Bound for Nirvana: (The Bound Trilogy Book 3) (32 page)

Chapter Fifteen

Ethan

Five days it took to find her. Five endless, mind-fucking, gut-wrenching days…

When I saw the Volvo parked in the driveway out front of the Miller’s house, it was the first time rays of hope had shined through the dark doom of dread that had shadowed my world. It hadn’t lasted long. The house being unquestionably deserted and locked-up saw to that. Mom and Dad searched around for a way in, frantically calling her name, but something drew me around back to the pool house.

The place was a mess, the air dank and fetid with hopelessness, but devastatingly empty. With no sign of Angel in sight, I ran out into the garden, hands fisting into my hair as I spun around, my eyes scanning in search of her whilst I helplessly screamed out her name.

That’s when I saw the gate standing open at the bottom of the garden, and I knew instantly where I would find my Angel. I started running before my mind had even processed, my feet tearing down the path, through the gate, and down the steps to the beach. All the time, my mind recollecting the day I found her submerged under the water in the bath, her words of explanation almost as fucking bizarre to her as they were to me.
I was blanking out—finding peace—shutting down.
A sign of how difficult it was for her to face the demons that had chased her through life, and the depths she would go to run from them.

By the time I reached the jetty, my head was so fucked with hope and despair and pure, unadulterated fear, that for a moment, I thought I saw her standing there at the end of the runway, like I had that day—arms outstretched, floaty dress and bare feet, like a fucking angel blown in from the ocean. The vision disappeared like a vapor on the breeze, a fresh influx of panic and misery hitting me like a sucker punch to the gut. Desperately, my eyes scanned the beach to both sides, my breath catching in my throat as suddenly I spotted a set of lone footprints leading through the otherwise unblemished sand. My eyes squinted through the morning mist, following the trail until they fixed on something lying in the sand, maybe sixty or so meters away.

“Angel! Angel!” I screamed her name at the top of my lungs, the piercing sound getting lost amongst the cries of the gulls and the sound of crashing waves as my legs raced across the beach to the bundled shape. I tried to make it out as I neared it, the contours forming no decipherable shape, the color muted like that of sand… or bare flesh.

A blanket! A fucking blanket!

“Noooo! Angel, where are you?” I rifled through the heap with futile hope—a blanket, some sweats… Angel’s backpack.

I picked up the trail, the direction of the footprints forcing my mind to consider the unthinkable. And then everything became a blur…

Suddenly there was no other sound than that of my heart, a resounding percussion gradually slowing and fading, until there was nothing but a sequence of uncorrelated vibrations—just white noise.

Everything moved as if in slow motion, the waves undulating to and fro at an unnaturally sluggish speed, like a hostile predator stalking its prey, slinking deviously back before pouncing forward in their relentless attempts to snatch her from this world.

My Angel. My fucking Angel!

I don’t remember the shock of the freezing water as I waded in toward her, because it wasn’t as ice-cold as the blood running though my veins in that moment. Because inside, I was dead. My heart encased in a frozen chamber, unable to breathe, unable to live. I grasped her limp and lifeless body from the clutches of the depraved ocean as my voice finally shattered the window of silence. My piercing scream was a grieving lament, a desolate cry of utter desperation as I cradled my broken angel in my arms and begged her to return.

I stared down at the tattered piece of paper in my hand, torn at the edges where it had been ripped from the notebook, crumpled from where it had been crushed inside the compact space of a pocket. I knew every dip and curve of the hastily scrawled words—Angel’s delicate, mindless state plainly evident in every letter.

I read it again, anyway.

I rubbed my fingers over the growth on my face, swiping at the never-ending tears, cursing myself. It was the fucking pain I couldn’t bear—the pain in her words. The torment and agony in her voice was as if the Devil himself were raking his fingernails through her mind, her soul. A slow, twisted, relentless infliction of suffering, until he’d finally stolen her sanity. Fucking torture.

One minute, the doctor had said. One lousy fucking minute is what had stood between her dying and living. One red light, one minute’s delay in making a crucial decision, one pointless phone call, one minute hunting for that fucker Sloane, one minute listening to her jerk-off dad spouting his toxic poison.

Images of her lying face down in the water and then crumpled on the beach, her body broken, skin pale and drained of life, lips gray—the color of death, keep flashing through my mind. I remember the sound of my own suffering as I wailed helplessly, my hands pumping her chest, my mouth closing over those swollen gray lips to breathe the life back into her—wanting the cock-sucking Devil to take mine instead. I recall my father pulling me away, my mom holding me as I rocked with desperation and hopelessness.

She shouldn’t have spent one of those five days alone—not a single one. I went over it again in my head, what had happened, where I’d gone wrong. Why I hadn’t gotten there sooner to pull her from the depths of her despair.

At first, I thought she was mad at me for not trusting her. For believing what those pictures of her and that fucker Sloane were trying to fool me into thinking. Thought I’d find her propping the bar up at Paddy’s just to piss me off. That’s where I’d looked for her first.

