Deep Waters

Chapter Twenty-Three

I woke up to chaos.

Nemo the dog was whining beside of me, Kason and Holden were having an argumentative conversation about something that needed to be done. Marla and Aria were sitting together on the other couch, leaning into each other looking absolutely devastated, and my brother was sitting on the other side of me with his face down in his hands, looking to be deep in thought. I tried wiping the sleep out of my eyes and noticed that the power was back on. "What's going on?"

All eyes fell on me as they all realized I was awake. "Daniel called me," Kason said. "Someone broke into Miles' family's house last night."

My heart dropped and a thousand events played through my mind. "Is everyone okay?"

"Mr. Anderson got in the shoulder, but he'll recover. Dad thinks the intention was to murder them all, but luckily they scared the guy away."

"Oh my gosh...So Charles finally decided to make him pay for turning against him?" I asked, referring to when Miles stopped letting Charles blackmail him the year before.

"Yeah."

I growled in anger, threw the blanket off of me and put my head in my hands. "I'll see you soon," his voice rang in my head. "I'll always find you." He was already making big moves.

"What is Daniel going to do about it?" I asked my boyfriend.

"Put officers outside of their house," he answered.

I shook my head. "That isn't enough."

"It will be for now. They aren't even positive that it was Charles or the gang behind it. It could have been a coincidence by a random criminal."

I scoffed. "Oh please. We all know this was Charles and the gang," I snapped. "He will try to kill them again. Real soon. And then he will come for us."

Holden shrugged. "I'm sure we have more time. He waited a while the first time."

My head jerked in his direction. "He won't make the same mistake twice. He's smarter than that. You are underestimating him."

"Delilah, how about you go wash some cold water on your face and take a minute to breathe," Aria jumped in, seeming to notice my growing anger.

Inhaling deeply, I didn't even nod before standing up and heading to the bathroom. There was no point in arguing with her since I knew I was getting too heated too quickly.

I suddenly felt like I was on rock bottom but like the wrong side of rock bottom. The side that was emptier and just a void. This boulder on my chest seemed to grow ten times larger with each second. I gripped the edges of the porcelain sink and looked at my pale reflection. Charles was getting in my head. The purpose of the letter could have just been to completely get myself overthinking and it was working. "This is the last time," I told myself. "I'm not running again. This is it. This will be the end...I'm done with Charles ruining my life and the lives around me. I'm putting an end to it."

Another quick thought crossed my mind, leading me to stalk out of the room and back into the living room. "Kason." Everyone looked at me, but my gaze remained on my boyfriend. "I want you to teach me how to fight."

His deep-blue eyes held surprise for a second, but then he nodded once. "Okay," he said. "We will start tonight."

Breathing and nodding, I turned around and walked to my room, closed and locked the door behind me, and then moved to get the letter that I had hidden inside of a book. I pulled my phone out of my pocket just to see that I had missed calls and texts. One text from a number I didn't recognize said that it was Olivia. They were all from the day before when we didn't have a signal. I didn't hesitate to call her number.

"Hello?" her voice answered a few rings later.

"Are you alone right now?" I asked immediately.

"Uh, yeah, why?"

I couldn't imagine what was running through her head right now. I barely knew her. "I...have a proposition and want your help...but no one else can know about it," I told her somewhat quietly in case someone walked down the hall passed my room.

She was quiet for a moment. "What do you mean?"

I sighed, not even knowing where to start in order to explain myself. "How good are you at investigating undercover?" I questioned instead.

"Pretty great," she admitted.

"Will you help me with something then?"

I heard her exhale. "Of course. Delilah, is everything okay?" I noticed a little worry and hesitance in her voice.

I took a few breaths. "I need you to promise that you won't tell anyone about this Not Daniel, not Kason, not even Gavin," I told her clearly. "This has to stay between me and you."

"Yeah, okay, I promise."

"Okay," I started, sitting down on my bed and staring at the letter in my hand. "The day I graduated, the same day that Charles escaped prison, I received a letter from him."

There was a long pause. "What?"

"I haven't told anyone," I quickly added. "Mainly because there is no useful information in it about anything that would help us find him—at least as far as I know. He just explains why he wants to kill me and why he is doing all of this, but I'm hoping that maybe there is a slight chance that you could either figure our where it came from or something. One of my teachers handed it to me while I was outside of the school after the ceremony. You could start by hacking into the surveillance footage."

A long sigh of hers came through the speaker. "Yeah, I can do that, but Delilah, how long do you plan on keeping this a secret? Daniel would want to know about this. Jeez, Delilah, I mean everyone would."

I laid the piece of paper down on the blanket in front of me and rubbed the back of my neck. "I know, I know...I just want to make sure it's actually useful. If you can't track down how Charles got it to me then there's no use in telling anyone. I think it was only meant to get me in my head."

"Are you going to tell Daniel, if I am able to use this to track down Charles?" she asked next.

"I don't know yet...," I admitted honestly. "But wouldn't it be nice to find Charles before he finds me?" I asked her. "I could beat him at his own game."

"This isn't a game, though."

"To him it is."

"...Okay, then what do I do if I find something?" she asked me.

I stared back at the letter. "Get a hold of me. Then we can decide what to do from there."

She groaned. "I can't believe we are doing this behind their backs."

I shrugged and leaned back into my pillow. "It will be fine, just as long as this stays between us."

"Okay. I'll start right now."