Chapter 28 Grayson
GRAYSON
“She left the underground parking lot around an hour ago and headed east.”
I inch closer to my desk to ensure Brandon can hear me. I’ve been pacing for the last ten minutes, peeved as fuck it took me almost thirty to realize Macy wasn’t sleeping in. She slipped the net, and I’ve been panicking ever since.
“Can you follow her?”
Brandon doesn’t answer me. He’s too busy pulling up traffic cameras and city feeds that will hopefully track her movements. As I return to pacing, my muscles taut, I replay the last few days. Macy’s exhaustion and frustration, and the way she looked at me last night, feature the most.
She knew I was holding back, but she’d never confront me. That’s not Macy. She never forces the narrative. Why do you think it took me so long to tell her about Cameron?
I shift my focus back to the monitor when Brandon says, “She stopped at HQ. Was there for around ten minutes, then headed south.”
As dread pools in my stomach, I pull over a statewide map and scan locations south of HQ. It only takes a minute for a suburb to stick out like a sore thumb.
“Check the feeds from Cameron’s apartment.”
The whoosh of Brandon’s agreement trickles through the speakers of my laptop, along with the thumps of his fingers flying over his keyboard. “Give me a minute.” In half the time requested, he finds a lead. “She entered Cameron’s building forty-five minutes ago.”
I grab my keys and head for the door, too hot to bother with a jacket. I’ve just wrenched the door open when Macy’s tiny frame fills it from the other side.
Relief crashes over me so fiercely that it is painful.
“Macy.” I’m torn between strangling her and hugging her to death. The thoughts that swirled in my head weren’t good, and every one of them involved me scratching out Cameron’s name from the top of my case file list and replacing it with Macy’s.
Instead of responding physically, I remind her that she’s meant to be on bed rest. “Doctor’s orders, Mace.”
She rolls her eyes, steps past me, then smiles a halfhearted greeting to Brandon, who is eyeballing our exchange from the makeshift command center we set up only two days ago.
How the fuck was that only two days ago?
It feels like a lifetime.
I don’t know what Brandon sees behind the murky cloud in Macy’s eyes, but he makes an excuse to leave before he cuts our feed.
Macy waits for the monitor to go black before she shifts on her feet to meet my gaze.
Her cheeks are stain-free, though I’m not confident in declaring that she hasn’t been crying.
Red rings circle her eyes, and she cracked her bottom lip by dragging her teeth over it too often. Both signs that she’s been upset.
“We need to talk.”
Robotically, I nod.
I guide her to the couch and sit opposite in an armchair, elbows on my knees, fingers pressed against my mouth to mask my frown. She’s here, with me, but I keep thinking she’s still lost.
What the fuck is wrong with me? My girlfriend, who had been missing for seventeen years, was just found safe and alive. I’m meant to be happy, not a miserable sack.
I shouldn’t be so hard on myself. How could anyone be happy when someone they care about is clearly hurting, and you’re to blame for their pain?
“If this is about last night—”
“It’s not,” Macy interrupts, smiling softly. She takes a big breath before ripping the Band-Aid off in true Macy style. She does it in one fell swoop. “Cameron wasn’t abducted.”
Dread prickles my spine. Out of all the people in the world, I never thought Macy would be the one to discount my recollection of the event that has kept me awake for well over a decade. Cameron was kidnapped under my watch. I can’t mistake that.
I grunt through Macy’s imaginative jab when she murmurs, “It was a ploy.” She speaks faster, thwarting my attempt to interrupt.
“You were meant to believe she was dead. That’s why they started the fire in the motor.
They wanted the evidence of her supposed”—she air quotes her last word—“death to still be visible when the authorities arrived.”
“That’s not true.” My headshake fills the room with the scent of Macy’s shampoo.
“She was kidnapped.” Before she can deny the truth I’ve clung to for seventeen years, I pull up the sleeves of my shirt to show her the area Cameron clung to when she fought to get away from her kidnappers.
“She grabbed me here.” I slap the skin, reddening it more than the faint nail marks only I can see. “Right fucking here.”
Remorse filters through Macy’s eyes before she murmurs, “I don’t believe she knew the exact date her abduction”—there she goes with the fucking air quotes again—“would occur, but she knew an abduction was their plan of attack.”
