Chapter 17
And Does Drama Always Have To Be On That Date With Us Also?
Panic rose in my chest as I waited for something to happen. Maybe the door would burst open and Max would come tumbling out, a shop owner right behind him yelling in Hindi for him to get out, that he was the wrong person. He would be alright, not a scratch on him. And more importantly, Vince’s men wouldn’t have hurt him.
Only that didn’t happen like I’d hoped it would. So instead, I resulted to pounding on the door, screaming so that someone would hear my pleas.
And someone did, just not the shop owner of the door that I was pounding my fist against.
“You, girl. Come,” a woman’s voice said from beside me. When I turned around, it was the same woman from the restaurant we’d eaten at earlier.
I could tell that she thought that it was urgent for me to come back into her restaurant, though it wasn’t going to get Max back to me. But I knew that I shouldn’t have been screaming and pounding on a shop’s back door when Vince Peters and his men were after us.
Me. They were now after me because they’d already gotten Max.
“You come quick,” she repeated.
I nodded as I looked back at the door Max was pulled through. My mind was pulling me in two different directions. Stay and try to open that door, or follow this woman who was offering me something that I wasn’t sure of?
Against my better judgment, I went with the latter.
Hurriedly, she guided me though the back door and through the little kitchen, back into the office that was small and only held a small desk. She brought me over and sat me down in the chair behind the desk.
“You sit here,” she said. Her English was better than she’d been leading on earlier that night, but maybe she had her reasons.
She was gone the next moment and back the next with some type of steaming drink in a small cup. It smelled a little strange when she handed it to me and I lifted it to my nose.
“Drink. Calm your nerves,” she said, urging me with her hands.
I nodded, though I was a little hesitant to take the first sip. But when I finally did, the warmth spread through me as the warm tea went down my throat.
“Good?” she asked, raising her eyebrows.
I nodded, setting the cup down in front of me. “Yes, it’s good, but I really need to find my boyfriend. They…”
“They take him I bet, that man,” she finished for me. “Seem like the people.”
I nodded and was about to speak, but she cut me off.
“They follow you a while, watch you while you here. I watch them,” she said. “Don’t know about them. That shop your boy pulled into. Not good shop. Not good at all.”
“What do you mean?”
“Bad people. Do bad things. Don’t know where your boy end up.”
That was just lovely. Max could be anywhere and I was sitting here, drinking tea with an old lady in the back of her restaurant.
“I keep you here for few more minutes. You safe then.”
“Yeah, I’m safe, but he’s not.”
She waved a hand dismissively, not bothered by what I said. She wasn’t going to let me go any time soon, that was for sure. I could gather that much by the way she closed the office door and locked it.
As I sat there, my mind was on Max and what might be happening to him while I was sitting here with a little Indian woman. I should have been trying to get him back. Why did I come with her again?
Five, ten, twenty minutes past and she hadn’t even said a word, not even her name. She was just sitting there, looking at me like she was watching for me to do something so she could stop me.
When a commotion sounded just outside the door, she jumped up from the spot she was sitting on the desk and flung open the door. I jumped up also, surprised – and, I’ll admit, a little scared – at her reaction.
But there, standing in the middle of the kitchen, was Max.
I swear my heart stopped beating right then.
But not my body. I vaulted out the small office and right into his arms. And yeah, I’ll admit I started crying. But who wouldn’t when you thought the one you loved might be gone?
“What happened?” I cried, burying my head into the crook of his neck.
“Nothing,” he said, laughing slightly. It wasn’t his normal laugh, though, and I think that he knew that it wasn’t either. But when his arms tightened around me, I didn’t care.
“But who pulled you through the door into that shop? Why didn’t you come sooner if nothing happened?”
Max held me for a few more moments before leaning back and taking my face in his hands. He kissed me softly before placing his forehead on mine, looking me right in the eyes.
“Something did happen,” he said softly so only I could hear. “I can’t tell you here, though.”
I nodded, confused as to what really happened. And when Max thanked the woman for helping me, I felt like I was on autopilot, just going through the motions.
I didn’t even realize it when we were walking through the streets and back in the direction of our hotel. Max had his arm around me and my body pressed against his side. When he pulled me closer as he walked, I heard the crumpling of paper in the inside pocket of his jacket.
“What’s that?” I asked, looking down at his jacket.
“That’s what I was going to tell you,” he said. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a folded piece of paper, handing it to me. I unfolded it as we continued walking.
It was a picture of a small golden box in what looked like a glass case. There were intricate designs pressed into the gold and what looked like a latch in the front. And in the bottom right hand corner were the printed words Acropolis Museum, Athens, Greece.
“What’s this?” I asked, looking over the picture still. “Where’d you get it?”
It took him a moment to answer, but my focus was still on the golden box.
“It was Agent Turner who pulled me through the door. He was going to try and get you, but he landed with me instead. He said it would do the same, though.”
“The same?”
Max nodded, tapping his finger on the picture. “He gave that to me, said that what we needed would be in that box. The trick is trying to get it. It’s in one of the high security rooms of the museum.”
“But…”
None of this was making sense to me. Well, the whole museum thing did, but just not the way Max got this information. It was almost like I didn’t believe him, I couldn’t believe him. Something was telling me that I shouldn’t. It was the way he was holding himself, the look in his eyes. That was almost a dead giveaway. He probably didn’t think that I knew something was off with him, and it all started with that phone call when we were at Ravana Phadi. It was almost like…this incident had something to do with it.
But I was going to go along with it…for now, at least. I wasn’t going to question the way he got this information about the box.
Not until I needed to.
***Well, hello there! Sorry for the long wait on the upload, but work has been kicking my butt all week and today was my first day off. But here's your upload!
What did you think? You know that I wouldn't hurt Max! But do you believe his explanation of what happened? Or are you thinking he's still hiding something? You'll definitely find out soon!
And as for that thing that I mentioned in my author's note in the last chapter, I've been thinking about doing something when I finish this up and I think you guys will like it.
Some Max POV chapters. Oh yeah!
Because of some of the stuff that's going to happen in the coming chapters, I feel like you guys are going to need some explanations from both sides of my Max and Callie duo. I haven't decided if I want to wait until I finish this or once I finish the chapters that I'm going to write in Max's POV. I guess I'll decide that when I get to it, though!
So you guys know what to do! 30 votes and 14 comments before my next upload on Sunday! I've got to work 8 hour shifts with crazy holiday shoppers, so I'll be exhausted. But then I get three blissful days off! :D
Comment, Vote, and Like!!!1