Royal Games (The Royals of Monterra) (27 page)

All I wanted was to escape. I would have said anything. “I don’t love Rafe! I don’t love him! Let me out!”

The coal bin swirled away, and I was back in the bright ambulance.

Rafe’s face looked so pale. Poor imaginary man. I wished the dream was better. I also wished this pounding in my head would go away. I swung my hands, connecting with a hard surface, and I beat against it, still trying to get out.

“Just go away,” I told my throbbing headache. “I want you to go away. How many times do I have to tell you to go away?”

Blessed darkness engulfed me then, taking away my dreams and pain in one fell swoop.

I woke up in a hospital bed with the worst headache of my entire life. My eyes felt swollen, and it was hard to open them.

“Rafe,” I said weakly. My mouth and throat were so parched, my tongue puffy. My lips were cracked and dried.

My nose throbbed, and I reached up to feel a bandage across it. I tried to sit up, but it made my head spin, and I lay back down. My room was empty.

I’d never been in a hospital before. How could I get someone to help me? I tried calling out, but my voice was raspy and soft.

Time passed strangely, surreally, with lights and shadows moving across the wall as I slipped in and out of consciousness.

Finally a nurse in light blue scrubs came in to check on me. “Where’s Rafe?” I asked. She jumped, like it surprised her that I was awake. She ran out of the room, but she brought back a doctor with her who flashed a light in my eyes and started asking me questions.

I answered them as best I could and again asked for Rafe. They didn’t respond.

Aunt Sylvia and Max came rushing into the room, with Aunt Sylvia crying and saying my name over and over again. She went to hug me, but Max stopped her. He put his arm around her and held her while she cried.

“Is Laddie okay?” I asked them in my raspy voice, bracing myself for the worst as the doctor continued to examine me.

“He’s with Dr. Pavich,” Max said. “He had several broken ribs, some internal bleeding, but he’s a tough dog. He’s on the mend and doing better.”

Relief engulfed me. I was so afraid that he had died. The doctor gave Max a dirty look, and he immediately stopped talking, chagrined.

Before I could ask about anything else, the doctor started speaking to me. There were a bunch of medical terms I didn’t understand and some words I did get, like
acute stress reaction, dehydration, panic attack, broken nose, and concussion.

He told me that I would need to stay for a few more days because they wanted to monitor me to make sure that my condition didn’t worsen, and to determine whether or not there were more extensive internal injuries.

I nodded. I asked for water, and the nurse told me that for now I could have ice chips. She said she would get me some.

Then I was alone with Max and Aunt Sylvia. She took my bandaged hand and squeezed softly. “I want to hug you, but I don’t want to hurt you,” she said.

“Where’s Rafe?”

Max and Aunt Sylvia exchanged glances. “We’re not supposed to tell you anything that might upset you,” Max said.

“What would upset me?” My heart thudded slowly. “You guys are scaring me. Where is he?”

Aunt Sylvia gave me a sad smile. “Rafe is gone.”

Chapter 27

“Gone? What do you mean
gone
? Where is he?” I asked. I again tried to sit up, and the pain knocked me back flat.

“You told him you didn’t love him and that you wanted him to go away. After he made sure you would completely recover, he left,” Aunt Sylvia said, as gently as possible.

“We’re not supposed to tell her anything that might stress her out,” Max reminded her, as if I wasn’t even in the room.

“She deserves to know the truth,” she retorted.

“I didn’t say that to him. I wouldn’t say that to him.” Whispers of a memory played around my conscious mind, like strands or fragments of a dream I couldn’t piece together. Rafe was there. I said something to him. But that wasn’t real. I had imagined it. Hadn’t I? What did I say? Could I have actually said those things?

And he left me? I thought he would never leave. He promised he would protect me and keep me safe, and then he took off? I was kidnapped and beaten up by a psychopath, and he was gone?

“You were angry about the tracker.” Max had gotten Aunt Sylvia a chair and had moved it close to my bed so she could still hold my hand.

“Tracker?” That seemed familiar.

“After you got the postcard, Rafe had his team install a tracker on your collie key chain.” It was a leather figure of a shepherd collie, like Laddie. He could have easily put something inside of it, and I never would have noticed. I remembered that morning when my keys had gone missing, and how Rafe had been the one to find them. He must have done it then.

“Why didn’t he tell me?”

“He thought it would make you mad.”

It did make me mad. He had promised not to put a tracker on me.

He promised not to put it on your phone
.

So he used a technicality to lie? Okay. He didn’t put it on my phone, but he was still tracking me.

Which made it so that he could save your life.

True, which I was obviously grateful for, but part of me still felt betrayed.

“How long has it been since . . . everything happened?”

“Two days,” Max told me. “They’ve had to keep you sedated because you were having night terrors that were worsening your injury.”

