Abandon Ship (Anchored 4)

That small gesture makes me feel like I can soar.

“We’d been searching for her for hours. It had been nearly two days. Everyone thought she was dead, but my partner and I, we didn’t.”

“You didn’t give up home.”

“Never. Long story short, after a media circus and a lot of fighting, a lot of struggling, we found her. She was bruised and she’d been hurt. She had a broken arm.” A shiver shoots through Piper, and I wrap my arms around her, planting a soft kiss on her head.

“I’m sorry,” she whispers. “It just hits kind of close to home. Tad broke my wrist once. That was the end of it for me. It was kind of like, a wake-up call, I suppose.”

“I’m sorry for what happened to you,” I tell her.

“I didn’t mean to interrupt,” she whispers.

“Well,” I take a deep breath. I just want to get this over with. Not a day goes by when I don’t think of Theresa James. “We saved her. We were so happy, so excited she was safe. Dylan and I had done what no one else thought was possible. We’d saved Theresa from her abductor. We’d rescued her, and everything was going to be fine.”

“That must have been an incredible feeling.”

“It was, and we locked her kidnapper away for a long fucking time. There was literally no chance of him getting out. We had more than enough evidence to put him in prison and throw away the key.”

“What happened, Maddox?”

“Two months after it happened, I got a call.”

I’ll never forget that day.

It was bright out, sunny. It was hopeful. It was a beautiful summer morning over a year ago. It was the kind of day you spend at the beach or in the park with your friends. It’s the kind of day where you lay out and just look at the clouds, but instead of any of that, instead of relaxing, instead of enjoying the weather, I got that phone call.

“She had killed herself,” I manage to say. “Her note said she couldn’t handle knowing he was still alive. She couldn’t move forward with her life with the fear that he would come back for her. She said it was better to be dead than to have to face him even one more time.”

“Maddox…”

Piper wraps her arms around me and pulls me close. I realize suddenly that I’m crying. Tears are streaming down my face, but I’m not embarrassed. I’ll never be embarrassed to care. I’ll never be ashamed of who I am. Not with Piper. I can be raw around her, vulnerable. I can be who I am and Piper? She’s not going to turn me away.

“I’m so sorry, Mad,” she whispers.

“I’ll protect you,” I promise her.

“That’s why you walked away from the force, isn’t it?” She asks. “You couldn’t stand to see it anymore. You couldn’t handle dealing with people dying and being hurt and all the bad in the world.”

“I still keep in touch with Dylan,” I tell her. “But I walked away after that. I work in a boring administrative office now, and it’s perfect.”

It’s boring as hell. The work is dull and meaningless and it doesn’t inspire me at all, but that’s not important. What’s important is that I’m not seeing people die every day. I’m not meeting people on the worst day of their lives. I’m not dealing with the pain, the anger, the hatred.

“Maddox,” Piper says, and suddenly, I realize she’s not eating anymore. She places one of her hands on my cheek and turns me toward her, and then Piper Queen kisses me softly.

Chapter 9

Piper

Perhaps I shouldn’t be kissing my rescuer.

Perhaps I should make him take me out a few times.

Perhaps I should make him beg.

I won’t, though, because life is short, and waiting is pointless. We’re all going to die at some point. We’re all going to have an ending to our story.

I want mine to be a good one.