Give Me Strength

  “Travis.” My eyes pleaded with him to talk to me. “What assignment?”

  Casey folded his arms and looked down at his feet. Travis shifted his eyes between the two of us.

  “You.”

  “Me?” I whispered, not understanding the hard edge in his voice.

  He gave a single nod.

  “What about me?”

  “You’re our assignment.”

  “You...you mean what, bodyguard duty since the whole Melbourne incident?”

  Travis rolled his shoulders. The gesture was a nervous one that set my stomach churning. He lifted his chin and met my eyes. “No. Since the beginning.”

  The world faded around me, blocking out everything but the guarded expression in his face. I opened my mouth but I couldn’t seem to form the next question.

  “The AFP hired us to watch you. They’ve had feds on the inside of a crime group they’ve been trying to bring down for well over a year. These are the people that David is caught up with. When the AFP heard he was due out of prison, they assigned our firm to you.”

  Casey cursed softly but I ignored it because my entire focus was on what Travis was telling me.

  “Who…who is the AFP?”

  “The Australian Federal Police.”

  “The entire time you’ve been with me is because I’ve been an assignment?” I couldn’t breathe. What I had with Travis wasn’t real. His entire reason for being with me was a… a paid obligation. A job. A fucking duty. I licked my suddenly dry lips.

  “To what, keep me safe?” My heart pounded as I tried to process what I’d been told. “All this time you knew I was in danger, and you didn’t say a word?”

  “No,” Travis began and the hand that rubbed at his brow shook a little. “Not that…”

  “Then wh…” Oh my God. My stomach turned over. “You weren’t assigned to keep me safe at all. Your job was to get information. You thought I was involved,” I said accusingly.

  I should’ve known.

  I really was stupid and just like Beth said, my life really was fucked. She’d known it all along, but something inside of me that I’d squashed for so long had rebelled against the painful words. I’d been battling so hard to let go of my past. Then Travis had asked me to try. He had touched me so tenderly that I ached from it, and asked me to try. Yet all this time, not just Travis, but all of them, had suspected me of being involved, had been sitting back and waiting for what, me to give them an in? Prove myself as one of the bad guys? The thought was utterly ridiculous, and I might not have had many friends, but I knew what friendship was and this wasn’t it.

  “Quinn, it’s not like that.”

  Travis took a step forward, walking further into the house, and I took a step back. I barely noticed Mac and Henry both stumbling down the stairs.

  “I might have kept things from you because I was scared of people I cared about getting hurt,” I told him, “but you lied to me. You sat there and looked right in my eyes when I told you I was scared, and you asked me to try. And I was so stupid, because I did. I tried,” I choked out. I blinked back burning tears because damned if I was going to let him see me cry. “But what was the point? Why would you ask that of me?”

  “Quinn,” he whispered.

  I could feel everyone’s eyes on me, and I fought against all the instincts that were telling me to run. Instead, I straightened my back and lifted my chin.

  “I didn’t want to hurt you. If we hadn’t taken on the assignment, then it would have been someone else that—”

  “Bullshit!” I yelled, balling my fists, because if he thought this wasn’t hurting me then he was a right fucking idiot.

  He reached out a hand towards me, and I swatted it away. “Don’t touch me. I don’t need your excuses.”

  “I didn’t trust anyone else with the assignment, dammit.”

  I shook my head when he opened his mouth to say more. “So tell me what it is I’m caught up in. What is this AFP or whatever, trying to bring down?”

  “Drugs and human trafficking.”

  My head tilted back as I choked on a laugh of disbelief. “And you thought I would be involved in that? Poor little girl from the wrong side of the tracks, beat up by her stepdad half her life until she’s so damaged no one will ever want her. I’m just trash, right? The daughter that got thrown away and tried to take something back for herself. So what part was I involved in?” Some part of me was screaming at me to shut up, but the anger was spewing out and I couldn’t stop. “Was I handling the paperwork and making the bank deposits for the big bad crime lord? Or was I on the other side of the desk prostituting myself for the—”

  “Quinn!” Travis barked. The vein in his neck pulsed angrily.

  “You and I were a lie. All this…” I swept out a hand to indicate the duplex and everyone currently standing in it watching me break apart “…was nothing but proof of how little I belong in a world like yours.”

  Travis shook his head, his eyes pleading. “We weren’t a lie, Quinn.”

  “Don’t.” Travis had a way with words, somehow manipulating them to always sound like the truth and something I could believe in.

  My heart squeezed painfully.

  “Quinn. Look at me.”

  I wanted to but I didn’t trust myself.

  God. That night at the bar when I’d spilled my drink all down his shirt, it must have been all he could do not to laugh at how easy I’d made the assignment for him.

  My eyes sought out Henry. His lips parted in shock, then Mac, her hand at her throat, and Casey, who just the other night had me believing my wish for a big brother might finally have come true.

  “Quinn, please,” Travis pleaded, his voice hoarse. “Look at me.”

  I didn’t need to look at him to know what he was feeling because the anguish was clear in his voice. I hated that I took satisfaction in hearing his pain.

  “I can’t.”

