Deceiving Lies

“Rachel, I’m not breaking up with you. I don’t want to call off the wedding, why are you saying all—”

“I heard you talking to your parents last night, Logan! Don’t lie to me.”

“I— Shit.” I groaned and sat back in my chair. “I don’t want to call off the wedding. I’m sorry you heard that conversation, but, Rachel, I was mad and confused and thought you were in love with that guy!”

“Trent. His name. Is. Trent.”

“I know what his name is, Rachel, please try to see it from my side. I reacted the wrong way, I wasn’t thinking about you, and I’m sorry about that. I lost my shit when I saw you kissing him and when you immediately left me for him, and then to find out later that he was the one to steal you from our damn house? None of it made sense to me, and it killed me to watch you not know what to say to Byson when he asked if you’d had a sexual relationship with him. I was hurt, and I was pissed, and I was so fucking jealous I couldn’t see straight. So last night I was just lashing out because I was too scared to find out what really happened between you two. I was wrong. I know that. I’m so damn sorry you heard that conversation, but that isn’t what I want, that isn’t how I feel; and I’m ready to listen to you now.”

I took in her closed-off posture and after fumbling for a moment, put the ring on the table near us, closest to her. Rachel stared at the ring for a long time before looking back at me. Those blue eyes of hers were so guarded I had no idea what she was thinking or feeling, and I hated it.

“This ring belongs to you, and the only place I want it is on your left hand . . . and hopefully someday if you’ll still have me, I want it accompanied by another ring. Like before, I won’t push you, but this is yours. If you decide to put it on again, Rachel, you better understand what I’m saying this time. I don’t want you taking that ring off.”

She didn’t move toward the ring, and she didn’t say anything. She just stayed in the same position, staring at me.

“You were still wearing your ring when we found you. So, tell me something,” I said softly, “while you were gone, were you hoping to escape, or to be found . . . and did you ever think about us and our future together?”

“Of course I did.” She sounded like I’d insulted her with my question. Thankfully, after turning away from me, she continued. “I never gave up hope until the day before you came for me. Trent said you . . . all of you . . . stopped looking for me. That you hadn’t been looking for me for a week. I figured you thought I was dead. That was the first time I ever felt like there was no hope. Every day before that I thought about you, thought about how long it probably was until we were supposed to get married. What you were telling people.” She paused and chewed on her bottom lip for a second before rushing out, “I wrote to you.”

“What do you mean?”

“Trent bought me a journal. I wrote to you the same way I write to my parents. I never stopped thinking about you, or us.” When she looked at me again, her eyes were glassy, and it was taking all my willpower to stay in my chair and not take her in my arms. “Did you?” she asked suddenly.

“Did I what?”

“Did you stop looking for me?”

I shifted forward again and brought my hands close to where her feet rested flat on the seat cushion. “Not the way you’re thinking. I was almost positive I knew where you were. Enough that Mason agreed to go in with me and attempt to rescue you if you were there. I had been taken off the case immediately because I was too close to it. So I did my own investigating. I looked all over the streets and used every resource I had until I got a lockdown on the building. By that time, the department had already figured out from the tests they did on the hair from your brushes, that at the very least, the hair they sent wasn’t yours. Just like the blood wasn’t even human. So they had to begin assuming all the ‘evidence’ was false, and they stopped responding to the men who took you when they called.

“Only problem is that it could have gone two ways: one, they would go crazy trying to get the department’s attention and mess up enough that the department could find them. Or two, they would get so frustrated with the department that they would actually do something to you. From what Mason said, the department was banking on the fact that since they gave you a month before they said they would kill you, and they stopped responding to them right before a month was up, it would make them crazy wondering why the department stopped looking for you all of a sudden in the last hour. The department assumed I still knew what was happening and would find out soon that they had stopped looking for you and would flip, so they began watching me like a hawk. I couldn’t do anything right away, but every day that passed was killing me. And then I found out about the building you were in. So Mason and I finally started the process of figuring out how to get you back. But we needed to be careful with our jobs, losing them would have been the least of our worries for a while if we would have just rushed in. That took another few days.”

“Are you going to lose your job?”

“No. Because, technically, we could say we were finishing up an old job. And we did find you. We might get a few days’ suspension, but nothing serious.” Keeping my eyes on her face, I slowly moved my hands up her feet to her ankles, and back down. Her body stilled, but she didn’t move away from me again, so I continued the path. “I don’t know what they told you while you were there, but did Byson explain why you were taken?”

“Not really. He didn’t say much that made sense. He asked if I was ever tortured and asked if there were any other girls there, that the department had been sent evidence of me being tortured. As for where I was kept, a few of the guys at the house let it slip one of the last nights that some guy named Romero would want Trent ‘out’ because he’d turned on the rest of the guys. I ended up guessing that Trent was in a gang, and after trying to find out who Romero was, I more or less guessed that he was in prison and was calling the shots. But I still don’t know who Romero is or why I was taken.”

“It was my fault you were taken, Rachel.”

A brief smile crossed her face and her eyes darted over to mine for a second. “Well, you are the one that works in the gang unit. I kind of figured that too, but that wasn’t until the same moment when I knew for sure that you would find me . . . only to find out less than a minute later that you had already stopped looking for me.”

“You remember the last gang Mason and I infiltrated?”

She nodded and thought for a second. “Juarez.”

“Right, and he’d put that hit on us as insurance because he thought we were cops, which is why we had to go undercover in Texas. Juarez and his boys from the meth house are still in prison, as are the two men that were hired to take Mase and me out. Apparently Romero Juarez has two houses for his gang. Mase and I weren’t in with him long enough to be trusted to even know about the other house, which is made up of the men you were with.”

Rachel looked shocked. I believed her when she said she hadn’t known why she was taken, but I still didn’t understand why this Trent guy never told her why he was keeping her if he was supposed to be helping her.

“They wanted their brothers out and, more importantly, the head of their ‘family.’ They were using you to do that, and to get back at me and Mason. From what you said yesterday, you didn’t see the destruction in our bedroom from when they took you. But on one of the walls in red spray paint were the words ‘Did you think we would forget?’ and the gang’s symbol. As soon as I saw that I knew why you were taken. I just didn’t know who had you, and how to get you back. They didn’t want money, just the members out of jail. Which is obviously something the department couldn’t do and why it took so long to get you. We just had to hope we found you before they—well, before they did what they threatened to.”