Roxanne’s is in my hands as well, and so is our unborn child’s.
Too pumped with anger to stand still, I house my gun into the back of my trousers, then storm to Alice’s side of the room, confident gamers these days are as ignorant as Rocco and I were anytime we played Super Mario.
I reach Alice before she even considers deflecting the barrel of her gun to me. She wouldn’t fire at me even if I still had my gun in my hands because she knows as well as her ex-husband, it isn’t an eye for an eye in this industry.
It’s family for family.
Mine for hers.
Or better yet, hers for mine.
As I drag Alice toward the open French doors that lead to her patio, my anger gets the better of me. “They took my wife, they have my daughter, yet that still isn’t enough for you. You want them to take everything away from me.”
“No,” she denies, shaking her head as she eyes the pool we’re heading toward. “I was just protecting Lucy.”
I’ve never laid my eyes on my daughter in person. That doesn’t make me any less of a father, though, so I understand her objective, but I’m just too worked up with anger to absorb it. “Because your daughter’s life is more valuable than mine?”
Fear leeches out of her pores before she once again shakes her head. This one is more hesitant than her earlier one.
“Then why did you do it? Why go against me knowing you could lose everything!”
As Alice’s stilettos skitter across the pavers, she attempts to lodge them into the cracks, hopeful her fight to live will have me recalling the time I saved her from this exact scenario.
If my anger wasn’t bubbling over, I might have, but it’s too late for her now. I can’t separate the past from the future any more now than I could when I was driving here. Roxanne is nowhere near as far along as Audrey was when she was taken. However, all I see when her face pops into my head is the horrific footage of Audrey going through a botched caesarian. My fucked-up head has replaced Audrey’s face with Roxanne’s, and it’s messing with my mind even more than Lucy’s frantic cries for me to stop holding her mother’s head under the water in their half-a-million-dollar pool.
“Get her out of here!” I scream at Rocco a mere second before pulling Alice’s head up so she can suck in the quickest breath. It isn’t long enough to fill her screaming lungs with air, but it will warn her I’m not playing. I’ve played the game as taught the past two years. It got me nowhere, so it’s time for a new set of rules.
As Lucy fights Rocco with more gusto than an eight-year-old should have, I bring Alice’s drenched head to within an inch of mine. “Where are they taking her?”
“I don’t kn—”
She’s back under the water in an instant, gargling and screaming while her nails make a mess of my arms. She digs them in deep before dragging them to the hand wrapped around her throat. If the water doesn’t suffocate her, the hold I have on her throat soon will.
With her eyes on the verge of sporting new blood vessels, I lift Alice’s head for the final time. Her gasps as she struggles to fill her lungs with oxygen are barely heard over Lucy’s frantic bangs on the window of her room. She’s three floors above, but she thumps her fists on the glass as if breaking her window will magically save her mother.
I wish it were that easy, but sometimes, the heroes in stories need to be villains too, especially when the only person they looked up to disappointed them time and time again.
I’m waist-deep in freezing cold water, but my skin is so hot, it hisses as well as my words when I growl out, “Where. Are. They. Taking. Her.”
“I…” when my hand moves for my gun, over the time waster Alice is being today, she talks faster, “… overheard them saying something about a ranch. T-t-that they had a bigger payday coming.”
I instantly feel hopeful. “Roxanne’s family’s ranch?”
Tears mix with the saltwater coating her face when she shakes her head. “They were talking about a gala, something about a ransom drop.”
When my hand raises in the air, Lucy screams my name in a mangled roar. It reminds me so much of Roxanne’s endeavor to protect her mother. Even when she should have hated