Chapter 10
Anastasia
The shrill tone of my cell phone rips me out of sleep. Dazed and slightly confused, I answer without checking the readout. “Hello?” My throat is scratchy, my voice raw. “Hello?”
“Did you get it?” a voice replies. It’s low. Deep and slightly robotic.
My pulse kicks into gear, fear threading through me. “Get what?” Flipping on my lamp, I pull the phone away to check the readout. Unknown number.
“The gift,” the voice replies.
What gift—and then I remember the orange stuffed cat sitting downstairs in my breakroom. “Who is this?”
“A friend.”
The sleep dissipates, and I rush to my feet, practically running into my closet to unlock the small safe.
Then, I withdraw the pistol my brother gave me for my twenty-first birthday.
My hands are shaking so badly, though, that I’m not even entirely sure I could pull the trigger.
But holding it still makes me feel less powerless.
“Did you like it?” the voice asks. “I thought it looked like sweet Axel.”
Fear spreads through me like a wildfire, so I put the phone on speaker and manage to fire off a text to Sawyer.
Me: Help.
A single word that autocorrect thankfully fixed for me when my shaking fingers accidentally typed ‘helo’.
The question is…am I really in immediate danger? And if I am, will he see it and get here in time?
“Don’t you think so?” the voice asks.
“Who are you? Why are you calling me?”
“You’ll know me soon enough. We’re going to be good friends, Anastasia. I’ve been calling for a while now, but I just couldn’t quite get the words out once I heard your sweet voice.”
Tears fill my eyes, and the fear roots deeper.
This whole time, they weren’t spammers or bot callers.
The cat—it wasn’t a cute gift from my ex, and now that I know that, I realize I should have always known it.
Or, at the very least, asked him about it.
What a fool I was.
Focus. I take a deep breath and try to shove the images of a faceless monster from my mind. The same one who has haunted my life for the last eighteen years. They never caught him, after all.
Is it possible?
“Who are you?”
A loud crack fills my ears, and I scream.
“Anastasia!” Sawyer’s frantic voice follows, and the thundering of his footsteps down the hall brings me a wave of relief even as the fear continues to render me immobile on the floor of my closet.
He’s here. I’m not alone.
“I’ll be seeing you soon, lovely,” the voice says. Then the line goes dead.
“Anastasia!” Sawyer tries the door.
“Coming!” I call out, my voice shaky. If he’s here, I’m safe. On trembling legs, I stumble over to open my door—then fall into his strong arms, the adrenaline leaving me in a rush.
“Baby, what happened? Are you okay?” He moves me into my room and sets the gun he’d brought with him on my nightstand so he can cup my cheeks.
“I think someone is messing with me,” I say.
His gaze searches the room, pausing on my closet, where the handgun I’d pulled out sits discarded on the floor. “Tell me what happened.” Sawyer gently guides me back onto my bed. “Was someone here?”
“I don’t think so.” I close my eyes and shake my head. “No, I would have heard him.”
“Him?” Sawyer’s expression turns deadly as he stands and retrieves his firearm. “I’m going to clear the apartment, okay?” But before leaving my room, he grabs my gun from the closet floor and carries it over to me, setting it on the bed. “Keep this here, and don’t move.”
I wrap both arms around myself and wait as he leaves the room. I can hear him moving through the apartment, checking closets, the spare bedroom, and my office. Finally, he comes back in.
“It’s clear.” He sets his gun on the nightstand now and moves mine beside it before kneeling in front of me and taking my hands. “Tell me what happened? Do we need to call the police?”
I shake my head. “It was silly. Just a phone call.” Except, it wasn’t. “I thought the stuffed cat was a gift from Jack. But it wasn’t.”
“Baby, you’re not making any sense.” He reaches up and cups my cheeks. “Breathe. You’re safe. I won’t let anything happen to you. Ever.”
“I’m probably overreacting. It’s just a prank.” Why doesn’t it feel like I am, though?
“Please tell me what happened,” he urges.
Biting back the emotion in my throat, I focus on the feel of Sawyer’s hands on mine. I’m safe. He’s here. “You know about the phone calls.”
He nods.
“Tonight, it wasn’t just breathing or a dead line.” I close my eyes, that voice like acid in my ears.
“What did he say?” Sawyer’s voice is serious. His body tense.
“He asked if I got the gift.”
“What gift?”
“I got a package two days ago. I thought it was just a gift from Jack since the postage said Savannah, Georgia.” Tears fill my eyes. “But he wouldn’t scare me like this.”
“A stuffed cat?”
I nod. “It looks just like Axel, and the voice—he said that he thought it looked just like him.” Tears slip down my cheeks, the fear so very real. If this is a prank, it’s a good one. “He called him sweet Axel.”
My body trembles. “No one knows about Axel except you, my family, Tessa, Katelyn, Garrison, Ryker, Weston, and Jack.”
Since I don’t have social media, aside from my business page, there are no pictures of my cat online. He’s not in my website bio or anything.
“Where is it now?”
“Downstairs.” I take a deep breath to try to steady my nerves. The calmer I get, the more ridiculous I feel. This has to be a prank. Someone messing with me. “In the break room.”
He starts to pull away, but I get up, too. “I don’t want to be alone.”
Sawyer offers me a nod and threads his fingers through mine before retrieving his firearm with the other hand. As we move through my dark apartment, I watch the shadows, half expecting some faceless attacker to come lunging out at me.
When we emerge into the living room, I see that the front door has been kicked in, the wood jagged and splintered where it once connected to the hinges. “I’ll fix that tomorrow,” he says. “I didn’t have time to grab my key.”
