A/N-So thank you all for sticking with this, and for reviewing! That means the world to me, really.

Xx

Tuesday, December 27, 2006

2:54 PM

The first two days, she wouldn't speak. After Rachel's initial conversation with her uncle, she refused to utter a single phrase that would convict Alex as 'the bad guy'. Her parents told her—hourly, it seemed—that it wasn't her fault, it was his. His fault. Right. If it was really his fault then why did she feel so guilty?

If life had a personality, Rachel scathed, then it was pretty damn bitter towards her at the moment. It gave her a boyfriend. Then pulled him away. Then gave him back. And when she was getting accustomed to it—oh—life stuck out a gnarled hand and yanked him away from her again.

She felt like she had deserved it all along. She hadn't appreciated love when she'd had it the first time, and she thought she'd learned her lesson from that experience. But she hadn't, and without realizing it she'd done the same thing all over again by rejecting Alex when he revealed himself to her. She couldn't blame the heavens for that—that was purely her own stupidity.

Rachel's pride was the only thing that kept her from going completely mad. She could blame Alex's leaving on her own behavior, sure, but why bother if there were external sources as well? Detective Maddox, for being so fucking persistent in his effort to find her. Her parents, for being so eager to blame Alex, for not understanding what was so clear, and the biggest one—for coddling her. She didn't want to be babied like some four-year old who had a bad day at school. She wanted them to just leave her alone and let her sleep.

She could blame Jackson. For all she knew, maybe he was the one who forced Alex to leave. After lying awake and contemplating that Christmas night, Rachel wondered maybe if Alex had been taken away from her against her will. Jackson could have immobilized him and dragged him away—he was a valuable asset to his organization, why wouldn't he? Alex had promised Rachel that he wouldn't leave her again. And the first and only time he'd actually left her, she realized, had been of Jackson's account anyway.

But then it hit her that she hadn't treated him the greatest in their short reunion. She'd been bitter, surly, and quite bluntly a pain in his ass. So what would give him incentive to surrender his freedom for her? Unless he really and truly trusted that what she'd said—that she loved him—was true, and was willing to gamble on the downside that she could be playing him into a jail cell.

Then there was Lisa. Rachel didn't hold Lisa responsible for anything that had happened, but she'd questioned why she hadn't left with Jackson. Maybe the two weren't as attached as she'd thought. Or maybe Lisa had still been sleeping and Jackson, ever the assassin, had left her to her fate in prison.

Rachel knew Lisa's father was in deep legal trouble as it was. She'd overheard Jackson informing Lisa that he had been released but kept under close watch as a suspect for association in the Keefe murder—which she learned had been successful on the organization's part. Charles Keefe was officially dead, as the news stations proclaimed had taken place early on the twenty-third.

Lisa Reisert was, as it was, the prime suspect for his murder. Jackson had worked her right where he wanted her. Every sign pointed directly to her and there was no turning back. Lisa would be lucky if she got off with a life sentence.

Rachel knew she'd be contacted to testify alongside her. To claim that indeed—Lisa was kidnapped by Keefe's murderer and that she in fact was just a victim to Jackson's manipulation and threats. But even then the problem was that Rachel was only sixteen, had just fallen victim to a kidnapping herself, and as she'd heard the night nurse muttering to her doctor one evening, "Something's not right with that girl. I think that monster who kidnapped her managed to break her down, drove her near crazy."

Rachel wasn't crazy. She just wanted quiet. She wanted to think but then, she wanted to stop thinking. It was a tricky situation, because when she was surrounded by noise and questions, all she wanted to do was to be alone and figure out why Alex had left her, but when she finally was rewarded with that blissful silence, she went stir-crazy and wanted to be numb.

"Rachel." She glanced up. Her father brushed her arm and pointed to the seatbelt seat.

"What?"

"You need to buckle up." It dawned on her that she'd forgotten where she was as she thought. The airplane. The plane to back home.

She blinked, rubbing her eyes. She couldn't remember what he'd said. "What?"

He sighed, obviously growing annoyed with her but trying to keep his cool in light of her current mental situation. "Buckle up." He stretched to do it for her.

"Buckle up." Alec sighed and irritably reached over, snapping Rachel's belt into the latch.

She pushed his hand away as it grazed her waist on its journey. "Don't touch me."

"Then listen to me for once."

"I will if you don't touch me."

Rachel started to cry as the buckle snapped into place. She pushed her father's hand away and he stared at her. Detective Maddox—seated on her other side, because she'd refused a window seat and they didn't want her exposed to the prying eyes of the other passengers—touched her shoulder and she flinched, drawing away and sinking into her seat. She heard the conversation around her quiet and then silence completely, and while the normal her would have been humiliated at her outburst, the 'crazy, broken' Rachel Redford didn't give a damn.

"Rachel," her father murmured as the plane began to move. "Honey."

"I'm fine," she said, a bit more snappishly than she would have liked. "I'm fine."

"She's fine," her father repeated loudly, also obviously a bit tense, to the staring travelers.

Maddox poked her lightly in the elbow and she raised her head slightly to see him wave a tissue in her face. She reluctantly accepted it, though still maintaining her vow of silence with the doltish man. He deserved no better than Jackson.

They'd been in the air for about an hour when he attempted to communicate with her again. "Can we talk?"

She shook her head, letting her hair fall guardedly in front of her sullen face. There really wasn't much to talk about, unless of course you were an officious detective named Maddox bent on forcing an angry girl to testify.

"We need to."

She shook her head again, 'no'.

"No, we don't need to talk?" Maddox cocked his head at her, but she still ignored him, reaching for the magazine in the mesh rack hanging from the seat ahead of her. He slapped her hand away, a bit callously. Rachel heard her father clear his throat.

"Detective, just leave her be. Can't you see she's--"

"Damn it, Redford, you can't appease her behavior forever! We need to get to the bottom of what happened so justice can be served to the asshole who hurt her."

"First of all," Rachel berated, forgetting her promise to herself. "He didn't hurt me. I've told you that over and over again. Second of all, I don't want to talk to you because all you do is ask pointless questions that get you nowhere. Which leads to my last point which is this—how the hell do you plan on serving justice when the man who kidnapped me isn't in custody? What are you going to prosecute, the chair where he should be sitting in court? I'm a sixteen-year-old highschool student and forgive my slim knowledge of the legal system, but it seems to me that you'd need a little bit more than one girl's confession to put somebody in jail."

Maddox nearly seemed winded from her outburst as she reached, all the more calmly, again for her magazine. He sat staring at his knuckles until the plane began to make its descent an hour later at Albany International.

"We could find him for you," he muttered reflectively. "We could find him with the information you could give us."

Rachel snorted in reply but didn't avert her gaze from the pages of her reading. "Trust me, Detective, you won't find him."