Rush

Chapter 19

Alex's POV

"Alex, you gotta come look at this."

I looked up from the infant sleeping on my chest as Nick burst through the door.

"What is it? Have they found her?"

His face was grim.

"Not exactly but your father has sent a message. It's bad."

I quickly stood and quickly but gently laid Elijah down in his crib so that he could finish his nap uninterrupted and grabbed the baby monitor on my way out.

"What'd he say?"

Nick sighed deeply before he spoke. He looked almost as if it pained him to think about it.

"It's not what he said it's what he did."

That did nothing to either comfort me or answer my question to my satisfaction.

The scene that greeted me in the living room was grim, to say the least.

"What happened?"

The agent that I'd chewed out earlier walked forward with an envelope in his hand.

"Your father's sent a message, he has her."

I took the envelope from the agent, it was thicker than I'd thought it would be.

"So what, did he write a fucking dissertation or something?"

I pulled out what felt like a stack of photos and my eyebrows scrunched in confusion.

"Not exactly." The agent spoke.

I could feel it in my bones that I wasn't going to like what I saw once I flipped the stack over but needs must I guess.

My stomach rolled as my eyes took in the first photo. It was a close up of Anna's face. Her eye was swollen shut and her face was badly bruised and littered with little cuts, her lip split.

There was more of the same throughout the next few pictures but from wider angles. She was tied to a chair in what looked to be a warehouse from the limited bit of the surroundings that I could see. I flipped through two more pictures with the hope that I could better see the place she was being held in. But the final picture in the stack made me stop breathing and my hands shake. The position she was in was so familiar, making me sick to my stomach as I came to several realizations at once.

She was lying on the floor curled in on herself, it looked as if her c-section scar had come open in some places and the blood had seeped through her shirt, almost a callback to the photo I'd seen of her from when she was younger, covered in blood and heavily pregnant, curled in on herself.

I fought back nausea as I processed the fact that this could only mean one thing. My father had apparently gotten the help of her husband and I knew that that made the situation that much more dire. I was unsure if my father would actually kill her but I didn't believe that her husband would be so restrained in his actions toward her.

I turned to the agent.

"He's not working alone."

"I beg your pardon?"

I took a deep breath in an attempt to stamp down nausea.

"Her husband, ex-husband. He's working with my father."

The agent seemed reluctant to believe me.

"What would her ex-husband want with her?"

"He's been after her for nearly a year and before now he's been abusing her since she was a teenager. This picture."