Chapter Thirty-Nine: Emma and Will

A/N: Didn't edit or proofread this so bear with me if there are any mistakes! I'm late enough updating as is, so I figured I'd just post it. Anyways, hope you guys enjoy!

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Kidnap My Heart

Chapter 39: Emma and Will

Emma

We gave Will and Eric a ten minute head start. I hoped it would be enough. I figured it would be; I was guessing they were both pretty fast. I mean, they were both in good shape—very good shape— and Will was a soccer player who was used to running, so I didn’t see why they wouldn’t be able to cover a good amount of distance in those ten minutes.

I had Taylor stand guard by the door as I finally used the lame little Nokia phone to call the police. The door to Will’s room didn’t lock, and I didn’t feel comfortable calling when Charles could barge in at any moment without any warning. My hands were actually shaking as my fingers hit the three numbers, 9-1-1. Without Will and Eric around to protect us, Taylor and I had to move fast. We couldn’t be anywhere near Charles when the police showed up. I didn’t know if he was armed, but I did know he was dangerous. He seemed dangerous, at least.

The operator answered after two rings. “911, what is your emergency?”

“My name is Emma van der Bilt,” I said in a low voice, worriedly glancing at the door. No movement and no sound. Safe—for the time being. “I need help. My best friend and I are being held hostage by a man named Charles.”

There was a muffled sound and then the dispatcher spoke again. “Okay, Emma, what’s your address?”

I shook my head. I wasn’t sure why; the dispatcher couldn’t see me. “I don’t know. I don’t know where we are. I think we’re thirty minutes away from the city.”

There was a brief pause. “It looks like you’re calling from 1100 Alpine Lane. We’re sending the police out.”

Dang. Their tracking mechanisms were legit.

“Okay,” I said. “Hurry.” I swiftly hung up the phone and shoved it in my pocket. The thought of Will’s fingerprints being traced made me whip the phone back out and rub it on my shirt in frenzied motions. I’d already wiped it off, and my fingerprints were probably the only fingerprints on the phone, but I just needed to make sure.

Taylor poked her head through the door, nearly giving me a heart attack. “Are you done? He hasn’t come upstairs. I haven’t heard anything.”

“I’m done,” I said. After checking the time—12:13 PM—I put the phone back in my pocket. “Come on. We need to find you a hiding spot.”

“What about you?” She furrowed her eyebrows and walked inside, gently closing the door behind her.

“I’ll find one, too,” I said, waving her worries away with a flick of my wrist. I was more preoccupied with finding her a place to hide. If it came down to it, I would be able to distract Charles long enough for the police to arrive. I had a better shot at it than Taylor did, at least, and besides, Taylor wasn’t the best at finding hiding spots.

She didn’t seem convinced, but she had the sense to avoid an argument. She nodded and followed me to Will’s closet. I opened the door and pointed up at the shelf on top. It had a huge suitcase laying on it, and it looked sturdy enough. There weren’t many other alternatives. If we’d been at the old house, we both would’ve been able to hide in the walls, but that wasn’t an option here.

I dragged the suitcase down as quietly as I could and set it aside before I gave Taylor a boost up. She clumsily pushed herself forward once she’d reached the shelf and crawled towards the back of the shelf.

“Are you good?” I asked. It was kind of dark in the back; the only thing I could really see was her luminous blond hair.

“Yeah,” she said. I nodded and hoisted the suitcase back up, tilting it on its side so it shielded Taylor from view. “Whatever you do, don’t come down unless I tell you to or a cop tells you it’s safe to come down,” I said, standing on my tiptoes to talk to Taylor more easily. “I don’t care what happens. You have to stay up there, alright? Alright. I’m going to go hide now.”

Her muffled reply was the last thing I heard before I walked away, my eyes searching the room for another hiding spot. I’d given Taylor the best one—the only one, really. There weren’t any other hiding spots that would conceal me for half an hour if Charles smelled something fishy. I looked at the time on the phone again—12:16 PM. Only three minutes had passed.

