Kidnapped: Book 1

Chapter 14. Don't Mess With the Chief's Daughter.

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Chief James POV

I lay in the bed staring at the ceiling. I couldn’t sleep. How could I sleep when I had just seen my daughter die? The divers were sent down as soon as they got there, but the bodies were gone. The current whipped them away. Soon they would be found downstream, or never found at all. Part of me wanted desperately to believe that they had survived, but that was impossible. I’d seen plenty of accidents off of the bank and no one ever survived. If they did, they drowned with the car. My wife slept beside me, she hadn’t stopped crying since I told them about it.

Emma’s POV

When Dad came home that night I knew something horrible had happened. He called us all into the living room and sat us down. The last time he had done this our grandmother had died. I braced myself for the news.

“Izzy is— Izzy may be— today we had the guys cornered. He found some space and squeezed through it. The car ended up rolling and skidding over the bank. It fell into the river. We don’t think they could have survived. The current washed the bodies away.” Dad said. His voice tried to mask the sadness, but it was no use. Izzy was dead, and we all knew it. My baby sister was dead. I couldn’t think straight. I couldn’t talk. It was all too much to take in. Izzy shouldn’t have died. She was too young to die. This is insane, this is crazy.

Andrew’s POV

I couldn’t help but cry when Dad told us about Izzy. Emma sat in stunned silence like Mom. I bawled like a baby. How couldn’t I? The last thing I told her was that any guy was stupid for dating her. I made it seem like I hated her. Now she was gone and I could never tell her how much I loved her and how lucky those guys were. I hated myself. I ran up to her room and slammed the door violently. Her school bag from last year lay untouched on the floor. Her bed was unmade and the closet was overflowing. Pictures of her and her friends and of her and Jace were plastered above her desk. There were a few pictures of her and Emma and her and Mom. There was only one picture of me, a family photo from a vacation. I laid down on her bed. I waited for her to burst into the room, screaming for me to get out, but she didn’t come. She never would.

Mr. Dawson’s POV

How could I have been so stupid? Why had I asked Jace to tell me? I remembered how the words had barely escaped his mouth before all I heard was white noise. Now my son was sitting at the bottom of the river, dead. I didn’t want to think this was all my fault. Something in my gut told me it was. The kidnapper hadn’t said who he was, but his voice was familiar. I knew this was my fault. That poor girl. Two innocent kids were dead because of me. The thought was unbearable. Then another realization appeared. I had lost not only Hali but now Jace. Both of my twins were gone. All I had left was little Alexis, only 5. Two out of three of my children were dead and I wasn’t even 50 yet.

I heard my wife sobbing upstairs. She sat up there crying for three weeks after Hali died, she might not come down ever again now. I hear Alexis tapping on her door begging her to hold her. My family has fallen apart and I am helpless to stop it. That was Jace’s job. He held us together. He held us together after Hali died, he held us together after my mother died, who would hold us together now? I could see the end result of this. Tori and I would get divorced and Alexis would bounce around between us. She would end up turning to some boy or drugs to fill the need. She would end up dead or pregnant by 16. My family was gone. All that was left was the hollow bodies that once were us.

Jace’s POV

Mr. Newman ran inside the cabin. He was carrying a battery powered CD player. He turned it on and cranked up the volume.