Page 46 of Belong With Me

I place both hands on Gia’s shoulders. “That’s not true, Gia. We’re stressed, and there’s a lot of tension right now.”

Gia says nothing, and despite how intensely we were arguing before Zia Stella walked in, I pull her into a hug.

She’s stiff in my arms.

“I’ll be back soon.”

And then I leave.

Maybe I shouldn’t be leaving her alone to stress with everything that’s going on, but both of us sitting around twiddling our thumbs playing thewhat ifgame isn’t going to solve anything. Plus, if we need to pack up and leave at a moment’s notice because we’re getting shipped off somewhere, I’d rather have as much money in my checking account as possible.

Fifteen

My manager is not thrilled to hear I’m not staying for my shift and is even less thrilled to break protocol and give me my paycheck a week early. She wasn’t going to, but I think she can see the desperation in my eyes even though I try to play it cool, because she begrudgingly relents only if I agree to work the shift until at least 8:00 p.m.

I send Gia a quick text to let her know I’ll be later than expected and suffer through the four-hour shift. At eight thirty, I finally get my checks and clock out.

Obviously, I can’t ask Isla for a ride home when she’s in the middle of her shift, so I use the last of my phone’s battery power before it completely dies to order an Uber and memorize the license plate. I could’ve walked, but for some reason I have an anxious feeling in my gut that something is wrong—at least,morewrong than everything already is—and that I should get back to Gia as soon as possible.

That feeling intensifies when we pull up to the house and see the wreckage.

I don’t even wait for the Uber driver to completely stop the car, hopping out and sprinting to the garage.

“Gia!”I yell as frantic panic shreds my insides. Dario’s Mercedes, which was parked on the driveway when I left, isinthe garage. “In” meaning it wasdriven through one ofthe garage doors. Smoke is in the air with debris everywhere, and it smells like dust and burnt metal. The garage door itself is folded around the car, pinned against the cement back of the garage by the ruined front end of the car, and I rush through the space where it used to be to check the car.

I can’t see the driver’s side since the garage panel is wrapped around it, and I frantically claw at it to move it. My head is spinning, and adrenaline races through me, sending my pulse into overdrive.

“Gia!” I yell again. Is she in there? Is she hurt? How long has she been here?

Panicked, I yank the warped steel with more power than necessary, and it releases, smashing me in the face with a sharp, sudden force that knocks the air out of me.

“Ow,fuck!” Intense pain radiates through my face, like I’ve been punched square in the nose, and for a moment I fear I’ve broken it. But I push the pain aside like I do the steel and peer through the new dust in the air for my sister.

“Gia?”

The driver’s seat is empty, and I force the car door open. It groans as it pushes against the garage door, but I duck in, kneeling on glass, and check every last inch of the car. It’s empty. The windshield is shattered, and the front of the car is crumbled and dented. The airbags are out and deflated, and I just now realize that the car isn’t running.

Gia’s not here.

I’m filled with a relief so intense it almost knocks me over. But if she’s not here, where is she? Is she okay? What if she had to be rushed to the hospital?

I leave the car exactly how it is and run to the front door, unlocking it with shaking fingers, and push it open.

The house is dark and filled with a deathly kind of stillness that has my defenses instantly rising.

Without kicking off my shoes, I dash up the stairs, calling her name even though a logical part of me knows it’s pointless. “Gia!Are you here?” Throwing open her bedroom door, I flip on the light switch, and my heart drops.

A tornado has hit the room, completely trashing it.

It almost looks like mine did when Brandon destroyed it, except less damaged. Drawers are open, clothes are all over the place, and there’s no petite teenage girl. It looks like someone came through and made a mad dash trying to find something valuable through all of Gia’s things, discarding the rest anywhere.

Has Brandon come back? No, something seems off, and the chaos is more organized than it would be if it were him.

I stalk through her room to her desk while praying that this doesn’t mean what I think it does. Her laptop and charger are gone, and so are most of the pictures that were pinned to the little corkboard above the desk.

Panicked, I whip open her closet door, frantically shoving clothes and books and shoes aside until I find what I’m looking for, or ratherdon’tfind what I’m looking for.

Her suitcase is gone.

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