After a few seconds of thought, I settled on hiding in the laundry hamper. It was empty, so I had to shove some of Will’s clean clothes in there to act as a shield. After that, it became a waiting game. The minutes dragged on, and I nervously checked the time every minute.

12:41.

The police would arrive any minute. We just needed Charles to stay downstairs for a few more minutes, and then we would be home free. Except what I needed to happen rarely coincided with what actually happened, and Charles chose that moment to walk upstairs to check on us and see why the house was so abnormally quiet. Will and I didn’t fill the house with loud arguments anymore, but I had a loud laugh and Will constantly made me laugh, so it was easy to tell when we were together. Charles had finally caught on.

“Will?” he called out. “Eric?”

Doors opened and shut as Charles searched the house. His footsteps bounced off of the wooden floorboards, coming closer and closer with each stomp. The door to Will’s bedroom burst open, and my entire body stiffened. I was frozen. At least he wouldn’t be able to see me move underneath the clothes.

“Van der Bilt,” he snapped. “Where are you? Where are they?”

Gone. Gone, and they weren’t coming back. Hopefully they were far, far away.

His footsteps came closer, and I held my breath. I could practically feel him standing over the hamper, but that might have just been my paranoia settling in. I let out a shaky breath when the footsteps retreated, but my anxiety returned when I heard Charles shuffling through the closet. The hangers smacked into each other as he shoved them aside. Please don’t look on the top shelf. Please, please, please…

“Fuck,” Charles cursed. A loud crash followed his exclamation. “I can’t believe this. Fuck.” A kick to the hamper jostled me, and some of the pieces of clothing that were covering me fell aside. There was a brief pause, and then the words that made me feel sick to my stomach. “Well, well, well. What do we have here?”

A shudder went through me, and goosebumps formed on my arms. Oh, God. The police weren’t here yet. This wasn’t supposed to happen. Things were supposed to go smoothly. What the hell was I supposed to do? What if he was armed?

“Get up. Now.”

At least he hadn’t found Taylor. The police would arrive soon; all I had to do was keep Charles distracted for a few more minutes and then lure him downstairs.

Sucking in a deep breath, I sat up and stepped out of the hamper, maintaining a poker-face the entire time. Charles was sporting a curled lip and a menacing glare. I wanted to run and get the hell out of there, but that wasn’t an option for me.

“Where are they?” he asked.

I didn’t answer. I just crossed my arms over my chest.

He visibly clenched his teeth together. They were white and straight, just like Will’s. “Where are they, van der Bilt? Where is the other girl?”

“Her name is Taylor,” I said forcefully, “and I don’t know where they are. All I know is that they’re gone. They’re long-gone.”

His gaze lowered, reaching the phone in my pocket. “What did you do?” When I didn’t say anything, he continued. “You called the police?”

I still refused to talk, but he wasn’t having it. He took a step forward and grabbed me by the arm, tightening his grip and forcing me closer. “Did you or did you not call the fucking police?”

“I see where Will and Eric get their vocabulary from,” I said, hoping the mention of his own blood would make him rational.

It didn’t. Maybe it would have if the police hadn’t pulled into the driveway. There was no way of knowing. The only thing I did know was that the sound of the police’s arrival made Charles’s grip on my arm tighten, and it made me more resolved to get him to let me go.

I tried wriggling out of his grip, but he wasn’t budging. “Let me go,” I hissed, struggling to get free. He just gritted his teeth in return.

I twisted and turned, forcing his arm into an unnatural angle. I didn’t hear a crack, so I knew I hadn’t broken any of the bones in his arm, but his guttural cry made it clear it hadn’t felt pleasant. He loosened his grip on me, and I managed to slide away from him, stumbling backwards. I heard car doors open in the back of my mind.

