Chris and Gina didn't exchange a word as they embraced. Their eyes were dry. Chris had been sobbing all night; Gina hadn't at all.

Her heart was hurting.

She'd been devastated when her father had called with the terrible news about her baby sister. Kidnapped, lost, or murdered. Neither were pleasant.

Gina hoped desperately that Rachel was just lost in the woods, but the chance now of that was almost none. They'd been searched, the police had scoured everything down to the smallest tree, no sign of Rachel except for the evidence they'd already found.

She had to face it. Somebody had done something to her sister, her best friend.

They'd hated each other until Gina had graduated highschool. Rachel had always accused her older sister of being "the perfect one" with the perfect body, perfect personality, never doing anything wrong, the one that guys craved. Gina had thought the exact opposite. Rachel was natural, she wasn't thin but she wasn't fat, she was incredibly smart and talented. The two clashed.

Then, for some reason, since she was now so far away, they'd been the closest of companions. The two confided everything in each other, but Gina had to admit that for the past two years Rachel had been worryingly distant. She wondered now if her boyfriend's death was somehow linked to this mysterious event.

Something in her made Gina believe that Rachel was okay. She wasn't quite sure why, because at the moment a good portion of the evidence was pointing to kidnapping or murder. And Gina had never heard one kidnapping story that didn't end in murder.

She was impatient with the rate of work that the detectives on the case were currently going at. They were going at a sluggish pace and so far the only conclusion they'd come to was that it was most certainly linked to the nearly identical kidnapping in Miami. Gina couldn't see how and found it stupid trying to annoyingly connect the two, a waste of time.

"We have a lot of information about the case in Miami," her father had sighed, rubbing his temples as they sped back to the house from the airport in his small Volvo. "It could help us here."

"I don't see how, though, they could be related!" Gina cried. "It's completely asinine that you're deciding that because the shoe and knife prints match perfectly, you have the same killer."

"Your sister. Is not. Dead." Her father gritted his teeth and gripped the steering wheel angrily with both hands. "Don't even say that."

Now, Gina felt the area behind her eyes aching. She wanted to cry. But she couldn't. She wouldn't, not until her sister was found. It would be almost blasphemous to do so. Rachel might be okay. Why cry if everything was okay?

"Gina," Chris nestled his head into her neck and stayed there for a while, muttering fragmented sentences into her collar bone. Poor kid. He's so, so scared.

"Sh, sweetie. She's fine. You know Rachel. She won't let anything happen."

I remember what she said when Dan died. I can only hope that she's in control now.

Xx

Rachel's expression was lifeless and flat as she watched the casket being lowered into the ground.

"Rach?" Gina touched her shoulder. Rachel drew away.

"I'm fine."

"I wasn't going to ask."

Rachel looked at her, her jaw setting. "Yes, you were. Please, Gina. Just leave me alone. I don't want to talk."

"Honey, I know this is hard, but trust me, if you talk to someone it'll hel-"

Rachel stumbled backwards as Gina tried to comfort her. She was angry. Livid. And yelling. "You don't know, Gina! You don't know what I'm going through right now and honestly, I don't feel like telling you or anybody else!"

Gina was hurt. "Rachel, please, I know how crazy you were about him. And he was for you, too. But life goes on, you'll find somebody else and start over-"

Rachel looked at her sister like she'd just had a spear dabbed in salt and thrown into her gut. Her voice had lowered itself to a whisper. "I loved him, Gina. This wasn't one of your teenage romances, your one-night stands. This was what they talk about in the movies. We had something, and now it's over. There won't be anybody else."

Gina paused. The mourners were gone. It was just them. A steady rain was falling, and Rachel's short hair was covering her eyes.

Rachel started to cry. She turned her back away from her sister and hugged her shoulders as she sobbed, her tears forming a dilated salty mixture with the rain water. She slid to the ground, paying no heed to her mud-coated skirt.

Gina slid next to her. Her baby sister needed her. She wrapped her arms around her and pulled the girl to her chest. Rachel rocked against her.

"I could have stopped it. If I was there, I would have stopped it. He shouldn't have let him kill him. He should have been in control."

"Sh, love," Gina began to cry as well. "You can't always be in control. This is out of your control, there is nothing you could do and it is in no way, shape, or form your fault. He loved you. He always will. But you can't let this bring you down."

They stayed there for a while. An hour, perhaps, getting drenched with rain and soil. They stood when they heard voices.

"She's fine. Sleeping. And Lisa?"

"Taking a nap. Man. Do women do anything but this?"

"Yeah. When you're lucky they get pissed off and yell at you."

"I look forward to it. What did you do to her?"

"Threw her around a bit, managed to pry her little secret from her. It's incredibly valuable, the tidbit of information she told me. She had a boyfriend who died and that, Jackson, is why she's so sensitive about everything."

"I see. We need to start being more thorough when we're doing our surveilling. This seemingly unimportant information that goes unnoticed has a tendency to bring us down."

"You got that right. So, we'll be over when she's up."

Rachel forced open her eyes, the blurry bedroom coming into focus. She blindly grasped for her glasses on the nightstand and pushed them onto her nose.

Where was she? As her eyes focused on the shapes surrounding her, she concluded that she was, repulsively as it was, in Alec's bedroom. She recalled her disgust at the staunch white and black color scheme earlier when he'd given her a tour.

"It'd be hilarious if a dog came in here," she'd remarked scathingly. He hadn't replied but she'd noticed his barely hidden cringe.

Wrenching her heavy limbs away from the soft sheets—he used good fabric softener, she'd give him that—she cried out slightly as she realized her entire body ached horribly. It made sense, since it had been her first sleep in a bed since she'd been kidnapped, and there had been a lot of violence since then, and she winced and closed her eyes as her feet landed on the floor.

There was a plain mirror hanging on the wall. Rachel caught a glimpse in it as her mind leveled itself out from sleep. She looked a mess. Her hair was tangled, half of it curly and the other half completely straight. Her eyelids were encrusted with tears and her pupils looked dilated. Her clothes were either torn or very wrinkled and she was freezing. The warmth that the bed had graciously offered had all but completely dissipated and she was left shivering in the heavily air conditioned room.

Where's Alec? And how the hell did I get here?

With a sickening wrench she floated back to reality. He knew.

She.

Had.

Told.

Him.

His mind held snippets of her saddened past. He knew a fraction of the sorrow that she was feeling, had felt.

Nobody else did.

No one else she knew had been able to affect her like that. Many people knew her story, her family was quite familiar with it, she had not been alone in the grieving process.

But he affected her.

When she'd told him about Dan, she saw it in his face. She could see that he was genuinely sorry for a girl he hated. He pitied his hostage.

And when he'd held her on his lap and rubbed soothing circles on her back to relax her, she had let him. She hadn't let even her family comfort her. She had been trying too hard to be strong. Then now, in the worst place and to the worst person possible, she had let loose her story.

It wasn't just that she was humiliated that he knew. She was mortified that she'd let him comfort her, that she'd actually been comforted by his touch. She was supposed to hate this man.

But she didn't.

She wasn't sure what she felt. If she had hated him, she wouldn't be semi-grateful that he'd helped her through the memory.

But he brought it up, part of her argued. He was the one who made you think about it.

He only wanted to help, she retorted. He wanted to help me because he could see something was wrong.

Rachel wondered why she was defending a murderer, the person who planned to kill her uncle.

She wondered.

But she had no reason.

…and the weird feeling was still there.