  Because I don’t see you. You’re not my Travis. You’re someone else. I don’t want to look at you and see a stranger.

  Mac reached out for me, and I took another step back, my eyes focusing on her and her alone. “Mac…” I swallowed. “I quit.”

  “You can’t quit. Travis!” she yelled. “So help me God, you better fix this.”

  “No!” I blurted out. My eyes found Travis and I flinched. There was no colour in his face. “I don’t want this fixed. I just want to leave.”

  I backed towards the door.

  Travis took a step towards me. “It’s not safe. You can’t go out there.”

  The air left my lungs in a huff of laughter, and I turned and kicked the side table next to the couch, sending it clattering across the floor. “I’ve never been safe!” I shouted through tears.

  I stalked for the door and threw it open. Looking over my shoulder I saw Casey holding Travis back from coming after me. “No, Travis. You don’t get it. What it’s like for people like us to have trust shattered like that.”

  I shook my head because in that moment that was how it felt. There were people like me and there were people like him and never should the two mix.

  I made it out the front door and to the side of the house before I had to lean against the weatherboard for support. I’d never seen Travis so pale or his hands shake like that. I’d never heard an ache in his voice like it had been just before.

  The front door opened and I closed my eyes, but the voice calling my name was Casey, not Travis. I dug my fingers into the pocket of my jeans and hurriedly yanked my car keys out. The only person I wanted to wrap their arms around me until it hurt to breathe was the one who’d just broken my goddamn heart.

  “Quinn!”

  I ignored Casey and unlocked the car door, sliding inside and jamming the key into Suzi-Q’s ignition with trembling fingers.

  The passenger door swung open, and Casey jolted hard into the seat. The agony must have been clear in my eyes because he glanced away and said softly, “It’s okay, Quinn. Just drive.”

&nbsp
; We were halfway down the street before I could let a breath out of my lungs. I felt Casey glance my way, but I kept my eyes on the road. He must have understood my need for quiet because he didn’t speak, allowing me to focus on calming the wild rage of emotion.

  I pulled into a park by the beach and without acknowledging Casey, I dodged cars, making my way across the road to the rail that looked down a rock shelf and onto the beach. Spying a public seat, I sat down.

  When Casey sat down next to me, I sighed.

  “I just want to be alone.”

  He rested his elbows on his knees. “I know. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s so much better being alone.”

  “Better or easier?”

  The breeze fluttered over me, and I hugged my arms around myself. My eyes remained trained on the horizon. The waves were choppy, the beach quiet. “Easier.”

  “You know you mean more to him, to all of us, than just an assignment, right?”

  “I don’t know what to think. I keep getting the urge to run. Always, there’s the urge to run, but I don’t know what I’m running from. David? The bad guys? Travis? Myself? Who are the bad guys anyway?”

  “I’ll let Travis explain it to you.”

  “I don’t want—” The rest of my words choked in my throat because suddenly Travis was standing in front of me. “How did you know I was here?” My eyes turned to the traitor sitting next to me.

  Casey shrugged under the full force of the glare I aimed his way.

  “Sorry, Quinn.” He stood up and slammed a hand on Travis’s chest and shaking his head, growled, “You and Jared. Christ. Tired of it. I’ll be across the road getting a coffee.”

  Travis sat down in his place.

  I didn’t say anything.

  He didn’t say anything.

  It felt like a bloody standoff, and I started to fidget because I was fighting the urge to curl into him and cry, and that just set off another wave of anger.

  “Do I really know you, Travis?”

  “If you’re asking me that, then maybe you don’t.” His voice was low and wounded.

  “Maybe you should start from the beginning,” I said coldly.

  “Okay,” he agreed and rubbed his palms along his thighs. “The AFP approached us the day Mac hired you, and we met with them the next day.”

  I remembered back to the day when I’d barricaded myself in the toilet, so utterly embarrassed to find out that Travis was Mac’s brother. When he walked out, talking on the phone, the relief had made me weak, but it was his phone conversation that pinged my memory.

  “Can’t today, Tim. Tell the AFP to set the meeting up for tomorrow morning, okay? Did they say what it was about?”

  “So that night at the bar—”

  “Had nothing to do with anything but you and me.”

  My chest loosened a little as I waited for him to continue.

  “They’ve been building up a case against this group of traffickers for so long. They have agents so deep undercover with the Zampetti crime group that no one has a clue who they are. Jesus, Quinn, men, women, kids. Kids. They’ve got all their best investigators on this operation, so they had to outsource for every possible lead. The minute they pegged your connection to us was when they approached us. We didn’t know anything about you, about the abuse. They told us David was in for assault, but they didn’t say why. They just told us you were his stepdaughter and they wanted to know your level of involvement. But Quinn, we don’t like to fly blind. We pulled up his records and found out it was you he assaulted, but the release date on the paperwork was wrong. It told us he was due out on early parole three weeks after he was actually released. I don’t know who fucked up there, but if we had’ve known he was out, he wouldn’t have gotten anywhere near you. It wasn’t until after we told the AFP what happened that they released the photos of the assault and we found out how bad it really was. No one knew he’d been abusing you, but after seeing those photos, I don’t know how anyone could not. Why didn’t you tell anyone?”

