Unexpected (The Protectors 10)

“You don’t get to always be the strong one. Finish your story.”

I shook my head.

“Finish it. Tell me what happened to your mom.”

“I told you—”

“You told us the sanitized version. Now tell me all of it.”

“No! You don’t need to hear that shit! No one needs to hear that shit!”

“I’m not no one! I’m the man who loves you and I hurt when you hurt. And right now, I want to fucking explode. I want to hunt that asshole down and tear him apart for daring to touch you and your family like that.”

I shook my head again, but he was unrelenting. And I could feel my will cracking under the strain to share the horrible things that were running through my head. I forgot that he was an officer of the law and I forgot that I needed to always be strong for the people who needed me.

“I killed him,” I whispered. “But I made him suffer the way she suffered.”

Unfazed, Nash softly said, “Tell me.”

“He put my mother in a box in his basement. There was one small hole for air and for him to give her food and water. He only let her out long enough to rape her on a dirty mattress next to the box. When he was done with her, he’d put her back in it. Four fucking days, Nash!”

“I’m sorry, Gage,” Nash whispered over and over. It was his voice that I clung to instead of the actual words. I matched my breathing to the softly spoken phrase until my head no longer felt like it was going to twist off my body.

“I’d gotten leave to come home to help find my mother,” I explained. “A friend of mine who worked for the police department as a sketch artist called me as soon as the cops got a location on where my mother was. I got there about five minutes after the police did. They wouldn’t let me see her… they had two officers restraining me, but I didn’t care. I was going to get into that basement and no one was going to stop me.”

I let out a choked sob as I managed to say, “God, Nash, why the fuck couldn’t they have stopped me?”

I couldn’t hold back the tears anymore. Nash pulled my head down so it was pressed against his throat. “You saw her?” he asked.

I nodded my head. “When they arrested him, he was silent long enough to make sure she wasn’t going to get out of that box alive. She didn’t have any food or water for seven days. There was no light and the top of the inside of that box…”

“Don’t, Gage,” Nash whispered in my ear. “Don’t look,” he murmured, because he knew I was back in that basement. “Stay with me.”

I closed my eyes in the hopes that I could unsee the scratch marks and bits of my mother’s broken-off fingernails embedded in the wood.

“Gage, come back to me,” Nash begged.

I clung to him as I fought my way back to the surface and struggled to take in clean air instead of the rancid smell of death.

“Tell me what you did to him.”

“His lawyer got a jury to buy that the guy was mentally ill. He was sent to a psychiatric hospital. He got out a little over a year ago after his doctors deemed him cured. He took his meds and said all the right things. Seven years… he spent seven years in a cell that was five times as big as the box he put her in. Seven years – one year for every day she spent alone in that box, waiting for me to come for her.”

“Don’t do that to yourself,” Nash said as he massaged the back of my neck with his fingers. “There was nothing you could have done.”

I knew he was right, but it didn’t silence my mother’s screams for help.

“After my mom was found, I decided to leave the Navy so I could move back home and take care of my dad. He was struggling a lot. It was during that time that Grace and I decided to have a baby together. On the one hand, we weren’t sure if it was too soon after losing my mother, but on the other, we needed that reaffirmation of life, you know?”

Nash nodded. I’d calmed enough that I was able to pull back so I could look at him as I spoke. I liked that he kept touching me, despite me being more in control of myself.

“Losing Grace so suddenly just turned my whole world upside down, but in a way, it helped my dad push past his grief. Our only focus became Charlie and I think that ended up saving both of us. But when we got word that the guy was getting out last year…”