Nothing except my rough breathing and rapid heartbeat echoes in the deadly silent room. Aside from the light that’s coming from my laptop, it’s pitch black, darkness all around me. It’s deadly, gut-wrenching as I wait for Dad to come to the same conclusion I did.
But Mom beats him to it.
A defeated cry slips from her lips, and her sobs follow. My eyes close, chest aching at the thought of Mom’s trembling body and the sound of her choked weeping.
“I’ll call you tomorrow,’’ Dad says, then hangs up before I can say anything else.
Mom is the strategist amongst our family. Her plans have never failed us.
My aunt, Jane, was a single mom to my little cousin, Luna. Luna would be around twenty years old right now. Jane married her husband, Josh, when Luna was six years old. They didn’t want to marry young, so they postponed it until Luna grew up a little and they became more stable.
Uncle Josh passed away in a car accident when Luna was eight. Jane vowed never to date again, or marry, out of respect for Josh. And it was true, until she met Nelson Adams.
He was wealthy, treated both Jane and Luna right, and quickly fell into the role of a fun stepfather. Mom begged Jane not to rush into a relationship with a famous politician because, well, they’re all scumbags.
Jane didn’t listen.
She saw Mom’s interference as a direct attack on her intelligence and parenthood, so she ended up cutting Mom off for a while.
Two months later, Jane was found dead in her house.
Unbeknownst to Aunt Jane, Mom filled her house with bugs, listening devices, and everything of the sort, wherever she possibly could. Adams wasn’t aware of it, either. He was a clueless fool.
Mom’s the one who heard Jane’s last breath on the recordings. She heard Aunt begging for her life, begging to at least spare Luna.
And the guilt is still eating her alive, even after a decade. Mom never got the chance to say goodbye to her sister, and it’s haunting her. She’s convinced that she could’ve helped more, that she should’ve done more.
Since the day Jane was killed, Luna has vanished into thin air.
Soon after, Adams left the States. He went overseas and laid low for years. Mom had hoped that once he returned, he’d come back with Luna.
That didn’t happen.
With the revelation of himhaving a place to keep the girls, it either means he’s trafficking them, or kidnapping them, or selling them. Or all of the above. And the senator himself is fucking involved in it, too.
It hurts to even think about it, but if it’s all true, and if they are involved in something so vile, I know where Luna ended up.
The thought of her being sold off, used, abused, and kept as a prisoner is enough to tick me off.
It almost makes me want to go and kill him, right then and there, tonight.
But I can’t.
Not until I’ve found Luna.
I can only hope that she’s still alive.
By noon the next morning, Blair is still asleep.
I couldn’t sleep a wink last night, given that I decided to put on a small duvet on the floor next to the bed where she slept. Her scent filled my senses and kept me awake all through the night. Someone needs to take care of her, and that someone will be me. Only me.
It’s almost too surreal. Almost as if she’s going to slip through my fingers, leave my sight at any given moment. The mere thought of that makes me physically ill, my stomach twisting and turning uncomfortably.
My butterfly can’t leave me. I won’t survive it.
Well, not that she can, anyway. The front door can only be opened with a key or a password, neither of which she has access to. The key is always with me, and she’ll have to physically take it off me if she wants to leave. Now,thatwould be impossible not to feel.
The passcode is her birthday, though I doubt she’d think of that and test it out.