Total pages in book: 85
Estimated words: 82186 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 411(@200wpm)___ 329(@250wpm)___ 274(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 82186 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 411(@200wpm)___ 329(@250wpm)___ 274(@300wpm)
Harper, Jake, Hannah, and Kola had been downtown, shopping on the Miracle Mile, walking around, when Hannah realized it was time for her to pick up George at the airport. How she had finagled that, and why, I still had no clear answer on, but when they went to where the van should have been, it was gone.
The four of them immediately concluded they must have forgotten where they parked. It was a minivan, for heaven’s sake. Who stole a minivan? As Hannah and Jake began searching the lower floors of the parking garage, Kola and Harper went up. This went on for an hour, after which Hannah made a sad, frantic call to George to tell him how sorry she was that she wouldn’t make it to the airport, and then, according to Jake, threatened George in her message to “not make a big deal about it and to not think she wasn’t dependable.” Apparently, she was a bit unhinged by that time, terrified about the van, because maybe she’d locked it and maybe she hadn’t—she had a terrible habit of not—and because it had taken quite a bit of persuasion and threats to get George to agree to let her pick him up, and now she was bailing on him; this was her main issue.
“He’s going to go on and on about this, I just know it,” Hannah told me when they got home, growling between clenched teeth even as she’d made George sit down in her father’s chair so she could clean up wounds that were oozing. He couldn’t go home either; he had questions to answer for the police. That, thankfully, all changed when Eli showed up.
On the second check of the parking structure, before the kids had agreed to call me and deliver the bad news, Kola had turned right at the elevator and Harper left. At that point, Kola had seen two dead men on the ground near an idling SUV, and a man wrestling Alessia toward the open back door.
Running fast, Kola reached the man and hit him in a flying tackle that put both him and Alessia on the ground. Unbeknownst to anyone, there was a crowd of girls there, returning to their car, and they were recording everything.
The man Kola hit was winded, which allowed my son to pull his hands off Alessia, drag her to her feet, and yank her after him. They didn’t get far before the guy was on them again, with help, three in all, chasing them down. Kola and Alessia were slammed into the side of another car, crumpling to the ground, and when the guy pulled his gun and pointed, Kola curled his body over Alessia to shield her. Alessia’s cry of “No!” was the last thing on the video.
Sam’s gaze lifted to Eli.
“The men were not trying to kill Alessia, they only wanted to take her, but they would have killed your son for getting in their way. There can be no doubt about that.”
My eyes filled with tears I quickly wiped away, all gone by the time my husband glanced over at me.
“Now,” Eli said gently, “that is the first part of the video, and it went out on social media before anything could be done. The rest of this, no one else will see,” he explained, and I appreciated how calm his tone was.
Into the mix came Hannah. No surprise there. She knocked the gun away, kicking it out of the man’s hand, thus saving Kola. Unfortunately, as focused as she was on keeping her brother safe, she missed the other two men, also with guns, who would have shot her dead. Harper, who had come running back to look for Kola, had almost reached them when a gun was pointed at him, freezing him in his tracks.
“It’s not as bad as it looks,” Hannah assured her father, stopping the video that she, too, was watching.
“Yes, it was,” Harper contradicted her. “Those guys would have killed us all and taken Alessia if George wasn’t there.”
“Thank God for George,” Kola said with a heavy exhale.
“He was great,” Alessia agreed, tipping her head and smiling at him. “But you saved my life way before that.”
“It’s true,” Jake threw out, putting water in the potato pot, having come to the conclusion that they needed to be boiled longer. “Kola kept her from being taken.”
Sam glanced over at me, and I tipped my chin at George, who looked like he was dead to the world at the moment.
“Finish,” he commanded Eli.
Restarting the video, they watched what I’d already seen: the guy leveling his gun at Hannah and then the pop-pop of a gunshot before he went down in front of her, which was when Jake, who’d followed her, came careening around the corner. Hannah was faster than him, so he’d been running to catch up.