  I shrugged. “Who was I supposed to tell?”

  “Fuck,” Travis muttered and rested his elbows on his knees. “We managed to put some pieces together and found out that David was friends with someone called Angelo. Angelo got him involved in their international trafficking ring. He was helping transport victims, setting them up in housing. Turns out though that David has a bit of a gambling addiction and after borrowing huge amounts of money from some of the bigger players, he couldn’t pay up because he ended up in prison.”

  “Oh God.” I pressed my palms against my eyes. “Them coming after me for the money is my fault.”

  “Jesus fucking Christ, Quinn. It’s David’s fault. All of this fucking mess,” he growled. “The reason we took the contract was because we knew without any doubt that you knew nothing about it. I’ve told you to trust your gut, and mine was telling me you had no idea about any of it. I didn’t tell you about the assignment because I didn’t want you thinking any of us doubted you for a single second. But also…” He swallowed and looked out at the ocean. “The AFP wanted to find a way to use you. Their information says David was the one that sent the Zampetti crime group your way to either get the money in cash, or get their use from you some other way. They went for the cash option first. Trafficking a local female isn’t as easy for them as getting immigrants who don’t know anyone and can barely speak English. When a local girl goes missing, there’s more press and local police involvement. That’s something they don’t want to attract if they can help it, but the AFP were thinking that maybe if they used you, it might help them rack up more charges. The Zampetti drug and trafficking operation is so slick they’re trying to get them on anything they can, and you were just another option.”

  “But no one from the police ever approached me.”

  “That’s because I wouldn’t let them. They’re not using you, but that stunt in Melbourne only increased their aim to get you involved.”

  Jared stood there, phone in hand. “Mitch wants to talk to you. He’s been in touch with Melbourne’s AFP, and they’re sending over a fed. They want to know what the fuck is happening with this assignment—”

  Oh God. How could I not see?

  “If I told you what they were asking of you, what would you have said?”

  I looked down at my hands and thought hard. Getting David permanently out of my hair? Having a hand in helping save thousands of lives from the hands of traffickers—people suffering worse than what even I could comprehend. “I appreciate you keeping me safe, Travis, but there’s a bigger picture, isn’t there? I think it’s my decision to make, and I would have agreed to do whatever I could to help,” I said softly.

  “No.” He spun to face me and grabbed my hands from my lap. “No.”

  “Travis you can’t—”

  “No!” he shouted hoarsely. “Quinn, this isn’t just about drugs. It’s exploitation of the worst kind. Women forced into prostitution against their will. How could I let them get you caught up in that? I’m not seeing you suffer anymore. No more,” he shouted.

  “At the least I need to hear what they might have in mind, don’t you think?”

  “No, I don’t think. No. Dammit.” Travis tightened his grip as though scared of letting me go.

  I focused my gaze on the waves, the dark blue of the ocean. The sun was bright, but not warm against the chill. The last time I’d been here with Travis was probably one of the best days I could ever remember living.

  “When I was young I used to think I deserved it. The suffering. The pain David inflicted. These women, kids, taken by the traffickers...they’re suffering too. Are they sold into this? Stolen? Putting up with the suffering because it’s the only roof over their head they think they’re going to get? I can relate to that. Remember when you told me that night that if you weren’t there to help those kids, who would? How can I turn my back if I’m able to help in any way?”

  Travis ran his eyes over my face and reached out to tuck a stra
nd of hair behind my ear. The gesture was soft and loving. “Do you remember what you said back to me?”

  “Dammit, Travis.”

  “Tell me what you said back.”

  I looked down at our linked hands. “You can’t save everyone.”

  Travis nodded.

  “But does that mean you stop trying?”

  I took in the rigid line of his shoulders and the tension in his jaw and cleared my throat. “Can I...I need to think, Travis. I need to be alone.”

  He went to speak and I held up my hand. “Please.”

  Travis let go and stood, looking down at me, his eyes dark and wounded. I shielded my eyes from the glare of the sun behind him. “I know you’re still angry, Quinn, and you can be for as long as you want, but it won’t change what I feel for you. That was never a lie and because of that, I won’t let you do this.” He paused. “Two minutes, okay? Then I’m taking you home.”

  With that he was gone.

  God.

  What a fucking mess.

  I pulled the car keys from my pocket.

  Running again, Quinn?

  I pushed up off the seat and started for the car.

  Yeah, that figures. No backbone in you at all. It’s pathetic that you can’t face your fears.

  My body froze in the act of opening the car door.

  What do you fear the most?

  Losing everything all over again, I answered the voice in my head.

  And what are you losing by running away?

  I closed my eyes.

  Everything.

  My chest ached with how much I loved Travis and the knowledge of how much he loved me. It was clear in his eyes yet I had doubted it. That must have hurt. How could I blame him for wanting to keep me safe? I had done the exact same thing.

  I shut the car door and put the keys back in my pocket just as my arm was grabbed in a vice.

  “You fucking bitch.”

  I turned, breathless. David was right in my face. He grabbed both my biceps with his hands and shook me hard. I winced, knowing it would leave bruises.