When he asked someone on his end if they’d given Addy a ride home, I realized he had either one of them with him and crossed my fingers for good news. Maybe she’d needed to go to the store or something, and they were going back to pick her up?
“Sadie says she didn’t, but she’s calling Santana now to see if she took her. She had Toby this morning, and he sometimes likes being driven around. It makes him sleep.”
I hung up and sprinted to the office to join them, needing to be active. Here’s something I didn’t like, feeling powerless. No one reacts well to having their power stripped, but at that moment, it hadn’t been stripped, it’d been obliterated.
I loved Addy. There was no other way to say it—I loved her. Life wasn’t a struggle, even when bad shit happened when she was around. I was comfortable in my own skin, I laughed, and I smiled for no reason. I made plans for so far in the future, it was stupid. I thought about what to have for dinner, knowing what she liked and disliked and planning around it.
We’d been going through movies from the 80s recently, and even then, I enjoyed them more because our commentary was so similar. I slept like a baby at night with her wrapped around me, and although I didn’t want to get out of bed and leave her, I was excited about what the day held for me with her.
I also didn’t feel like the odd one out when it came to my family. Growing up, most of my friends came from normal households. Ones where they had fun, but they were just ‘normal.’
My parents and brothers might be the more placid and less outgoing of the Townsends, but we weren’t normal, and when the rest of the family got together, I felt a little self-conscious because of how nuts they were.
With Addy’s family not being how they were, I wasn’t worried about what she’d think when she met my family. We’d been breaking her in slowly by telling her stories about them, but hearing and seeing were two very different things with the Townsends.
We fit together like thunder and lightning. Sure, you can have one without the other, but the true power behind a storm is when the two are together. That was the perfect description for us.
“Knock, knock,” the familiar voice of my twin, Jackson, said as he stood in the doorway of the office.
Christ, I’d forgotten he was coming with Sasha. It was meant to be a surprise for Addy after she’d introduced me to her sister. Jackson was one of my favorite and one of the most important people in my world.
Staring at him and unable to even form a “hello,” I watched as Elijah and Remy greeted him and then filled him in on what’d happened.
His eyes wide, he yanked his phone out of his pocket and frantically tapped the screen. “Sasha’s at your place using the facilities. If she and Sadie stay there, we can go out looking for your Addy without worrying something’s going to happen to them, too.”
I hadn’t even considered that they could be at risk. Shit, I didn’t even know for sure that Addy was even fucking missing.
Elijah said something, but I missed who he was talking to as I sat there going through possible reasons for Addy not being around. To be fair, I’d been doing that since I’d found out she’d missed her meeting, but now I was starting to think more realistically instead of movie plots like Taken.
“Marcus,” Jackson said sternly, squatting down in front of me.
To everyone, we were identical, but to us, we looked nothing alike. Obviously, we knew we were similar, we were twins, for freak’s sake, but that’s where it ended in our minds. That said, out of all of my brothers, we looked the most like Wes, to the point people thought we were triplets when they saw us together now. Genetics was weird, but I loved them all the same.
Needing to snap out of irrelevant thoughts, I blinked and shook my head to clear it. “It’s good to see you, man.”
Jackson’s lips twitched, but he remained looking serious. “It wasn’t meant to be like this, though. When we get her back—and we will—we’ll relax and enjoy time with Addy. Just a heads up, Mom is gonna be fucking pissed she hasn’t met her yet.”
I winced. Yeah, she really was. It wasn’t that I was ashamed of Addy, I just knew if I told Mom and Dad before how serious it was, they’d have been down here almost every weekend. They weren’t intrusive or overbearing, but they’d want to get to know her and include her in family shit, and that might have brought my grandparents and cousins to the ranch, too. It was more for Addy’s protection than anything that I hadn’t said anything to them, but now I felt guilty about my decision.