Fantastic. Rafe had been gone for two days, and I was now a mental basket case.

Suddenly my eyes felt heavy, like I couldn’t keep them open. I heard Aunt Sylvia say that they would be back soon, and then I fell into a dreamless sleep.

I woke up screaming, still inside the trunk, not able to get out. Nurses and a doctor ran in to check on me and tried to reassure me, telling me I’d had a nightmare. The doctor said that it was normal given the trauma I had experienced, and he recommended that I see a psychologist when I was released. He left a referral card on my bedside table.

It was pitch black outside, which meant it was probably the middle of the night. There was no way I was going back to sleep.

I still couldn’t believe Rafe was gone. I mean, I would get over the tracker thing. Was he worried that I wouldn’t?

And if I’d said those things to him, that I didn’t love him and I wanted him to leave, I was obviously out of my mind. I didn’t mean them. Didn’t he know that I didn’t mean them?

I had always thought that he understood me so well. How could he not know what his leaving would do to me?

Didn’t he know how much I needed him?

“Knock, knock,” a soft voice said at my door. “I heard you were awake.”

“Whitney?”

She came into my room wearing a hospital gown and a bathrobe, pushing a small, wheeled, see-through bin that had her baby inside. “Auntie Genesis, meet Marco Rafael.”

The baby was wrapped up in a blanket like a burrito, his little head covered with a blue knit cap. “He’s so small!”

“That’s what happens when they come early,” she told me, putting him right next to my bed so I could see him. “Fortunately, he was strong enough and far enough along that he didn’t even have to go in the NICU.” I reached out to touch the skin on his cheek with my fingertips, the only parts of my hand that weren’t bandaged up. His skin was the softest thing I had ever felt.

“He’s so beautiful,” I breathed, looking up at Whitney.

“I know.” She smiled, sitting down in the chair that Aunt Sylvia had occupied earlier.

“Why did you choose that name?”

“We didn’t quite make it to the hospital, although Rafe did his best. Marco delivered this little guy in the backseat of Rafe’s SUV. I don’t recommend childbirth without an epidural, by the way. Anyway, I was so hopped up on pain that I demanded he be named Marco Rafael after the two of them, and Christopher was so relieved we were okay that he was fine with it. So Marco it is.” She put her hand on top of little Marco’s chest.

I started to cry.

“What is it?”

“Rafe’s gone. He left me. Everybody leaves me,” I said, in between sobs.

She handed me the tissue box next to my bed. I couldn’t blow my nose, but I could wipe away the tears and the snot.

“He blames himself, you know.”

I tried to put the tissues in the trash can, but missed. “What? Why?”

“Both Rafe and Marco blame themselves. Marco had promised to watch over you, and Rafe said he’d never let anything happen to you. You should have seen them after they brought you in. They were both a mess.”

“What happened?” The last thing I remembered was being put in the trunk. Everything after that was a total blur.

And if we had lived anywhere else, Whitney wouldn’t have known, but by now every single person in our town had probably told and retold this story and had started adding embellishments to it. “After they dropped me off at the hospital, they got a phone call from the sheriff. Your 911 call got through, but they couldn’t hear anything. They managed to triangulate the location of your cell phone, and they found Laddie and your broken phone and your truck. Rafe and Marco raced out of here, but your kidnappers had a couple of hours’ head start.”

Little Marco yawned, drawing her attention for a minute, and she smiled a serene, motherly smile. “Anyway, they completely broke every imaginable traffic law, calling the rest of the security team to come with them. Police tried to pull them over for speeding, but they didn’t stop. They called the local stations to tell them what they were doing, and somehow those police officers let them keep going. They caught up to your kidnappers halfway through Missouri, which adds crossing state lines to the charges. Marco got ahead of them and swerved, forcing them to stop. The other bodyguards used their guns to force the kidnappers out of the car while every highway patrolman and sheriff’s department from here to Missouri pulled up behind them. Sheriff Stidd says Rafe was the one who got you out of the trunk and put you in an ambulance. They initially stopped at a hospital in Missouri, where they figured out your injuries weren’t life-threatening, and he insisted you be brought here, close to home so your family could visit you. He rode with you all the way here. He stayed to make sure you would be fine, and then he left. He cleared out of your guesthouse, and his guards checked out of the B&B. They’re just gone.”

“What about Royal Productions?” Had I just unemployed the entire town with whatever I said during my delirium? “Did he shut that down too?”

“No. Amanda says he paid two years’ worth of rent on the B&B because of the short notice, the lease on the building is paid through five years, and he has managers in place at work to run things. He didn’t close anything down. He’s just not here.”

“And John-Paul is locked up? They have him?” I wondered if she noticed how shaky my voice was.

