Page 33 of Vow of Vengeance
"I am promising you now, Soren, that I will do everything I can to find her. But I need you to take care of yourself for once, okay? Right now, you're only chained to the bed. If you refuse to nourish yourself properly, I'll have your every limb strapped to that same bed with a feeding tube in your nose and an IV in your arm again. Dr. Kent is just waiting on the command."
No.
"Declan." I shake my head, tears burning my eyes at the thought of being force-fed and tied to the bed like I'm not perfectly capable of doing this on my own. "I'm fine. This isn't necessary, okay? I'll eat whatever you want me to."
"Prove it." He says, pressing a kiss to my forehead. He doesn't move before he speaks his next words. "Because if you don't, all it will take is one call."
"Okay," I nod hurriedly. "I will. I'll be good."
He breathes me in, still with his lips on my forehead, his fingers tangling against my scalp. "Good. Because Iwon'tlose you, Ren."
"You have me." I promise, nodding as I pull away to look at him in earnest. "I'm not going anywhere. I'll be good."
"I know." He smiles, nodding his agreement. "Now focus on getting better for me, little bird. I'll focus on finding Marissa for you."
I nod, because what other choice do I have?
Declan's right. I haven't taken care of myself the last year. I've pretended I was okay, kept up the appearance that I was putting in an effort to nourish myself mentally and physically.
All I am is a shell, left behind by the thing that used to occupy my body.
seventeen
Declan
Sorenisquietthefirst night when I crawl into bed with her. By the time I do, I'm exhausted, my body aching from hunching over the keyboard for hours, desperately trying to find anything that will give me an entry point, a nugget of information to try and track down Marissa Hanley. But the code I wrote does its job effectively, and despite hours of searching, I find nothing. No social media pages left up, no driver's license, not even so much as a listing in a digital yearbook.
I know I won't sleep when I lay next to her, but I need to be beside her, to hear her breathe, to know she's with me even if she hates me right now.
Misha brought us dinner and supervised Soren while she picked at hers— some sort of pasta. Mine is still on the kitchen counter, long past cold. Hypocritical of me, no doubt, to force Soren to eat when I couldn't take two minutes to step away from the computer to shovel spaghetti in my mouth. Misha assured me that she took a few bites and sipped some water, but I'm underwhelmed with her efforts. Of course, it's not her body that's ill.
Soren's mind is fractured by tragedy after tragedy. At some points, she seems to fight past what grips her and function like she's fine, but I don't think it undoes any of the pain and suffering at the root of her problem. And I can't begin to understand what's going on in her beautiful, shattered mind, so I bring in someone who can.
Dr. Kent's friend is a woman who looks like someone's grandma, except she's got a brusque, no-nonsense aura about her that makes me feel like she's going to yell at me every time she talks to me. It isn't often, considering that she seems to only be concerned with the person I am paying her to care about. It's fine with me, of course, especially given that she's a miracle worker. She gets Soren started on medication right away— she brought the pills with her and gave me the prescription to fill for more.
I was sure to ask her whether this would interfere with our efforts to conceive, and she assured me there was proven to be no risk to patients or their baby. She visits every day, without fail. I don't know what Soren talks to her about, but the doctor doesn't seem alarmed by the fact that I've kept my girlfriend chained to my bed for the last week, so I'm content to pay the exorbitant price she requests. In fact, I'd double it if she asked, because by the end of the first week working with her, Soren seems better.
I don't know how to explain it, but after a week of sharing my bed with a stranger despite my best efforts to pull out of her the woman I've fallen for, she begins to change. She doesn't eat everything I put on her plate, but she doesn't skip meals either. She begins to do more than just lay curled in a ball, wallowing. She throws herself into work, editing articles from our team, deciding the layout of each paper’s columns, fact checking the claims made by the journalists.
I think she suffered caffeine withdrawal by the end of the first day as my little captive, and it made her particularly vicious for a bit. The psychiatrist suggested that intimacy wasn't a good idea until Soren was better healed, and abstaining from having her has been a hell I'll gladly endure if it promises me an eternity of heaven later.
When I slink into the bed beside her on our sixth night, Soren turns to me of her own accord. "Have you gotten any closer to finding her?"
I don't want the answer to shatter the progress that she's made, so I simply nod. "We're getting closer."
The truth is that I've abandoned the computer work in favor of boots on the ground detective work. In the last week, I've become something of an amateur sleuth, learning more about Soren's best friend than I even care to know. I've met with her coworkers, had a lunch with her boss, visited her apartment again, checked the places Soren claimed she likes to frequent. I've sweet-talked the lady at her apartment complex into letting me view the footage of Marissa's building for the week prior to her disappearance, watched all of the delivery drivers dropping off her dinners for the week before that, and seen that she hasn't brought a single person back to her place.
When Chief Radiker called to tell me that when they tried to run her name through their database, nothing came back, I decided to level with him.
"We're working against a sophisticated operation." I told him over coffee. "This isn't a random abduction or a crime of opportunity. The fact that you can't find any official records on her is by design."
He frowned at me, wanting more details, so I gave him just enough.
"I know it's hard to look for a person without a digital footprint. It's meant to be. But you were in her apartment. You saw pictures of her. She's real."
When he asked me where Soren was, I didn't tell him she was chained to my bed against her will. Something tells me that no matter how much money Evergreen Industries has pumped into the city budget, he wouldn't look the other way on that crime. Instead, I told him Soren was indisposed, and he somehow knew better than to ask for more. We haven't had any contact since then, but I trust he's still doing his job.
It's the eighth night, when I've exhausted everything I can think to do, that I tell Soren it's time to consider the possibility we can't get her back.