When both the gallery and Jia turned out to be dead ends as well, I really started to panic. Jackson scoured Central Park with the boys, and I called Mom and Dad, hoping they’d heard from her—they’d become so close over the last few weeks. I told them all about our meeting with Ernest Schrader and they shot over to Manhattan straight away to help me look.

We started with her Dad.

The sniveling, cocksucker was so much in his element, he was practically frothing at the mouth when he spewed his venom. A mass of poisonous, disease-ridden bullshit. What kind of crazy fuck comes up with that shit? And worse, spends most of his life believing it.

For the one second it took for me to realize what the stench of bull was, I got a glimpse of what it was like to die. My heart ceased to beat, too strangled by the earth-shattering pain lancing through it to even try.

That’s when I knew.

Knew that if I didn’t find her and find her fast—I might never see her again. Might never get to see her perfect face, or smell her heavenly skin, or taste her or hold her or bury myself inside her. And my heart would never beat again.

Christ only knows the agony she must have suffered in those five days. The lies fuelled by jealousy and a deluded mind driving her to self-destruct, her body and mind enduring a slow, torturous suffering with only one unimaginable culmination.

That fucker had laughed with the depraved malevolence of Satan himself when he’d read the so-called “love letter” aloud. A tatty scrap of paper that had exacerbated his delusions, inflamed his paranoid, erroneous conclusions to the point in which he’d thrived on them. He said he’d followed Angel’s mom to the building where my parents lived in the penthouse. He’d seen her give the note to the doorman, but he’d intercepted it before the man had chance to deliver it. Paid him handsomely, he said. Then he went to Central Park, to Gapstow Bridge where he confronted her about the affair.

He’d been waiting for this moment ever since. He’d fed and housed my father’s bastard, just to deprive him of her, and vice versa. Felicity had left a piece of her behind, but he was damned if he was going to let Richard Wilde have it. Mine and Angel’s relationship, he said, was the cherry on top of the cake—ultimate revenge.

There was never a second of doubt in either of my parents’ expressions as he relayed his story and reeled off the words on the page without even looking. Fury, incredulity, pity even, but never doubt. And when I heard Felicity Lawson’s voice speaking out from that piece of paper, I realized Harley Lawson’s mistake immediately.

My mother had snatched the note from his hand, her countenance fevered with realization and grief. “You stupid, crazy fool of a man. Is this all you’ve got apart from your sick, twisted mind? This is why you sentenced that poor girl to a lifetime of sheer hell. You murdered my best friend—tried to kill your own daughter, because of this?” My mother’s voice, strained with tears and regret slapped him in the face with brute force anger. “The R is for Ronnie—Veronica. The note was meant for
me
. She was waiting for me—and you killed her.”

It took all my strength not to kill him there and then with my bare hands, but all I could think about was finding Angel. My last words were a promise of what I would do to him if I didn’t. “I will torture you slowly. I will puncture your spineless neck, hang you by your feet, and watch you bleed to death, you fucked-up, worthless piece of shit.”

The fucker wasn’t laughing when we left.

We spent the next five days chasing our tails in fucking circles. Checking everywhere we’d already looked and then checking again. The hospitals came up with nothing, airports the same. The police were next to fucking useless, and with no tracker on the Volvo, it was like looking for a needle in a haystack—a very precious, very delicate needle. Finally, it was Abby talking to Alisha that gave us the clue we needed.

Folding the piece of paper in my hand, I pushed it back inside my pocket. I’d lost count of the amount of ways I could have avoided Angel’s slow decline into Hell. Lost count of the amount of ways I could have misused that single, precious minute that was the difference between her living and dying. But as I gazed down at her breathlessly beautiful, sleeping body, closed my hand around her warm fingers, laid my head against her beating heart and bent to kiss her rosebud lips—I thanked God again for that one fucking minute.

In those moments when I thought she was dead, I realized just how much I loved and needed Angel Lawson. I needed her in order to function, to eat, to sleep, to fucking breathe. When I thought I’d lost her, my world came tumbling down around me—body, heart, mind, and soul trapped in an avalanche of complete, soul-shattering destruction.

And then she’d taken a breath.

I’d been unable to speak or even move. I just remember the long, painful, piercing howl exploding through the silence, a sound that emanated from me.

Her eyes had opened briefly, but had seemed devoid of awareness, just blank and unable to focus. Her body was limp and unresponsive, destitute of all sentience, and in that second a fresh wave of dread had passed through my ice-laden heart.

Not capable of reacting, I’d watched as my parents wrapped her in the blanket, my mother rocking her and stroking her face. My father racing to meet the paramedics arriving, it seemed, from nowhere. Her body had begun to shake uncontrollably, her eyelids fluttering with disorientation, bluish lips trembling.

In the hospital, she was wrapped in heated blankets, her motionless, sleeping body steadily replenished with IV fluids. And then all that was left to do was wait. Wait and hope and pray to a God I doubted even existed.

Chapter Sixteen