chocolate box. We took the exit for the town but immediately turned away from it, taking the local coastal road north.
Each twist and turn of the road made my stomach tighter, and by the time we pulled up to Edgecliffe, I was ready to jump out of my skin. I threw open the car door before Daisy could even come to a complete stop.
“Bring him right out, Ari, I mean it,” Daisy called behind me. I waved vaguely in her direction and took off.
I couldn’t explain why, but I needed to see Holden, needed to see him now, and I couldn’t relax again until I knew he was alright.
I threw open the side door of the house and dashed inside. Frog, who’d been lying on a patch of sun-warmed wood beneath a window lifted his head and hissed as I sprinted by, but I didn’t have time to stop and apologize.
“Holden?” I said as I made the final turn and saw the library door at the end of the hall. “Holy shit, Holden, I can’t believe it. It was my dad. My dad was the one behind it this whole—”
I skidded to a stop as I entered the library, barely noticing as Frog darted around my ankles and scampered into the room as well.
Holden was, indeed, in the library. He was standing over near the shelves I’d been working on the last time I was here. Art history and Caribbean literature, respectively. And my father was pointing a gun at him.
“Hello, Ariel,” my dad said. “It’s so good to finally meet you.”
I gaped. How was he already here? Had it all been a ruse? He’d been in the States this whole time, and had never intended to meet me in Portland at all?
My eyes went wide. The bright winter sun streamed through the windows behind my dad and Holden, lighting up the edges of their bodies like someone had dipped them in gold.
Frog zoomed across the room and leapt up a precarious stack of books behind my dad, then bounded to the top of one of the new bookcases. The book stack wobbled, but if Frog noticed anything amiss with the scene, he gave no sign of it.
“But you—you’re not…” I trailed off, replaying my dad’s words, actually hearing them this time. ‘So good to finally meet you?’ But that meant—
“Uncle Eddie?” I said, wishing my voice didn’t sound quite so shaky.
“The one and only.” Eddie smiled like we were at a cocktail party and he was exceptionally pleased with the company. “I suppose I really ought to say ‘see’ you. I have met you before, technically. But you were all of six years old, and I rather think the current circumstances warrant a re-introduction.”
“But you—you weren’t even—” I stumbled through half-recovered memories, broken off at the edges and jumbled together like a graveyard after an earthquake.
Iceland. My family had been in Iceland, that was what my mom had said. And Uncle Eddie was supposed to meet us there that week. I’d been excited. I hadn’t seen Eddie since I was a kid, but I remembered him as a guy with a mischievous smile and a joke always at hand.
He was the one who had kidnapped me?
“Were you already in Iceland?” I asked. “Waiting there, for me to be alone, so you could take me?”
“Got it in one.” Eddie beamed like a proud parent at a spelling bee. “You’re more than just a pretty face, I see. I get why your boyfriend is so charmed.”
I stared at him in confusion. If I hadn’t known better, I’d almost have said he was hitting on me, and daddy kink or no daddy kink, it was distinctly creepy.
I looked over at Holden, who seemed equally confused. He mouthed ‘Sorry’ as though this were his fault, as though it hadn’t been me who dragged him into all of this.
Eddie frowned when I didn’t respond to the compliment and gestured with his gun.
“I might have hoped you’d be a little more polite, but I suppose we can’t have everything in life. In any case, we need to get going. You and I have a boat to catch, Ariel. Come here.”
Holden shook his head vigorously, and I didn’t need to see him mouthing ‘Daisy’ to know that I needed to find some way to stall. There was no way in hell I was going anywhere with Eddie when he was pointing a gun at Holden. Not that I’d comply anyway, but seeing him threaten Holden made