That had been almost four years ago, and I hadn’t heard from her since apart from birthday and Christmas cards. I’d missed her and had felt like a part of me had been missing since.
When she’d called tonight, I’d known it was her. I’d felt antsy all day, like something bad was going to happen. Normally I sleep like the dead, but tonight I’d been tossing and turning and had just decided to say fuck it and get up when my phone rang.
The closer I got to her location the more the pit of dread and fury. What state would she be in when I got to her?Three hours later…
“Levi?” my brother answered his phone on the first ring.
“Get Dad to call Doc and tell them to meet us at Archer’s,” I said grimly, stealing a glance over at the tiny bundle curled into the passenger seat of my car.
I’d wrapped a hoodie from the back seat around her and had placed another one I’d thrown in the trunk yesterday under her head so she could lean on it.
She looked more fragile than I’d ever seen her look and the tiny pieces that she’d managed to tell me about what she’d gone through had made my stomach turn.
“Is she okay?” I could hear my dad on the phone in the background and figured that Noah had the phone on speakerphone.
“The only word I can say to that is a huge fucking no.”
“How bad are we talking?” his voice was croaky, and I knew what he was asking– the same question I’d been asking myself and had approached reluctantly with her.
“She says no, but from the looks of it, she was beaten daily and pretty much starved the whole time.”
When she’d told me she hadn’t been raped or abused sexually, I’d wanted to cry with relief.
“How long ‘til you get here?”
I’d stopped at a gas station to get some painkillers and a drink for her after I’d picked her up. I’d initially pulled in under the ruse of filling up the tank, intending to use the bright lights of the forecourt to look over her injuries, at least the ones that were visible.
Once I’d seen the bruising on her face and the pain in her eyes, I’d gone in and bought what they’d had available, Advil and Tylenol, and had demanded that she take them.
I wouldn’t be taking the risk of driving fast on the roads home in case we got stopped, or I hit a pothole and jarred her, so it would take me at least two hours to get back to Gonzales County.
Relaying this to Noah, I hung up the phone and focused on the road in front of me, grinding my teeth the whole time.
I was going to kill that bastard.2 NoahI’d thought the wait between when Levi had called me the first time to his follow up call was painful but waiting for him to pull up in front of my brother’s house was worse.
We all had houses on a huge plot of land with big gaps between them and Archer’s was the right in the center of them all. We’d gotten the idea from how my uncle’s ranch was laid out with my cousin’s houses on it, and I loved it.
There were some smaller houses dotted throughout where some of the people who worked for us lived when they needed to, so it was the best place to go to in situations like this. People usually assumed that you’d go furthest away from the road, or to the main building, and Luna’s father was such a basic piece of shit that he’d go straight to those areas - if he had the balls to enter our property.
I actually hoped that he did come looking– I had a lot I wanted to say and do to the bastard.
“Doc’s ten minutes out,” my older brother, Archer, informed us, hanging up the phone. “We get her in and take her to the bedroom down the hall. The men have their guns and are patrolling out of sight. Anyone who enters the grounds will trip the alarm and the first team will make their way to its location leaving the others to focus on their areas. The most important thing is to assess her medical needs and make her comfortable or transport her to the hospital if need be.”
Really, he would have been an asset to the military, but Archer had an issue with people telling him what to do, so he’d never joined.
Looking at my family’s faces, I saw the anger I was feeling reflected on them. Luna had been one of us since Levi had brought her home the first time, and we’d all missed her since Rick had taken her.
“Let’s get her settled first,” Dad held my eyes as he told me. He knew that I was fighting against finding out the last location of her father from her as soon as she got here so I could go and deal with him. “As soon as he finds her gone, he’ll do the dip and disappear again until he can track her down.” A man like Rick Cleaver didn’t hang around, especially not with the number of people he owed money to. He would panic when she wasn’t there and move until he had a plan to get her back. “Get her settled, get her safe and then we plan.”