It’s silly, but after he says it, I realize that he’s also shirtless and barefoot. “Did you run over here without shoes on?”
He glances down at his chest, then looks back at me. “You texted ‘Help.’ I wasn’t wasting a single second.”
Warmth spreads through me, momentarily easing the icy fear still clinging to me. Sawyer ran over here, barefoot and shirtless, because I needed him.
Tears burn in the corners of my eyes as he squeezes my hand. Together, we descend the stairs. My coffee shop is dark, and I hate that the place where I once felt more at home than anywhere now feels scary.
This is ridiculous. Get it together, Anastasia.
To prove to myself that I’m okay, I release Sawyer’s hand and flip on the light. It floods my empty shop. I remain where I am as Sawyer repeats what he did upstairs, checking the windows and every nook and cranny.
I turn toward the back—only to see that my back door has also been removed from its hinges.
“I’ll fix that, too,” he says quickly.
It’s funny that, in this moment when I feel so incredibly vulnerable, knowing what Sawyer went through to get to me fills me with an overwhelming sense of safety.
The front door opens, and my pulse kicks seconds before my brother comes through it, a weapon in his hand, his hazel eyes wide and furious.
“Ana—what happened?” he says when he sees me. My big brother eats up the distance between us in three long strides, and I wrap my arms around him. Aside from my dad, Zane has always felt like the safest place to be.
That is, until Sawyer.
“Someone’s been calling her late at night.
She thought it was one of those automated calls until tonight,” Sawyer explains.
“I ran the numbers, but since they were always a different one, coming from cell towers all over the world, I didn’t think much of it.
I assumed they were overworked telemarketers.
” He shakes his head angrily. “I should have known better.”
As he continues to relay what I told him earlier, I wrap my arms around myself, feeling utterly ridiculous that I got not one but two men out of bed in the middle of the night for nothing more than a phone call.
“You said the stuffed cat is back there?” Sawyer asks, gesturing toward the break room.
“Back here.” I move past them and through the back of my shop to where I’d set the cat. It’s sitting on the top of a shelf, now looking absolutely menacing despite being a cute orange stuffed animal.
“Did you like the gift?”
Sawyer sets his gun aside and lifts the cat. He turns it over slowly, then squeezes gently. “You have your knife on you?” Sawyer asks Zane. “Left mine at home.”
My brother reaches into his back pocket and offers Sawyer his Swiss Army knife.
Sawyer stabs it into the stuffed animal’s back, then slices down and reaches inside. He pulls out gobs of stuffing until—
“What is that?” I squeal when he withdraws a small, round object with wires sticking out on one side.
Sawyer’s gaze turns hard. Dangerous. “Someone’s been listening to you.”
The sound of a drill has eaten up most of my morning. Weston brought over two brand-new doors, and he and Garrison have been installing them, with the help of Kyle Harding.
Sawyer and Zane left shortly after Weston arrived so they could try to track down whoever sent me that cat. My phone, unfortunately, has also been taken. But Sawyer left me with his just in case I needed to get hold of him.
I’d chosen to keep the shop open today, despite Sawyer and my brother’s protests. But I worked hard to build this business, and the last thing I’m going to do is allow some creep to scare me into losing it.
“Back door is finished,” Garrison says.
“Thanks, Garrison.”
“Of course.” His gaze lands on me. As a counselor for troubled teens, he’s good at seeing past the masks one might put into place. I’ve never needed one before, but right now? I can’t drop it, or I’ll crumble. “You okay?”
“Not really. But I will be. Like I told Sawyer, it’s probably just some creep playing a prank.”
“And if it’s not?”
“Then Sawyer and Zane will find him. Either way, I’ll be fine.
Can I get you guys some coffee?” I ask as Weston crosses over toward us.
A big brother to me in every way but blood, he was furious when they told him what happened and promised not to leave my side until Sawyer gets back.
Even then, I wouldn’t put it past him to camp out just in case.
After what happened with Violet—well. He made it his personal mission to keep watch over me right alongside Zane.
“That would be great, thanks.” Garrison retrieves his tools. “We’ll get started upstairs.” Kyle follows him, but Weston remains downstairs.
Right now, it’s just me and Katelyn, as well as a group of women who meet here every week for book club. No scary men. No monsters in the corners. But, no matter how hard I try to distract myself, I can’t get that voice out of my head.
“We’re going to be good friends, Anastasia.”
“We’ll get him,” Weston says.
“I know.”
“None of us will let anything happen to you,” he adds.
I force a smile, seeing how hard this is for him, too. It’s written all over his face. His sister, Violet, was abducted from the scene of a car accident and murdered. They never caught the guy, and I can’t help but imagine Weston’s mind going straight to that loss.
Crossing over, I wrap my arms around him. He hesitates a moment before hugging me back. “Thank you for being here, Weston.”
“I’ll always be here for you.”
“Just like I’ll always be there for you.
” I pull away and cup his scruffy cheeks.
His appearance intimidates most before he even says a word.
At six-foot-five, he’s taller than everyone I know—except for Ryker.
Both muscled arms are heavily tattooed, and the ink continues climbing up one side of his neck.
I’ve never asked him the meaning behind his tattoos, but there’s one that I know is for his sister. A single purple flower petal on his chest—right above his heart. I have one, too, on my right side. Where she’d been sitting just before she died.
Weston has always been a man who prefers to suffer in silence, but behind his dark eyes, there’s enough pain to fill the Atlantic. “You know that, right?”
Weston offers me a slight smile and nods, then pulls away. “I’ll stay down here while you make the coffee, then we can carry it up together.”