Until Fools Find Gold (Providence Gold 1)

1

Luna

“Hello?”

I’d done so well to not cry up to this point, but the sound of my best friend’s voice on the other side of the phone almost broke me.

“Levi,” I tried to whisper as loudly as I could, but the pain and the fear made my voice almost inaudible.

I didn’t have to worry for too long though. Like it had been from the first day we met, he just knew.

“Luna? Luna, where are you?” I could hear the sound of fabric rustling the other side of the line like he was getting ready. I’d known I was lucky the second I met him and he’d claimed me as his best friend, but that luck came back now to hit me all over again. “Don’t talk, just send me your location now. Okay, Luna-Lu? Text it to me.”

Pulling my phone away from my head, I looked at the screen and did what he’d asked me to. During all of this, not once did I get distracted from my surroundings and the people who were passing me by. I couldn’t afford to, not now.

“Levi,” I croaked, trying to get some strength back so I could talk normally, but I was exhausted and the pain in my face was really starting to hit. I’d been running on adrenaline for six hours and now that I’d stopped moving, the adrenaline wasn’t fighting against it and I could feel it all in its no doubt technicolor glory.

“Don’t talk,” he muttered, the sound of the car door closing and the engine starting following it. “Make sure you’re in a safe place and wait for me. If you need to move, do it as much as you need to but keep me updated so that I don’t pass you. Do you understand, sweetheart?”

God, I loved my best friend.

“Okay, Levi.”

I looked around me and checked to see if there was a place I could hide until he got here. Spotting a dumpster down an alleyway, I slowly walked toward it and then merged into the shadows behind its massive form. From here I could see the street in front of me, but most importantly I could see the cars and the people on that street.

Swallowing hard around the knot in my throat, I took a shuddering breath in and then let it out.

“Okay, I’m going to go so you can save battery power. My map says I’ll be with you in roughly two hours, so just hang tight. I’ll message you with updates, so put your phone on silent. Before you check it, make sure you have it under your sweater to try to hide the light on it too. I’ll be with you soon, Luna-Lu.”

I would have smiled or chuckled each time he’d used his old nickname for me if I wasn’t in the shit storm that I was in. I felt a tug and twitch at the corners of my mouth though. It was the first time I’d even been tempted to smile or laugh in years and it felt strange.

“Okay, Vi-Vi,” I mumbled just as a black SUV drove past my hiding spot.

Dropping back down behind the dumpster, I gasped with the pain and carefully peeked around the corner to take a good look at the inhabitants of the vehicle. A great whoosh of breath left me when I saw that it was a family instead of someone affiliated with my father.

“Hang tight, sweetheart,” he hadn’t misread the noise coming from my end. “Hang up now, I’ll be there soon.”

Hanging up, I switched my phone onto silent before getting into a more comfortable position. It was hard to do because I wasn’t sure what I was squatting down in. It was also a well-known fact that people peed behind dumpsters on a regular basis, so I made sure not to touch anything and prayed that my legs wouldn’t give out. I would have to change positions while I waited, but the discomfort in my legs couldn’t beat what I had been through already and what was going on in my face.

My beeping… no, on this occasion I was going to swear. My fucking father.

I hated that man.

I hated that part of his DNA made up my own. I’d checked that fact too because I hated him so much, praying they’d come back with a, ‘no, this asshole isn’t any relation to you, so you can arrange a play date for him in the busy traffic’. The day it had come back with a definitive yes, I’d cried my heart out.

I only had one relative that I loved, my big brother Madix. He was the one who had taken the hair samples to hand into the DNA lab for me and had called me with the results. My asshole of a father wasn’t his, the lucky guy. He was the only person that Dad had let me stay in touch with, and that was on the condition I didn’t let him know exactly what was going on. I hated lying to him, but Dad had said he knew people who would kill Madix if I did. He was a cop, so when my father told me that, all I could think of was all the movies where there were crooked cops who offed the good ones.