The Beginning of Us (143 page)

There was no time to rationalize with my quick decision. I was already halfway down the road, in a pair of pajama pants. Stosh’s car was a stick shift and it was hard for me to get used to it. The gears grinded as I switched from one to another.

The house was dark and it was quiet outside. The lights were all turned out, as well as all the other houses on the block. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary, but I wasn’t going to be able to rest until I knew they were both safe. That eerie feeling was overwhelming me more and more by the second.

Unfortunately, the house was locked and the key that had been hidden, had been moved. I checked under every rock, in the mailbox and even the electrical box on the side of the house with no result.

Maybe it was the worst thing I could have done, but I started beating on the back door. My parents may have wanted nothing to do with me, but I couldn’t abandon them.

I heard footsteps and someone unlocking the door, albeit the person that answered was not one of my parents.

Rafe stood at the door with a gun pointed at me. “Don’t make a scene, Willow.”

I immediately threw my hands in the air. “Rafe, please?”

He pointed behind him with the gun. “Get inside!” He closed the door and locked it behind him. I looked around quickly, but didn’t see or hear my parents. He turned around. “Where’s the boyfriend?”

“He’s not here!” I wished he was, but I’d left him sleeping.

“If you’re lying, it will be the last thing you ever do.” His threat wasn’t taken lightly. I said nothing as I backed away from him.

“I swear. I’m all alone. Now tell me where my sister is! Where’s Ivy and where are my parents?”

I heard someone walking down the stairs. “Well, I couldn’t have planned this any better. Did you come here to say goodbye, Willow?”

“What are you talking about? Are you leaving town? Did you come here for the money?”

She started laughing. “The hundred grand? I can’t survive on that.”

I was scared with the way she’d said that. “Ivy, what are you planning on doing?”

“Don’t be stupid, Will. I think you already know the answer to that.”

I shook my head and backed up against the wall as she got to the bottom of the steps. Her boyfriend kept his gun pointed right at me. “Please, Ivy. Please don’t do this. They’ll give you anything you want. Please don’t hurt them.”

She reached over and ran her hand through my hair. I pulled away, but didn’t make any sudden movements to alert Rafe. “Dear sister, if you only knew how happy I am that you’re here. I’d been trying to figure out how I was going to make this go off without a hitch. With you here, everything just got so much easier.”

“What are you talking about?”

She laughed at me. “You’ve already been arrested. The state thinks you’re a loose cannon. When they see your lifeless body holding the gun that killed our parents, there won’t be anyone to argue it. I’ve already practiced my part of it all. After a few weeks of grieving, I’ll meet with the attorney and collect their entire estate. The life insurance will take about a month to receive. The hundred grand check will hold me over until that comes.” She clapped her hands together and reached for Rafe. He walked over to her and kissed her like I wasn’t in the room. “Then we can run off and do anything we want, right, baby?”

“You’re sick!”

“Fuck you! Do you think I care what you think? Nobody has ever cared what I thought.”

“You’re wrong! I cared. I would have done anything for you.”

She pushed me, sending me falling to the floor. “I didn’t want your fucking sympathy. You will never understand, because you had everything I wanted. They were so proud of you. Their sweet Willow got the good grades. She made the right decisions. She fell for the good guy. I’M SICK OF IT! They worshipped you while ignoring me. I hate them!”

“That isn’t true, Ivy. They love you. We all did.”

She held up her hand. “Just stop, Willow. I’m done feeling like I will never be worthy. I’ve spent too much time planning this all out to back down now. I want to be happy and the only way that will happen is if they’re out of my life for good.”

“Murdering your family isn’t going to make you feel better.”

“Awe, do you think I care what you think of me or how you think I’ll feel? I don’t!”

“Where are they?” If I was going to die, I wanted them to know that I loved them. It didn’t matter if they thought I was the traitor in the family. Nothing mattered when it came to being able to say goodbye when in this extreme of a situation.

I was already crying, in fear of my fate. Stosh was never going to know I was gone until the morning. He’d never get to say goodbye to me, or share in the birth of our baby.