“Whoever that man is who took you, he’s not getting out of prison for a very, very long time. Kidnapping is a Class A felony in both Iowa and Missouri, and both states plan to prosecute. The FBI is also getting involved, from what it sounds like, and they are investigating his background.”

I nodded at the news and somehow managed to start crying again. I’d have thought my dehydration diagnosis would have prevented it.

“Are you going to tell me why somebody would kidnap you?” She asked the question gently, probably expecting me not to tell her.

After swearing her to secrecy, I told her the entire messy, sordid story. She had a pitying, shocked look on her face, but it felt good to share it with her. As it did every time I told the story, my soul got lighter. As if I was giving away part of the burden to my friend. I expected her pity, but instead she said, “I am so proud of you. You are such a strong woman. I am honored to call you my friend.”

As my eyes teared up, Baby Marco started to actually cry. “It’s feeding time,” she said. “I’m going home in the morning, but we’ll come back and visit you.”

“Don’t,” I told her. “I’ll be home soon. I’ll come see you then.”

“Thank you for trusting me. I’m so sorry for everything you’ve been through, but know that I am always here for you.” She put one hand on my shoulder and squeezed gently, and then she told me to get better before going back to her own room.

It wasn’t Rafe’s fault. It was my fault. He had told me to stay home, but after our vacation in Monterra, John-Paul had seemed so far away. So meaningless and unimportant. I’d never thought he would show up and do what he did. I should have stayed at the farmhouse. I shouldn’t have put myself or Laddie in danger.

Maybe he left because I’d been so stupid.

I wished I could call him. But I didn’t have a phone.

Not that it mattered. I wouldn’t have even known what to say to him.

I stayed in the hospital for another three days. The longer I stayed in the bed, the madder I got.

Mad about John-Paul hurting me and kidnapping me, mad about what he had done to Laddie, mad about the nightmares that plagued my sleep.

But I was mostly mad at Rafe for abandoning me. How could he say he loved me and then fly off like nothing had ever happened between us? You didn’t treat someone you loved that way. You stayed by their side when they were in the hospital. You gave them support and helped them.

My nose started to heal, the pain in my head went away, my wounds scabbed over, and my bruises started to fade.

The pain that Rafe had shoved into my heart did not go away. It only multiplied.

When I finally checked out and discovered that Rafe had paid for all of my hospital bills, I wasn’t grateful. It just made me angrier.

I went home and continued to heal. Life returned to normal, except now I felt like I was walking around with a sucking chest wound, unable to breathe. I went back to school, ignoring the stares and whispers on campus. Apparently my kidnapping had been all over the news, and my red hair and height made me instantly recognizable. When I worked my shifts at the diner, the townspeople were again handling me with kid gloves, like I might break if somebody said the wrong thing.

Even Max had stopped telling me jokes.

Whitney was the only person willing to speak honestly to me. When I went to visit her and the baby, she said, “You’re totally pining for him.”

“I am not,” I said dismissively.

“You are. Pining like a whole forest of pine trees.”

I held the baby against me, smelling the delicious baby smell on the back of his neck. “I’m not pining. He’s the one who left me. I’m not pining.” I didn’t know which one of us I was trying to convince more.

“Mm-hmm,” she said, not believing me.

“Maybe I’m pining a little,” I admitted a minute later. “I don’t want to see him. Or talk to him. But I set up a Google alert with his name. Does that make me weird?”

“Oh, sweetie. It’s on the list.” She set aside her laundry to sit next to me. “You should call him.”

That wasn’t going to happen.

To get through it, I told myself I didn’t need Rafe. He obviously didn’t need or want me. He could walk away without a second glance. He never called. He didn’t email or text me. There were so many times I considered reaching out myself, but pride got in the way.

When I spoke to Pastor Dave about it, he talked about something called transference—that I might have taken all my negative and hostile feelings about John-Paul, a scary person who hurt me and whom I didn’t want to think about, and transferred them to Rafe, a safe person whom I loved and did want to think about. That it was easier and safer for me to be mad at Rafe than John-Paul. I told him I had plenty of anger for them both.

Not to mention the anger I had at myself. I hated that every time the phone rang, I hoped it would be him. That every time there was a notification that someone from the guild had logged on to
World of Warcraft
, I longed to see the name Hatchet. That when I got a notification of an email or a Facebook post, I hoped he would be the one who had done it.

I hated that everywhere I turned in my own home, in my town, there was a memory of him. I couldn’t get away from him even if I wanted to.

And now, when there was a knock at the door, I was mad about how my heart did a funny flip-flop. When I opened it, I didn’t really expect to see Rafe, but I still had that letdown feeling to see Max standing there.

“Come on in,” I told him. “Aunt Sylvia’s not here.”