Page 152 of Unexpected

“Dude, I’ve been looking fucking everywhere for you, what are you—” Josh began to ask when he busted into the bathroom, but when he glanced over my shoulder, his words cut off.

“Fuck!” he roared, and it echoed off the walls. He paced to the door and back, fists clenching and unclenching as I stood there frozen. “Look, I had the manager guy pull the security tapes. They went through the back of the place in the alley.”

“Have you gone back there?” I asked, replacing Hazel’s phone in her purse and taking it with me as we hustled into the dark hallway. I slammed into the emergency exit door and stumbled into the alley. I didn’t know what I expected, but I was disappointed that it wasn’t immediately apparent where they went or what the fuck was going on.

“Wait, the camera’s here,” Josh pointed to it over his left shoulder and just above the restaurant’s dumpster was a camera pointing to where we stood. “We’re standing where the car was, but Valerie walked to the dumpster before she got in the car.”

Josh retraced Valerie’s steps, maneuvering around trash at the front of the dumpster until he kneeled to the side of it. While he looked around, I did the only thing I could think of and tried to call the number Valerie had been texting me from. It didn’t even ring, just gave the normal message stating the number had been disconnected. That would have been too easy anyway.

When Josh popped back up, he was holding a manila envelope. He came back and handed the envelope to me.

“This appears to be for you.” Sure enough, written on the front in Valerie’s loopy, large handwriting was “Bear.”

The envelope was heavy in my hands. If I could have done anything besides open it, I would have. Valerie had already proven how sick she was, but I knew it was only going to get worse.

My stomach twisted, and I had to choke back bile as I pulled a stack of photos from the envelope. The first one was enough to tell me what to expect from the rest. Hazel and I were standing on her front porch. She was halfway hidden by the partially open front door and her eyes were not on me but on her surroundings. My hand was reaching for her, and I knew the moment it was taken. When I had shown up, terrified Michael was going to hurt her again. The vulnerability in her sad eyes tore me apart.

Each photo was even more private than the previous. The last one was a photo from just outside of Hazel’s bedroom at her apartment. It appeared to have been taken from just across the street and was level with her second-floor unit. All you could see of me were my legs and feet as Hazel straddled me on top of her bed. She was in the throes of pleasure, her hands twisted in her long, brown hair and her head thrown back. The contours of her back cast careful shadows across her ivory skin. It would have been a beautiful picture had it not been taken under those circumstances. And to only make matters worse, Valerie had drawn over Hazel’s head a halo and, on her back, wings—angel’s wings. Written in her signature handwriting on the bottom of the photo was, “Maybe your Angel deserves her wings.”

I flung the pictures at the emergency exit door and yelled at the sky. Hazel was the only thing that mattered anymore. The rest of the world could go fuck itself because I was about to burn it all down to bring her home safe. Fuck it, she was my home.

The intention of Valerie’s words was obvious—Hazel would have to die to get her wings. But I couldn’t live in a world where Hazel didn’t exist.

“Did you get a hold of Blakely?” I asked Josh, having completely forgotten about what he was doing before he busted down the bathroom door.

He stooped back down, retrieved the photos, and reviewed them as he shook his head and ignored my outburst. “Her phone’s off, of course. I called Amanda, though, and she said Blakely told her that she was driving to Arkansas to see her parents. Then I called Reed, and he said the same thing.”

“Keep trying to call her. We need to know how the fuck she got involved and what Valerie told her.”

“I will, man, but do you really think it’s going to get us anywhere? The way the hostess made it seem, Blake was torn up. Don’t you think it makes more sense that Valerie only used Blakely to maybe get Hazel here under false pretenses?”

“I don’t know what makes fucking sense anymore!” I bellowed and whirled on Josh. He stood from his position near the ground, still unfazed. Other than Valerie, it was Josh who had put up with my anger and outbursts for years; he knew when to fight and when to let me be.

“We’re going to find her,” he said.

“How?” I asked, unconvinced he had any type of plan that would mean finding Hazel at that moment.

“I don’t fucking know, but what you’re doing right now isn’t going to help.”

I took a deep breath and tried to slow my rapidly beating heart. He was right and pacing back and forth down the alley, gripping Hazel’s purse in my hand, and yelling at him was not going to get me to her quicker.

Rationalizing Valerie’s motives and predicting her behavior was almost completely impossible. Valerie was not thinking like a normal person; a person does not kidnap their ex-husband’s new girlfriend because they’re jealous. But either way, whether she was rational or not, I knew Valerie well. After years of being together, I had begun to follow her reasoning as well as explain her behaviors and her thought processes. It was when that had begun to happen that I took a step back and reevaluated our relationship. Nonetheless, I could follow her train of thought.

I just had to do it again. Think like Valerie.

“The most important thing to Valerie is me. She said all she wants is me.” Valerie may not have been a good person, but she didn’t lie. She always told the truth, or at least her version of it. So, we could take her words at face value. We had at least that to fall back on.

Josh nodded, pressing his phone to his ear, likely trying to get ahold of Blakely again.

“Right, so the point of taking Hazel…?” Josh said with a frustrated sigh.

“Getting my attention,” I stated.

“And she clearly wanted you to see her in the video and find the photos—she was perfectly in the frame the entire time,” he added.

The possibilities of what Valerie was doing to Hazel at the very moment we were standing there gnawed at me relentlessly. Valerie knew that Hazel mattered to me, and she was sure to make her suffer. My eye began twitching at the thought of Hazel tied up in the trunk of a car and transported to some unknown location where Valerie would likely do her worst. My mouth was dry, and I couldn’t swallow past my fear.

“So, it’s most likely Valerie took her somewhere you would know, right? Otherwise, she’s going to bide her time and appear just when she wants to. She hasn’t tried to contact you…”

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