I booked it towards the door, but Charles was quick for his age—early fifties, I was guessing—and managed to stop me before I could even open the door. He wrenched me away from the door by throwing me on the ground.

I rubbed my knee with a grimace. That was going to bruise later. I forced myself up and roundhouse-kicked him in the only place I could think of that would inflict enough damage to get past him—his groin. I thought he was going to fall to the ground in pain, but he only bent his knees and held his groin with a grimace. Movies lied. He was supposed to start crying and fall. Damn it.

When I tried to sneak past him, he straightened and lashed out at me, hitting me somewhere in the face. I was too pumped up on adrenaline to feel the exact location.

He pushed me away, causing my head to slam against the wall. I cried out, and my vision was so blurry that I didn’t see Taylor until she was jumping on Charles’s back with a shrill battle cry. Something told me she’d been watching too many action flicks with Eric. What had he done to my best friend? I wasn’t sure, but I was starting to think it was great.

My vision cleared, and after giving him another kick to the groin, I ran towards the door and threw it open, screaming, “Help!” at the top of my lungs.

Everything else happened so quickly, I wasn’t sure it happened at all. A few police officers burst through the door, their weapons up and ready.

“Hands where I can see them,” one of them yelled, and Charles slowly lifted his hands up. Taylor let go of Charles’s face and neck and slunk downwards, her feet hitting the ground with a loud thud.

My head was starting to spin by the time Charles was approached and promptly handcuffed. I was surprised he’d gone down without a fight, but I guess even he knew when he was in over his head. His odds weren’t good, even if he’d been armed himself. He never stood a chance.

“Where’s your partner?” one of them asked. I recognized him as one of the officers who had questioned me when I went home—Officer Steve. The officer who had been with him that day was nowhere in sight.

Wait. Wait.

Shit.

I’d told Steve there were two kidnappers. Not one. Two.

What did I say? What else did I tell him?

My dizzy, foggy mind struggled to locate the adjectives I’d used to describe my kidnappers. Okay, tall, average, old. No, one tall, the other average. Charles was tall, as were Will and Eric. They wouldn’t look for another tall guy. They’d look for an average guy. They were expecting two old, average looking guys, as well, and while Charles qualified, Will and Eric did not. Will and Eric were young with hard, lean bodies. They wouldn’t think to approach them. They couldn’t.

After a moment of brief hesitation, Charles shook his head. “I haven’t had a partner for a long time. He backed out when this one ran away and left the country.”

It was like the metaphorical weight on my shoulder was being lifted. I hadn’t even considered the possibility that Charles might drag his sons down with him, but it turned out I didn’t have to. Charles had—almost—mindlessly covered for them and taken all of the blame. Even the shittiest of people had at least one redeeming quality. This—his surfacing paternal instinct—was his.

Charles’s words were the last thing I heard before I finally blacked out.

***

Will

Eric and I didn’t stop running until we made it back to civilization. Well, we stopped once, and that was to go back and retrieve the license plates on my car so it couldn’t be tracked back to me. Eric was the one who remembered, not me.

We had to take some sketchy backwoods roads to get back to the city, but we got there in the end. Using the main road would have been too risky. I mean, if you were a cop and you saw two guys running away from the house you were heading towards, wouldn’t you stop and see what the fuck they were up to? Exactly.

Once we made it to the city, we walked among the rest of the commuters on the streets and headed towards our apartment in the “ghetto” part of town, as Emma would say. She obviously hadn’t seen the real ghetto part of town.

We didn’t speak the entire way there. Even when we made it to our apartment and sat down on the worn leather couch, we didn’t say anything. Eventually, Eric broke the silence and asked the question that was taking over both of our thoughts. “Do you think they’re okay?”

I didn’t answer immediately. “Yeah. Hell, Rage hid in the walls for a week, for Christ’s sake. I doubt he found them.”

“What if he did?” My brother, the pessimist.