No, this drastic move had sealed my fate. I could feel it in my bones. I wasn’t getting out the house alive and neither were my parents.

She turned her head and let out this evil kind of laugh. “You want to say goodbye, don’t you?”

There was no love in my sister’s eyes. She lost all of her morality. It was replaced with shear hate and nothing I could say or do was going to change that. “Please.”

She pointed toward me and looked over at her boyfriend. “Take her ass upstairs with them. Make sure you watch her. She’s sneaky.”

He grabbed my arm and pulled me to stand up. “Let’s go!”

My sister was talking to someone as I was pulled up the steps. I couldn’t hear what she was saying, and I really didn’t care. I wanted to think that I was going to make it out alive and somehow save my parents, but it wasn’t going as planned. Rafe was a big, muscular guy, plus he had a gun pointed at me. Running would end my life sooner.

I saw my parents sitting on their bed. They were tied together and had duct tape over their mouths. I ran toward them, forgetting about the guy that was holding me. He didn’t try to pull me away as I freed myself from his grasp.

My parents couldn’t say anything, but I ran over and wrapped my arms around both of them. They leaned their heads on me and I knew that they had figured out what was going on. “I love you both! We’re going to be fine.” I lied.

Rafe got close. “Sit down and shut up!”

I backed myself further onto my parent’s bed. “Please, Rafe. Don’t be a part of this. You don’t have to do this. Ivy is sick. She needs help. You don’t want to kill …”

He slapped me right across the face with the back of his hand. “I said shut the fuck up!”

I pulled my knees up to my chest and cried on the bed, while my parents watched. They were just as afraid as I was and we needed to be. I saw Ivy walk into the room with the diary in her hand. She threw it right at me, hitting me on my ear. The pain was immediate. “How did you get this?”

Stosh was the last person to have the diary. Had she called him?

Oh my God, were they in this scheme together this whole time? Had this all been some master plan? Was he on her side this entire time?

I couldn’t help but fear that was the truth.

“Tell me how you got this?” She walked closer to the bed and pointed at the book.

“I found it!”

She slapped me again. “Liar!”

“You know where I got it!” I sat up and looked right at her. At that point I had no idea how the diary got into her hands. If I was going to die, I was going to fight.

She seemed shocked that I would get smart with her. “Who else has seen this?”

I started laughing and crossed my hands over my chest. “Enough people to make sure you’re put away for whatever happens here tonight.”

She grabbed the book and chucked it against the wall, screaming at the top of her lungs. With no regard for her losing control, she ripped the gun away from Rafe and put it against my temple. “You ruined my life!”

I closed my eyes and prepared myself for my fate. It would be a lie if I said I wasn’t petrified. There was so much that I needed to say and no time left to be able to do it.

Chapter 25

Open your eyes.

When you feel your life flashing before your eyes, a million thoughts begin to run through your head. I found myself wondering if I was going to feel the bullet as it plummeted through my skull. I thought about how they would find my body and what excuse my sister was going to use to blame everything on me.

Mostly, I wondered about Stosh. For a second I wondered if he was involved somehow, but then I thought about our baby, the one that would never get to be born. Stosh was never going to know him or her and his dreams of being a father would be gone again.

The gun was pushing into my skin and without regret, I screamed, “I’m pregnant!”

When the pressure of the gun disappeared, I opened my eyes and saw my sister staring at me. She had it pointed at my face. I held my hands in the air. “You’re lying!”

I shook my head. “I’m not! I swear!”

She stared at me like she was looking into my soul. I could see how broken she was inside. This wasn’t the little girl that I played with and shared my heart with as a child. My sister was broken. She’d lost her mind as a result of jealous rage. That little girl was gone forever.

She put down the gun and looked over at her boyfriend. “Go to the store and buy a test.”

“It’s the middle of the night!” He argued.

“I don’t give a shit! If this bitch is telling the truth, I need to know.”

The truth was that I’d rather die than give her my baby. Telling her my most precious news was only to buy me enough time to save my family. I was desperate and grasping at whatever I could.

