Since then, Virginia had dated other men. A few, here and there. One or two of them might have even worked out; they might have given her that family she’d always wanted. But she’d dumped them and moved on, not really knowing why.
Until now.
Six years isn’t long enough to kill love. Love, in all of its god-forsaken perfection, is immortal. How horrible is that? How unfair? When people are so fragile, when life is so fleeting. Where does God get off making something so strong that lasts so much longer than we do?
Virginia found herself sitting back against the couch. Absently, she brushed the back of her hand against her cheek. It came away wet. She looked down at the smeared tears and her brow furrowed. She suddenly felt more lost, in that moment, than she ever had before.
And, it was at that moment that a sound escaped from the bathroom down the hall.
Virginia sat up like a bolt. Her mind was at once painfully alert.
It had sounded like the shower curtain rings sliding over the curtain rod. Her ears strained to hear more. And there it was. A rustle and a footfall.
Someone was in her apartment.
Annabelle sat straight suddenly, her hand pausing in its downward swipe through her long hair. She stared out the window, her brow furrowed. Something had pulled her out of her reverie.
Their surroundings looked familiar. In fact…
“Weren’t we just here?” she asked. She’d zoned out over the last few minutes, her mind on the matter of Craig Brandt and the somewhat more distracting matter of Jack Thane in bed.
“Yes. We’ve turned around,” Dylan told her from beside her in the back seat of the cab.
“Why?”
“Because I’m a bloody fool,” Jack told her from the front seat. He turned to face them both, an agitated expression on his handsome face. His blue eyes were sparking with barely-kept tension. “We never should have left Meredith alone.” He shook his head. “What was I thinking?” He seemed to be talking to himself. Then, to them, he said, “We haven’t managed to go without a tail for more than a few hours thus far. Virginia Meredith is as good as dead.”
Annabelle’s eyes widened. “I’ll call her.” She held her hand out for Jack’s phone, but he shook his head, his eyes boring into hers. “It’s no use, Bella. I already tried to contact her. No answer.”
He had? When had he done that? While she was staring blankly out the window day-dreaming about his sexual prowess, most likely. She blanched.
“No answer?”
Again, he shook his head. Once. “None whatsoever. It went to voicemail.”
Virginia’s scream died in her throat when she hit the back of the couch and it dug itself into her diaphragm, choking the breath from her lungs. She dropped to the floor and then scrambled, still breathless, across the hardwood floor.
Her attacker followed her easily, stalking her around the living room. So far, he hadn’t spoken a word to her. He had merely appeared in her hallway in time to stop her from making it fully to the door and out into the apartment’s main corridor.
Then he had slapped her, not hard enough to knock her out, but hard enough to send her stumbling backward into the coffee table in the living room. She’d gone for her purse next, attempting to make it to her cell phone. But, again, he stopped her, making it to the purse first and dumping the contents of the entire bag out onto the faux fur rug. They watched her phone bounce once and land near the leg of the coffee table.
Before she could contemplate making another dive for the cell, he was crushing it beneath his boot. It wasn’t hard. The man must have weighed in the neighborhood of three hundred pounds. Not much of it was fat, either.
When this had happened, Virginia’s dread kicked up a notch. She tried to consider her options. There wouldn’t be any running out the door, because he stood in-between the exit and herself. She had no landline into the apartment. Her cell was her only means of communication with the outside world. She had a computer and did possess cable internet service, but she highly doubted that her attacker would sit back and wait patiently while she typed out an email SOS.
That left the fire escape. There was nothing in between it and herself except the dining room table and a sliding glass door.
She had stood still, breathing heavily out of terror, and trying, with every fiber of her being, not to give herself away by stealing a furtive glance toward the glass doors. She’d slowly inched her way around the coffee table, her back to the fire escape exit.
And then she had heard that same glass door open slide open behind her.
“Took you long enough,” the man in front of her had said, speaking to someone over her shoulder. Virginia had been nearly overwhelmed, then, with terror-induced nausea. Her heart was in her stomach as she slowly turned around.
Another man was standing there, this one just as tall, but skinny as a rail. The expression on his ugly face was nothing if not mean. “Hello, sweet heart.” He’d grinned at her, exposing crooked, tobacco-stained teeth.
So, Virginia chose to exercise the only option that had been left to her at that point. She opened her mouth and screamed.
Which was when the big guy had spun her around and slammed her against the couch. It had been deftly done, as if he’d know just how to get her in the solar plexus and knock the wind from her body.
Now, she crawled across the living room floor, attempting in vain to gain back a little air. Her head pounded and her vision was blurring. Having a bit of a medical education, she knew enough to recognize that the swimming dots and tunneling vision in front of her were due just as much to fear as they were to a lack of oxygen in her system.
She was having a panic attack. A part of her wanted to give in to the attack and let it take her under, where the men couldn’t hurt her any longer or do anything worse to her. But another part of her fought the impending darkness and yanked her out of unconsciousness with a ferocity that can only come from the human old-brain’s intense aversion to death.
Her lungs expanded and she swallowed in gulps of air.
Someone grabbed her by her hair and began to pull her into a standing position. She cried out, coughing with the effort, and grabbed the man’s hand, instinctively pulling on it to relieve the pressure in her scalp.
“We’re gonna ask you some questions, pretty, and if you answer nicely, we’ll forego the worst of the torture. How’s that sound?” It was the skinny one. His breath smelled like onions and digesting sausage.
She gagged and tried to turn away from him, but his hand in her hair prevented any real movement.
Her mind was spinning.
Jack threw open the door to the taxi and began running down the block before the driver even came to a full stop.
“Wait here!” Annabelle told the man, and then followed after Jack. Dylan was hot on her heels. At full speed, Annabelle had a very hard time keeping up with Jack, who she knew was not running nearly as fast as he could. He didn’t exactly want to leave the two of them behind and vulnerable, even if he
So, Annabelle forced any discomfort she felt in her body, especially her damned hips, to a backburner in her consciousness and tried, very hard, to ignore it. She pushed herself as hard as she could, focusing on the sweet blonde woman who owned The Lavender Garden, and her impending doom should they not make it to her rescue on time.
And several yards ahead, sprinting at a racer’s pace, Jack continued to silently beat himself up. He’d been so preoccupied with Annabelle, in so many damned different ways, he’d self-fulfilled his own bloody prophecy about his inability to concentrate eventually getting someone killed.
He no longer bothered to ask himself how he could have been so blind, because the answer was plainly clear