“Rage is a firecracker. I bet she gave him hell if he found her. They’re okay.” I said it confidently, but I wouldn’t be convinced until I found out what happened over there.

“Yeah,” Eric said, nodding slowly. “Yeah, I bet you’re right. Maybe there’s something on the news.”

“Maybe,” I said.

There wasn’t anything at first. After who-knows how long, there was a feature on Emma and Taylor’s rescue. My heart was pounding so loudly in my ears that I missed some of the details, but I caught all of the important things: Emma and Taylor were rescued, Charles Knight was taken into custody, and Emma was currently at the hospital, although she hadn’t suffered any major injuries and was “fine.”

I bolted up as soon as they went to commercial, heading straight towards the door. I had my car keys but no car; hell, I’d walk if I had to.

“Where do you think you’re going?” Eric asked, running after me.

“Making sure Rage is okay,” I said as if it were the most obvious thing in the world—because it was. She was in the hospital. What else was I supposed to do? Sit there and suck my thumb?

“Are you crazy? You can’t just show up at the hospital. Do you know how tight security is going to be right now? Don’t be stupid, Will.”

“I can’t just sit here and do nothing. I left her behind to save my own skin, and she got hurt because of that. I have to make sure she’s okay.”

“They just said she was,” Eric insisted, pointing at our television. “Besides, weren’t you mad at her an hour ago? What happened to that?”

I shook my head. “It doesn’t matter how pissed off I am. If I hear my girl’s in the fucking hospital, I’m gonna go see her and make sure she’s really okay.”

“You can’t. If anything, it’s just a precaution. They do it with all recovered kidnapping victims. Just wait until things calm down.”

“Don’t you wanna make sure Taylor is okay?” I snapped. What was wrong with him? I didn’t care if it was a suicide mission. I just needed to see Rage.

“Of course I do. I just have enough common sense to realize there’s nothing I can do right now. Going over there would just be counteractive. Sit down, Will.”

I balled my hand into a fist but nodded and stiffly sat back down on the couch.

I didn’t sleep at all that night.

***

I woke up to a text from an unknown number. The minute I saw it, I knew exactly who it was from. All I had to do was read the first word. The multiple emoticons—particularly party favor and confetti emoticons—made it obvious.

Rage here. I’m okay. Diagnosis is a mild concussion. I’ve been sentenced to bed rest and a Grey’s Anatomy rerun. Security is intense and will be for a couple weeks until things calm down so… calm your impulses and have a great day. (Taylor gave me your number btw. I’m still not sure how she has it.)

Happy birthday, Squilly! Don’t forget to open your present. I love you. (:

I didn’t even realize my mouth was turned up at the corners the entire time until I finished reading the message. Who was I kidding? I couldn’t stay mad at this girl. I was whipped. And now that I knew she was okay—and perfectly content watching her favorite TV show—I could breathe easy again. We’d deal with everything else later. She was alright, and that was all that really mattered.

I sent back a quick reply, my eyes on the present I’d set on the table near the door. I’ll open it. I love you too Rage.

I pushed myself out of bed and headed towards the table, grabbing the small box. I was tempted to shake it to try to guess what it was, but if it was breakable, I didn’t want to ruin it.

I took off the lid to the box and picked out the contents: a deck of cards. I furrowed my eyebrows in confusion, and then I read the words on the front. 52 Things I Love About You.

“Hey, you’re up,” Eric said, leaning against the doorway. He looked down at the cards in my hands. “Opening Emma’s present, huh?”

I just nodded.

“Good. I would’ve forced you to open it if you refused. I saw her working on it every time you were in the shower. I even caught her working on it in the middle of the night while you were asleep once. She worked hard on it.”

“I was always going to open it. The curiosity would’ve killed me.”

“I’ll give you some time alone, then,” Eric said with a nod. “Happy birthday, man. I’ll give you your present later, but I think she has me beat.”

He gave me what Emma liked to call a “bro-hug” and then left the room.