“I’m not lying. I wasn’t going to keep the baby, at first, so I didn’t tell anyone.”

She tapped the gun on the top of her head and paced around the room. “Who is the father?”

“You know the answer to that, since you planned to get me pregnant so you could steal my baby. Did you really think Stosh would let you do that?”

“I don’t give a damn what Stosh was going to do. He was just part of the plan that you messed up for me. That’s what you do, though. You mess up everything and come out smelling like roses.”

I tried to stand up, but she pointed the weapon at me again. “Don’t even try it! Stay down.”

“You won’t hurt the baby. I know you won’t!” I was so afraid of her, but admitting that would only make her happy.

She was looking over at my parents and then back to me. “Take her to the car and wait for me there.”

Rafe grabbed me by my arm and started pulling me out of the room. “Wait! What about them? Ivy, please don’t hurt them. They love you.”

“Save it for someone who cares. They lost the chance to be my parents.”

I tried to pull my way out of Rafe’s hold, but it only sent me falling to the floor. He pulled my hair and got me standing back up as he pulled me down the stairs.

None of the screaming or crying was getting me any pity from my sister’s partner in crime.

We got to the bottom of the stairs when I heard one single gun shot. I screamed, loudly and collapsed to the ground. Neither of us knew what had taken place, so Rafe went running back up the stairs. While I watched him, I felt something touching my arm. I screamed again, but was stopped by someone’s hand. They picked me up and drug me out of the room. Once we were in the kitchen, the person turned me around. Stosh was standing there with his fingers over my mouth. He leaned in close to my ear. “Don’t make a sound.”

“Ivy has a gun. She just shot someone. My parents are upstairs!” I was freaking out and he knew it. He ripped the restraint and freed my hands, then brought them up to his mouth and kissed them.

“Stay here. Call the police and hide. No matter what you hear. I need you to promise me that you won’t come out.”

I shook my head. “I need to know.”

We heard someone coming down the stairs. “Promise me, Willow. Please!”

He ran away before I could say anything. I looked down with trembling hands at the phone he’d left with me. Two voices were on the lower level. I could hear Rafe’s accent and deep voice as he yelled at my sister. She was arguing back. I heard one thing clear. “Find her!”

I ducked down in the back of my parent’s pantry and made sure the door was closed. They were going to find me. I’d hid in there every single time we’d played hide and go seek. With only seconds to spare, I dialed the numbers.

I heard the operator answer and whispered the words “help me!”

When I knew she’d heard me, I whispered the address and sat the phone on the floor. The operator was still trying to talk to me when I heard the door to the pantry opening.

Ivy stood there looking at me with a wicked look on her face. “There you are!”

She reached in and grabbed my hand, pulling me out. “I’m not done with you yet.” She gritted her teeth.

“What did you do Ivy? What happened upstairs?”

“Shut your mouth or you’ll end up just like he did.”

I froze and she finally realized that my hands had been freed. She reached for me, but I backed away quickly, grabbing a bottle of wine and swinging it at her. The first time she ducked out of the way, but the second time I made a direct hit with the side of her jaw. The bottle didn’t break like I assumed it would. She grabbed her face and crouched down with overwhelming pain.

Rafe must have heard her crying. He ran into the kitchen to assess what was going on. I made a run for the front door, hoping to make it outside. Another gunshot caused me to freeze in place. I turned around slowly and saw her aiming it right at me. “Get your ass over here, right now!”

“Ivy, don’t!”

I saw him coming in out of the corner of my eye. Stosh took Ivy down, sending the gun to the floor. It spun around and landed under an antique table that my father had purchased in France. Rafe dove on top of Stosh and the two of them began to scuffle around, throwing punches. Ivy rushed for the gun, and so did I. We both knew that whoever got to it first was going to determine how all of this played out.

I reached my hand in beside hers, while we struggled to swing our free hands at each other. I managed to climb on top of her and get a couple punches in. She wrapped her legs around me and flung me onto the floor. I felt her fist hitting below my eye. The pain was immediate, but I kept fighting back. My life was at stake.