Worn Me Down

Chapter 31 Austin

“You son of a bitch! You had one fucking job. One job and that was to keep them safe!”

I look up as the door to the apartment crashes open and Brady charges across the room at me. His fist slams into my cheek and I don’t even bother fighting back when he punches me again. I’m perfectly fine with letting him beat the shit out of me, but the police officers that fill the room have other ideas. They pull him off of me and drag him back over by the door as I cradle my jaw in my hand.

“God dammit, let me go! Let me fucking go!” Brady shouts as he fights against their hold, his eyes wild and full of anger.

Dylan steps over to Brady and grabs onto the front of his shirt, yanking him close. “Dude, reel it the fuck in. I know you’re pissed, but beating the hell out of one of your best friends isn’t going to help Gwen and Emma. Calm your ass down right now.”

Brady takes a couple of deep breaths and his shoulders sag, the fight finally leaving him. The three men holding onto him finally let go and step away when they realize he’s calmed down. As they head into the kitchen with the rest of the team that have set up a make-shift command center at the table, Brady looks across the room at me, the disappointment on his face crystal clear and I completely lose it.

“I’m sorry, I’m so fucking sorry,” I tell him brokenly, my legs giving out as I slide down the wall into a heap on the floor.

I let my best friend down and I let Gwen and Emma down. They weren’t a job; they were more than a job. For the first time in my life, I don’t know what the fuck to do. I don’t know how to fix this. I’m crawling out of my skin with fear and worry and now that Brady’s here it makes everything worse. He trusted me to keep his family safe and I failed him.

Brady walks across the room to me and I’m more than a little shocked that he slides down the wall to sit next to me instead of kicking my ass some more. Closing my eyes, I let my head thump back against the wall and we sit there in silence for a few minutes.

“Next to Layla, they’re my whole life, man,” Brady says quietly. I keep my eyes closed as he talks, knowing if I look at him I’m going to start crying like a fucking baby. “I was the shittiest brother in the world. As soon as I turned eighteen I got the fuck out of dodge and left her alone there with our parents. I had no idea that asshole she married would turn out to be a monster. I had no idea what he’d been doing to her all those years because I chose to shut her out. It was easier that way. It made me feel less guilty for leaving. And then one night she showed up on my doorstep with her arm in a cast, broken ribs and a black and blue face looking so small and helpless with Emma by her side and I knew right then and there that I would never let her down again.”

I don’t want to hear this, but I have to. It’s my fault that Gwen was let down again. It’s my fault that she’s in danger.

“I’m sorry. Jesus Christ I’m so sorry,” I mutter.

“Will you stop saying you’re fucking sorry? It’s not your fault.”

I finally open my eyes and look at Brady in confusion.

He just rolls his head at me. “I’m scared out of my mind and I lost my temper, that’s all. It would have happened even if I’d been here. There’s nothing you could have done to keep that fucker away from them. There’s nothing either of us could have done.”

I shake my head in denial. “I left them, man. I just walked away. I got a call from Risner and I bolted. I thought it was best, I didn’t want her to have any more baggage than she already did and we both know I’ve got enough to fill a thousand suitcases.”

Brady studies my face and after a few seconds he curses. “God dammit. You slept with her didn’t you?”

At this point it’s probably best not to answer him. My jaw still hurts from his punches and even though I deserve more, I’m not in the mood for them right now.

“You’re lucky I didn’t know that when I first walked in here or your face would be a pile of ground meat right now,” Brady mutters. “What do the police know so far?”

I fill him in what I found when I got here and how once the police arrived and they bagged up the needle and the dish, we started going over all of the information I’d been collecting the past few weeks. Right before Brady got here, Mark called to tell me that Stratford’s lawyer wasn’t answering his phone so the two men were still MIA and another BOLO was issued for both of them.

“What about Ellie?” Brady asks when I finish.

“Same. Calls to her phone are going unanswered so they’re assuming Stratford has all three of them. Her car isn’t in the parking lot so he must have taken them in it. The cops have her license plate and the description of her car and they’re on the lookout for it now. They also put a call in to her parents back in New York and they haven’t heard from her in a couple of days. They were surprised to hear she was in Nashville, she never told them she was going out of town,” I explain to him.

“Speaking of calls, sorry for not returning the messages you left me right away. Living on a tour bus is fucking insane and who knows what city I lost my phone in,” Brady tells me in irritation.

One of the officers comes into the living room from the hall with a cell phone in his hand. “Hey, we found this cell phone in the back bedroom. Anybody know who it belongs to?”

Brady and I look up and Brady is the first to speak. “Yeah, that’s Gwen’s. Guess we know why it hasn’t been answered all day.”

Brady reaches for it, but I quickly push myself up from the ground and grab it out of the officer’s hand. Something Gwen said to me the day Emma got hurt and I took her to the hospital nags at the back of my mind.

“That’s weird, I didn’t have any missed calls from you. Something must be wrong with my phone.”

Brady stands up next to me as I quickly scan through all of her missed calls from that day. Not finding any from my phone to Gwen’s from the time I was busy driving like a maniac to get Emma to the hospital, I pull out my own phone from my back pocket and search the outgoing call log. My heart fills with dread when I don’t see one call made to Gwen’s phone that day.

“Just got a call from New York. Stratford and his lawyer just landed at LaGuardia so that’s why the calls to him went unanswered. They’ve been at the airport since they left the station earlier, we just confirmed it with the airlines,” one of the officers shouts from the kitchen.

So Stratford couldn’t have been the one to do this. Everything starts to quickly click into place. How could I have never thought it was odd that Ellie showed back up in Gwen’s life right when strange things started happening to her?

“Son of a bitch!” I shout, shoving Gwen’s phone back into the officer’s hand and stalking towards the door where I left my go-back when I brought it in right before Brady got here. Reaching inside, I grab my 9mm and check to make sure it’s loaded. I know exactly who has my girls and it fills me with rage. All this time the person we should have been looking at was right in front of our faces. Shoving my gun into my back waistband and turning around to face the room full of men with questions on their faces.

“I know who has them and I think I know where they might be.”

The place is suddenly a flurry of activity as phone calls are made and everyone scrambles around checking their weapons and making a plan.

“I hope you’re right about this, I need my girls back,” Brady tells me as we rush out of the building.

Sliding behind the wheel of my SUV as Brady hops into the passenger seat, I look over at him before pulling out of the parking lot. “No, we need our girls back.”

I peel out onto the street forcing another driver to slam on their brakes to make way for me.

Brady sighs as he grabs tightly to the door handle. “We’ll discuss that later.”