I walked back to my bed and sat down on the edge, a half-smile already fighting its way onto my mouth. Here we go. Moment of truth.

1. I love the way your smile lights up your entire face.

2. I love the way you kiss—as long as you’re only kissing me, of course.

3. I love how you can always make me laugh.

4. I love the sound of your voice.

5. I love how hilariously bad you are at poetry.

6. I love how comfortable you make me feel.

7. I love how you can make me forget what I was just about to say.

8. I love your electric blue eyes.

9. I love that you can cook better than I can. And baking? Let’s not even go there.

10. I love your laugh, even your arrogant one.

11. I love your body—please keep playing soccer.

12. I love the way you say “Damn it” every time something goes wrong. (Which is often.)

13. I love the talks we have at night—especially the ones you start.

14. I love that you’re the kind of person who would name his man bits ‘Vlad the Impaler.’

15. I love it when you hold me in your arms.

16. Hell, I even love the cuddle-raping. (Don’t quote me on that.)

17. I love how you know what I’m feeling and thinking before I do.

18. I love how you watch out for me.

19. I love the way your voice sounds when you’re sleepy.

20. I love how one single touch from you leaves me breathless.

21. I love how you sing in the shower, even though you can’t sing.

22. I love how you sing along even when you don’t know the words.

23. I love how you go along with my pranks and give me a taste of my own medicine.

24. I love that I can talk about anything with you without having to worry about being judged. (Well, maybe a little, but I judge you too so it’s okay.)

25. I love that you ignore my snoring to spend your nights with me.

26. I love the way your body feels against mine.

27. I love that horror movies scare you more than they scare me.

28. I love how you can be downright sexy and cute as hell at the same time.

29. I love how you refuse to stop playing rock, paper scissors until you win and still claim it counts. (It doesn’t.)

30. I love how you warm me up when I’m cold.

31. I love the way you smell. (I don’t think your cologne smells cheap. I just said that to bother you.)

32. I love how you tell me I’m beautiful even when I look like I just gave birth.

33. I love the way you offered to protect me from those “ghosts.”

34. I love the way you try to be chivalrous, even when I don’t make it easy for you.

35. I love how you hug me so tight, I feel like you never want to let me go.

36. I love how you don’t realize whipping off your towel in front of people is socially unacceptable.

37. I love how you kiss my forehead.

38. I love the way you call me ‘Rage.’

39. I love the way you play with my hair.

40. I love the way you stare at me when you think I’m not paying attention.

41. I love how you pull me into your lap, even when there’s an open seat in the room.

42. I love the romantic side of you—the one you’ve only let me see.

43. I love how you opened up to me and let me in.

44. I love the way you look at me, like I’m the only girl in the world and all that you see.

45. I love how you held my hand in public when I looked like a hippie dude.

46. I love the way you treat me, even though I don’t deserve it.

47. I love that you can imagine us growing old and wrinkly together.

48. I love that you stood up to your dad for me.

49. I love how you said “I love you” when you thought I was asleep.

50. I love how you’ve changed the way I look at the world.

51. I love that you made me fall in love with you without even realizing it.

52. I love all of you.

The last card was a printed picture of us. It was one of the pictures from our photo strips—the last one, the one where I kissed her. Somehow, she’d made a copy and taped it to the card. It was our first kiss, technically.

Underneath the picture were the words: Happy birthday, Will!

Despite everything that had happened, I was having a happy birthday. She’d made it a good one. Maybe I didn’t know exactly where we stood, but I did know that we loved each other, and that was enough for people in cheesy movies. Why couldn’t it be enough for us?

I mean, Rose ditched her stuffy family for Jack in Titanic—Rage really needed to stop making me watch her girly movies—and he was enough for her. Maybe things would end the same way for us.

Oh, wait, Jack died at the end of that movie, and Emma and I had already agreed to avoid cruise liners and icebergs.

Never mind.