I shake my head in disagreement, but she acts as if she doesn’t understand.
She can when she’s holding all the cards.
“Cameron confirmed my theory, Grayson. She confessed that they had staged her kidnapping.”
Her words hit me like a punch to the gut.
This can’t be right. Macy must be lying.
But why would she? What benefit would she get from that?
Nothing.
She would get nothing.
And the remembrance frees me to say, “Tell me everything.”
The world tilts when she confirms my greatest fear.
My father isn’t the man I thought he was.
He isn’t even a man.
“He threatened her?”
Macy’s hand shoots out to grip mine, which is balled on my knee, answering me without words or a gesture.
Fury and grief rage inside me as I struggle to stay upright.
I recall all the years I’ve spent searching, and all the nights I lay awake, replaying her kidnapping.
I think about the shame I felt when I failed to protect her, and how the ache of her departure was endless.
And all this time, it was him who had caused my grief.
My own father. The man I trusted more than anyone.
“I need to talk to him.” My voice is unlike anything I’ve ever heard. It is low and full of death. “I need to hear it from his own mouth.”
Macy grabs my arm as her eyes silently plead for me to listen. “Don’t do anything rash.”
I can’t stop, breathe, or think. I need answers. Justice. But more than anything, I need to know who my father really is.
After shrugging out of Macy’s hold, I race for the exit.
I reach the underground parking lot before Macy catches up with me. She grabs the sleeve of my shirt as her eyes beg me to listen. “Stop, Grayson, please. You’re not thinking straight.”
After yanking out of her hold, I bark at her, my anger spilling over on the wrong person. “How am I supposed to think straight? My father destroyed my life! He lied to me for fucking years! I can’t let this slide.”
Pissed, I throw open the van’s door so fast the hinges creak before slotting behind the steering wheel. I turn over the ignition, but before I can reverse out, Macy reminds me that this isn’t solely about me. It isn’t even about her.
“You promised.” Her tears spill, and every one of them breaks my heart.
“You promised you wouldn’t leave until we found Kendall too.
This—” she thrust her hand to the left like my childhood home is only feet from us—“will break that promise.” She wipes her tears with the back of her hand as her eyes continue to silently plead.
“You don’t talk with words, Grayson. You’ve never used words.
So we both know how this will end. It won’t be anywhere near Kendall.
” She steps so close that her warm, panicked breath fans my lips.
“You are a man of many talents, but I would have never pictured you as a liar. Please don’t give me a reason to change my belief. ”
“Mace…”
The wish to continue arguing surges through my veins, and I can’t think of a better way to disperse it than to pummel it out on my father’s face.
The thought makes me laugh. Macy is right. I don’t talk with words. I use my heart… and my fists. It is the former that sees me switching off the ignition.
I don’t leave the van. I can’t. All the lies I’ve been told are out in the open, and I don’t know how to climb out from beneath their crushing weight.
The thoughts swirling in my head get a surge of reprieve when Macy murmurs several long minutes later, “Scoot.”
I peer at her, lost, before doing as asked. Her advice has never steered me wrong, so I don’t see it being any different today. And I am too fucking snowed under to put up a decent fight.
Not speaking, she climbs into the driver’s seat, fastens her belt, and then reverses out of our designated parking spot.
When she signals to turn left at the T-intersection instead of right, I stray my eyes from the road to her. She smiles. Even though it isn’t her true smile, I’ll take it.
“It’s not time for that yet.” She turns left before merging onto the freeway. “But when it is, if you want me there, I will be at your side, cheering you on.”
In the cracked side mirror, Cameron’s building disappears on the horizon. Macy guides the van out of town. She keeps it five below the speed limit, not wanting to get pulled over, and every two miles, her eyes flick to me as if she’s checking that I haven’t shattered.
I’m broken, but she can’t see my flaws. Each time our eyes meet, she offers a faint grin before looking back at the road.
My heart thuds for an entirely different reason when Macy pulls the van into a bureau practice range forty clicks out of town. We have access to several locations nationwide; however, this is my first visit to this one.
Actually, come to think of it, I haven’t been to a firing range in years. I only went when I needed to remind myself that I still had control over some things, even when everything else in my life was in chaos.