Break Away

chapter 11

I heard people talking outside of the car, "is she still asleep?"

"Yeah, I'm pretty sure she is. I'll check in a minute." I heard Ryan say.

The girl, whose voice was super familiar, spoke again "I'm sorry. I know this isn't what you wanted. But it's going to have to do for now."

I heard Ryan sigh, "Why did I ever agree to this?"

"You didn't, remember? You only agreed to do the first job, which was the package. Ryan, you didn't know."

I heard them walk closer towards the car and he unlocked the trunk. It didn't get much brighter, we were in a parking garage and as I looked up towards Ryan. I almost screamed when I saw who was next to him. Blonde hair, blue eyes and tall: it was Lindsey. I thought she was dead?

I wrinkled my eyebrows in confusion and tried to talk but realized I still had the duck tape over my mouth.

"If I take this off, you can't scream, please. I'll explain as much as I can to you soon." She slowly ripped the tape off, I cringed in pain.

"Am I going insane?" My voice cracked as I talked.

She smiled a sad smile and pulled the duck tape off my hands, "No. But I think after I tell you everything you will want to be insane instead."

I didn't say anything back to her and then I suddenly realized that Ryan had disappeared. I got up out of the trunk and looked around the empty parking garage for a minute, but couldn't find him.

Lindsey starting talking, "Are you looking for Ryan? He will be back any second. We had to get another car."

I nodded and stood there for what seemed like hours but was really only a few minutes. He pulled in the parking garage with a black Honda with tinted windows. He pulled up right next to us and Lindsey started to pull stuff out of the first car and put it in the Honda.

Ryan motioned for me to get in the car and I opened the door for the back and heard him say, "Raine, no you sit up front."

I walked back around towards the front and opened the door, sliding into the seat, "I'm going to need you to tell me what is going on. And now, Ryan."

"Sadly, that I do not know. I don't know what's going on right now." He said smoothly, grabbing his sunglasses out of the cup holder and putting them on.

"You're lying, I'm not that stupid. You can't just do something like that to me and not tell me what's going on. Ryan, I trusted you," I said, getting annoyed.

He twisted at his dark hair with his fingers like he was nervous. I jumped at the car door opening, but then I realized it was just the girl I thought was dead, Lindsey.

"So, are you going to tell her Ryan?" Lindsey asked as he pulled out of the parking garage into the cloudy weather of wherever we were at the moment.

Ryan hesitated, "I don't know."

"Ryan, you might as well tell her. We decided to go with another plan, so it won't hurt her to know what almost happened."

He sighed, "Raine remember when I first met you? The way I followed you home with your purse because you had supposedly dropped it on the way to your car?"

I almost smiled at the memory of the first time I had met him. He walked to my apartment door soaking wet and handed me my purse. I fell for him the first time I saw him, blue eyes and black hair, he was just perfect at the time.

"Yes, I remember," I said wanting him to continue.

"You didn't drop your purse. It was planned for me to meet you that way."

I wrinkled my eyebrows in confusion, "What do you mean by planned?"

He pulled over on the side of a country road that I hadn't ever seen before and started to talk again, "I was paid to take your purse and go give it back to you."

My heart dropped, "I don't get it. Why would you be paid to do that?"

"A year before that happened I ran into a guy on the street that had looked like he needed money, he was harassing me and wouldn't leave me alone, and kept saying, "you're perfect." I gave him a twenty and then got into my car and drove away. I soon realized that someone was following me. Before I knew it my car crashed, I blacked out and then I woke up not in a hospital, but in a warehouse. The guy that brought me there kept on saying that he needed to use me for something. I didn't know what at the time, but I knew the guy shouldn't be messed with. I agreed to do whatever he told me to do. As I was walking out of the warehouse to leave, I caught a glimpse of Lindsey on a table; she looked like she had been stabbed a few times. But she was still breathing."

I cringed at that picture and he continued, "So I escaped and took her with me and tried to get as far away as I could from that place. When he had told me the instructions for what he wanted me to do I agreed to him, but I had decided not to do it. I was going to run away and help this girl. But that backfired, a lot."

"What happened?" I asked, my mind glossing over every detail.

"He found me. I had left Lindsey at my dad's house and she eventually ended up being okay, I'm not sure how; but then I started getting calls. Random calls, a person would just call me and hang up over and over again. The last time the person called they talked, I recognized the voice as the guy in the warehouse and listened to what he had to say. He told me that I needed to find you, that you were going to be at the store at twelve and that I needed to do whatever I could to get closer to you."

The same question, I was pretty sure I had already known the answer to, which had been in my head, finally came out of my mouth, "Who was the guy in the warehouse?"

"Alex," Ryan said, "he told me that he needed you. Everything was planned out Raine, even when I left for a while to go meet my dad and Alex showed up at your house and told you that I needed to leave? How I pretty much over-reacted when you told me to leave? That was all a part of him scaring you and forcing you to be with him. He wanted you to feel like you had no one else to go to. He wanted to get you comfortable with someone else and then have that person betray you, so all you could trust was him."

I started to panic, "Does that mean that what we had wasn't real? You were just using me?"

"Raine, I meant everything I said to you. I promise. Everything that we had was real."

"But you still continued to use me the entire time," My voice grew louder.

"Raine, calm down," he said, "please, just let me finish."

I didn't say anything back, I was trying to control myself, so he continued, "I didn't use you. I fell in love with you. I wanted to protect you. I just needed to let him believe I was following his rules to protect you."

"Please, you expect me to believe that?"

He sighed, "Raine, I will prove to you that I love you. I will spend the rest of my life doing it. I am trying to help you right now."

"Help me? Are you kidding me, Ryan? You threw me into your trunk for who knows how long and I wake up looking at a person who I thought I had killed."

"This was the plan the entire time. Alex had eyes on me, he knew where I was at and what I was doing. I was supposed to take you to Alex back home, but I'm taking you somewhere safe."

"How am I supposed to trust you now, Ryan?" I asked him.

He sighed, "I know you can't. But I made a mistake and now I'm fixing it."

I sat in silence, trying to understand the situation I was in.

"Raine, please," he reached for my hand and I quickly rejected it, "He threatened to kill my dad. Please, you have to understand."

I suddenly felt guilty, "I'm sorry... I didn't realize."

"It's fine." He said, quickly changing the topic, "So are you staying with us? I will let you go if you want to leave. You can walk out of this car and I will call you a cab and you never have to see me again."

I didn't know what the right decision was and I knew I definitely didn't want to end back up with Alex.

"I'll stay with you guys."