Chapter 33
THIRTY-THREE
LIAM
You’re paranoid. You’re always paranoid. It’s just the street.
But what if it’s not?
I shout to Kat to stay here, and then head for the door.
I don’t wait for her to argue.
A man clears the alley, and I take off after him at speed, pulling the door behind me.
I turn right like he did, and nearly run into a woman with a pushchair. Behind them are two students who chat as they walk. A car is turning at the end of the road. Nobody is running or watching. Until a flash of black darts across the road.
My feet pound the pavement as I go after him, gaining on him. Anger fuels me as I follow him, determined to kill the fucker.
After nearly ten minutes of flat-out running, my lungs burn, and I’ve lost him.
‘Fuck!’ I shout, furious that he’s given me the slip again.
At a jog, I head back to Kat.
The door’s open wide when I get there. Fear spikes. Did I close it? I think I did…
My stomach sinks.
‘Kat.’
Nothing.
‘Kat.’
I’m through the door before I finish saying her name, and the first thing I see is that the hallway light is off. It was on when I left. And then I see the floor, which stops me in my tracks.
Drops. Small and dark, leading from the doorway toward her room.
No.
The word doesn’t make it out. Just tears through my throat and dies there.
Her bedroom door is open.
I don’t remember crossing the kitchen, but I find myself clinging to her doorway and looking at the mess beyond.
The curtain rail has come half away from the wall, the fabric torn and hanging at an angle.
The bedside lamp is smashed to pieces next to her bed.
Her notebook is there too, pages splayed.
She’s not here.
I check the bathroom anyway, slamming the door back against the wall hard enough to crack the plaster. Empty. Ellie’s room. Empty. Back to the kitchen. Empty.
She’s not fucking here.
I go back to her room and notice the bed.
There’s blood.
A dark smear on her pale duvet, and another near the pillows. More on her heart stones, which are scattered everywhere. So wrong for our love tokens to be lying in the wreckage of her room like morbid confetti.
I sit down on the edge of the bed.
My hands find my face, and I press hard, making sound into my palms that I have never made before.
Not in the ring. Not on the worst nights in the worst houses, in the years of foster placements where I learned that surviving and living were two different things.
Not when I went looking for her and found the cottage empty.
Not ever.
The scream wrenches from some deep, broken part of me, my throat burning and face filling with blood.
He’s taken her, and suddenly I’m not the man who grew up surviving, but the boy who sat in the stream and watched her dry my hair with the hem of her dress.
The man who fell in love fourteen years ago, and again in the past few weeks.
The man who finally got everything he ever dreamed of, only to lose it again.
I’m going to kill him.
My hands drop.
Her necklace isn’t here. She’s wearing it.
The tracker.
I’m on my feet with my phone in my hand, fingers shaking so hard that I get my PIN wrong twice. Eventually, the app opens.
The dot is moving.
They haven’t gotten far. The pink dot is moving quickly, so he must have her in a car.
I have to get to her.
Her keys are still on the table, and I lock the door behind me as guilt bites. I should never have left her.
Follow the dot. Get to her. Everything else after.
The city swallows me up as I run.
By the time I make it to the disused warehouse where her dot is, I can barely breathe. My lungs ache, and my legs wobble, but I tear toward her anyway.
I can’t let this guy hurt her any more.
She has to be okay.
Pushing through a door, I feel fiery hot pain tear through my side, while my ears fill with electric static.
I drop like a fucking fly.
‘Hello, Liam,’ a soft voice says, before the world briefly lights up, then sinks away completely.