Page 122 of Single Teddy
And to top it all off, I’d made a promise I wasn’t sure I could keep.
“Let’s go,” I told Slade and walked back to the car.
No.
I would keep it. Iwould beback. I wasn’t going to abandon him like Josie. I wasn’t going to die on him.
And I would make sure Wesley and the boys didn’t die on me either. No matter what.
THIRTY-TWO
WESLEY
Ididn’t know at what point I passed out and was blindfolded, but at some point, I came back to my senses and everything was dark. Dark and bone-chillingly quiet.
The soft rhythmic splash of waves on shore filled the silence, but whereas the sound was usually relaxing, soothing, it just made my heart beat faster and everything more ominous.
What had I gotten myself into? Why didn’t I listen to Teddy and his teammates? Did I really think I, a teacher, knew more about crime and security than a bunch of people who had dedicated their lives to protecting innocent people?
Agh.
Stupid, stupid, stupid Wesley.
I’d made a mess of things, and even worse, I’d made everything so much worse for the twins.
Shit.
The twins.
“Valentin? Niko?” I whispered.
Were they suffering the same fate as me, or had they been taken back to their father?
“Mr. Wesley?” I heard a tiny, broken voice, but I couldn’t tell which of the kids it was.
Shoot. I had hoped they wouldn’t drag the kids into…whatever this was.
“Boys? Are you okay? Where are you?” I asked and started twitching in an attempt to get the blindfold loose.
“I don’t know,” said the same voice.
“I can’t see anything,” said another.
At least they were both here. At least they hadn’t separated them, which was a shit consolation prize, but it was something.
“Hang on. Let me try something.” I groaned and tried to find some sort of grip, any kind of surface, but there was nothing around me. Only the floor.
So I flopped down to my side and rubbed my face along the floor until the blindfold came loose and hung around my neck.
I tried to sit back up, but with my hands tied behind me, it was hard, so I focused on the kids as much as I could with my shitty eyesight.
Everything was slightly blurred but I could tell the poor things were tied up, squatting next to each other with a dirty rag covering their eyes, similar to mine.
I crawled toward them, and by the time I reached them, I was aching all over. The pain and exhaustion would have to wait. I had to help them first.
I bit the dirty rags off both their faces and pulled them down so, at the very least, they could see too.
“Mr. Wesley!” Valentin and Niko exclaimed with heartbreaking relief as if the poor things thought we were free when in fact we were anything but.
