15

“Damien,” I whispered, as I sat next to him on the couch. It was a one-bedroom house, so he voluntarily took a blanket and some pillows and offered to sleep there while we were in the house. I had been thinking everything over for the last few hours after we argued, and I thought I had a solution to our problems.

“What?” he growled, clearly still angry with me.

“I think I have an idea on how to get out of this,” I said quietly, worried about how he would take the idea. It was crazy, and I was sure that he would only get angry again.

“Let’s hear it, Audrey.”

“I think you should take me home,” I said bluntly, making Damien groan and glare at me.

“I can’t just take you home, Audrey. Don’t you understand–”

“Let me finish, Damien,” I said, placing my hand on his leg for a few seconds before he nodded in agreement. “I think you should take me home so my parents know what’s happening. They’ve been through this, and they should be able to help us.”

“I understand that, Audrey, but Steve will be chasing after us. It’s not your parents anymore; it’s us. We are what he is after, in fact, he’s after you, and I’m in his way of that. He won’t stop until he has you, or your mother. So why would I take you back to Wilmington where you and your mother would be in the same place?”

“Because they’ve escaped before. They can help us!”

“You’re not thinking it through, Audrey. He doesn’t want your father and me, he will kill us to get what he wants—you and your mother. He may even kill you to get to your mother! We can’t go back.”

“But they won’t put Steve behind bars again until we tell someone you aren’t a kidnapper. You’ll be tracked down and then taken away. He may be let go, and then he’s going to come after my mother and me anyway.”

“But I am. I took you, even if you were willing. I knew what I was doing and that’s exactly what it looks like. I should have realized that was his plan, but I wanted to believe that I could do something to find my sister. It’s doesn’t look like that will happen, so I’m going with whatever gets you out of this alive, and away from Steve.”

“Fine, then we can’t simply take me home, what do we do?” I asked, as a loud bang sounded overhead and sent me into Damien’s chest in terror. I didn’t think Steve could find us again that quickly.

“Don’t worry, Audrey. It’s just thunder; we won’t be staying here long enough for Steve to come and get you here,” he whispered to comfort me, as he kissed the top of my head.

“What are we going to do, Damien?”

“I like the idea of having your parents know so they can spread it around, but I can’t take you back home, sweetheart. It’s too risky and there’s not enough benefit to risk it.”

“So then what?” I asked, lifting my head and placing it on his shoulder. I could feel my heart beating faster the longer I was with him. I had really fallen for him, harder than I had for Mark. There was no ignoring it, he may have had a hard time admitting it to me, but I knew I had fallen for him.

“I think we need to put a call out to your parents. We can’t tell them where we are going, but if we can let them know you are okay, then maybe we can get rid of this kidnapper issue. I don’t want to have to hide from Steve and the police.”

“Then what?”

“We get Steve back in jail for setting up another kidnapping. He dies, and we can go on and live our lives.”

“Our lives?” I asked curiously. I was hoping Damien would stay with me after this like my father had done for my mother. It was silly to hope for that because I knew that he wouldn’t want to, but who else would want to be with me after all this was over? No one would want to answer all the questions, and they wouldn’t understand.

“Yeah, you’ll go on to college and I get to move back home I guess. Unless everyone there hates me now, I might not move then,” Damien said, placing one hand over his face as he sighed, deeply unhappy.

“I think it will all work out.”

“Then you clearly don’t know Steve Bennett like I do.”

“Tell me about him and what happened to your sister, maybe it can help us think of a plan.”

“It’s not a pleasant story, Audrey. None of them are.”

“We need all the information we can get. It’s time that I had the information you have. I need to know now, Damien, there’s no other choice,” I asserted, as he hugged me closer with one arm and looked into my eyes.

His eyes were a crystal clear blue that was stunningly gorgeous. I could read the emotions in his eyes as if it were a book, until he wanted to hide the one emotion I wanted him to have the most. He was hiding his affection for me; I knew he felt it. He said it all the time at the house. What was different now?

“Fine, we can start with Steve Bennett. He married Kelly at a young age, and they were high school sweethearts that married after college. They were happy until Kelly miscarried their baby. She became so depressed that she tried to leave Steve. Of course he wouldn’t let that happen and instead stole Garrett Thomas as a young child from somewhere in New Jersey. What Steve didn’t realize is that by taking Garrett, it gave Kelly something more to fight for. She didn’t want the child to suffer through a life like this, and she continued to try and escape. One day Steve was so angry when he chased after her, an accident happened; she fell from a cliff while running and died on impact. He killed Kelly.”

“That’s a horrible way to die,” I said quietly.

“It gets worse. He went after girls that looked like Kelly. He went through twelve girls until your mother was taken. She had been missing a whole year before she was recovered, and reunited with her family. She and Garrett had devised a plan to get out, when Steve made the same mistake he made with Kelly. Steve brought home a daughter, who was the actual daughter of a policeman in Charleston.”

“The Sparks family, James Sparks and Jessi Sparks,” I said, since Damien didn’t seem to know their names.

“Exactly,” he said astonished. “Well, anyway, with a young girl, the plan had to change. It didn’t go exactly how they wanted it. Jessi had accidentally told Steve that Anna and Garrett were in love, and sneaking behind his back. Steve flew into a rage, and what he refers to as “the chase” started. Anna and Jessi ran from the house with only a backpack, and the warning that Garrett had given them, that the cops were in on it.”

Damien looked at me before continuing to make sure I was still listening to this. “When they got to Charleston, Anna realized that Garrett had been right about the police. They were working with Steve in order to keep their families safe from him, but overlooking it when it came to others’ families. The police gave up Anna’s location and Steve found her. She traveled for a few more days through the same woods we're in, and eventually made it back home to Harrisonburg, where Steve was arrested by the police.”

“I never knew. How do you know some of that stuff? Steve wouldn’t have known what Jessi and my mom left with.”

“I read your mom’s book. She’s a good writer, and she should continue to write stories, but I think she only wrote it to get the questions out of the way. It was a page-turner, and enjoyable to a point. It’s nice to know that she and Garrett stayed together after all of that.”

“My mom says if he didn’t stay with her through it all no one else would have come near her,” I said with a smile.

“She might be right. It would have been hard for people to be around her. It would have been hard for me to be around my sister if she had gotten back. Everyone would be stepping on eggshells, afraid to say the wrong thing,” Damien said with a sullen tone.

“What happened to her?”

“I don’t really know. One day she was going to go meet some friends at the mall, and never came back. You see she was a lot older than me, she was taken when she was eighteen and I was about four, but I can remember my parents searching for her for months. They died before Steve Bennett was captured and they found part of my sister's body.”

“And you want the whole body, why?”

“So she can be buried with my parents in a cemetery, not somewhere in the woods. She deserves to come home and be with her family.”

“Do you think Steve is just going to tell you where she is?”

“I might if he turns you over to me, Audrey,” a dark voice said from behind us. I turned to see Steve Bennett, drenched from the rain, standing in the doorway with a murderous look on his face. “Or maybe he can simply join his sister in death,” Steve stated with a laugh as he leapt toward us.