Disclaimer: I own nothing, except my own characters.
A huge shout-out to lilsherlockian1975 for beta-ing and MrsMCrieff for Brit-picking! This story wouldn't be half as amazing if it weren't for you! Loves!
This is How a Heart Breaks
Chapter 2
This Isn't the End
"Her dad was a good guy that everyone liked / But nobody knew he was dying inside
He promised his family they'd be alright / And then with a gunshot he left them behind"
"Scared. Little. Girl."
That's what the madman had called her as she scooted away from the corpse of her dead father. His blank eyes staring up at her, accusing her. She was sure that she would never get that image out of her mind. Her only relief was that her baby brother was away at a friend's house, and not here caught up in this mess. All she needed to do was manage her own escape. All she needed to do was get to a safe place and call the aunt she wasn't supposed to know about. All she needed to do was get her brother and get out of Texas, the U.S., the entire continent. 'Maybe we'd be safer on the moon.'
She wasn't sure how she managed it, he was much bigger than her, and clearly more trained than she was in the art of fighting. But she was small and scrappy, and if there was one thing that she had that the attacker did not, it was the determination to survive.
She pushed herself up against the wall. Her left leg at an odd angle. She was certain it was broken. He came at her with his hands spread, ready to strangle her. She pulled the dagger from her boot and stabbed him in his chest. He stumbled back, eyes wide and confused.
"You…"
She didn't wait for whatever he was going to say. She stood up painfully, lurched forward, pushed him down, and took off as fast as she could. His fingers grazed her leg as she jumped over him, but there was no true grip.
Huh. She must have got some real damage in.
She pushed out the front door and fled down the hall to the stairwell. No time to take the elevator now.
(She had a new understanding of the 'hounds of hell being on one's heels.')
"Scared. Little. Girl."
Those three little words taunted her as she ran, her leg twinging with every step. If she could just get to her dad's car, she could get her brother, call her aunt, and get to safety.
She didn't care that her father had made it more than explicitly clear not to contact the woman on the other side of the ocean. He was gone and she had nobody else to turn to. Besides, why shouldn't she get a hold of the person that held the family fortune and could afford to take on two children. (Her father obviously couldn't, not without turning to less than legal dealings anyway.)
"Scared. Little. Girl."
His mocking voice circled around in her mind as she pushed out the front doors of the apartment building. Nobody was outside, and the air was too quiet. It was all so ominous.
The man was right.
She was – is - terrified.
Her dad's car was sitting at the front of the parking lot. It was as close as it could be to the building without being illegally parked. He had always made sure to be as upstanding as a citizen as he could be. He didn't want the authorities to catch on to him because of something so mundane as a parking ticket.
She stayed close to the building for a moment longer, double-checking that there really wasn't anyone around. Once she was absolutely certain, only then did she walk (limp) over to it. Her backpack and purse sat on the floorboard of the passenger seat where she had left them that afternoon.
Getting into the driver's seat, she pulled the spare set of keys from her bag, grabbed her phone, sent a quick text to the mother of her brother's friend, and took off down the road. She had never been more glad that her father had insisted on getting her a fake ID.
~SH&MH~
"You take a hit now / You feel it break down
Make you stay while I wait / This is how a heart breaks"
Molly was exhausted. The 13-hour flight she had booked had turned into a 20-hour flight because of an unexpected hold-over. The screaming child behind her had insisted on kicking her chair. (The parents paid little heed to the poor thing, and as much as she wanted to do something to try and ease him, she was certain the parents would be obnoxious about it and not allow her to help in any way. The proof lay in how they treated the stewardess and anyone else that had addressed the issue.) Eventually the child got distracted with a movie and drifted off to sleep. When the plane finally landed, she found that her luggage wasn't even there, and it probably wouldn't get there until the next day.
She did not have available networking service for her phone during the holdover, so she wasn't able to call ahead and let the car rental company know that she was going to be late picking it up. By the time she got to the rental shop, the nice little sedan that had an automatic engine was gone. The only vehicle available was a pick-up truck with a manual transmission, and while she did learn how to drive such a vehicle, it had been years since she had done so. The only positive thing it had going for it, was that it had backseats, albeit small, they were at least there.
(The whole experience was on par with how her life was going.)
She threw her bags into the back of the truck, put the keys in the ignition, and sighed deeply as she put her head on the steering wheel.
"This will get better. This will. I am determined," she said it as if it were a mantra she were clinging to. Then she remembered that she had not turned on her phone since she had arrived to the Houston airport.
"Crap!" She fumbled for her phone, dropping it as she pulled it from her carry-on bag. She turned it on to find 30 text messages and 80 missed calls from John, Mrs. Hudson, and even Mycroft. Sherlock was conspicuously missing. Not that she expected anything else, especially after his last phone call.
Her breath hitched.
'No. I will not think about it!'
She threw the phone on the seat next to her, programmed the address into the GPS and made her way out to Beltway 8. 90 minutes later, she was pulling up to a beachfront house. It was a garish purple and…'is that on stilts?' Apparently it was. From where she sat in the truck, she could see some of the boards in the porch falling apart. The paint was peeling away from the house, and there was a hole in one of the screens in the window. She thought she saw a shadow move one of the dirty curtains, but she couldn't be sure.
The place was dark and somewhat ominous in the light of the fading sun, and other than her earlier perception, there wasn't any sign of movement from within. No cars were parked outside, and she wasn't even sure if she had the right place.
She double-checked the address and the GPS, sighed at the inevitability, and got out of the truck. The stairs were even more rickety when on them, and she hoped she wouldn't fall through them. She heaved a sigh of relief for making it across such a weak porch and rang the doorbell. As she waited she noticed some toys scattered around the lawn and wondered if they were from a previous owner.
There was no answer, so for good measure, Molly knocked. She waited another minute, rocking back and forth on her heels and then tried the doorknob.
Unlocked. That was never a good sign.
The door opened on rusty hinges, the squeaking noise making the hairs on the back of her neck stand up. The inside of the house didn't look much better than the outside. Dust motes danced in the air as she made her way into the surprisingly open foyer. Wallpaper peeled off the walls. A table sat lopsided next to a door on the right, its leg lying next to it. A small lamp sat on the floor nearby.
A pair of eyes peeked around the corner of the door and stared at her as she walked through the hall.
"Hello? Is anyone here?" Her voice was quiet and not as steady as she would have liked, and she took in a deep breath to steady her nerves. 'This is, without a doubt, exactly how Belle felt when she went in search of her father.'
She didn't see the small boy come out from the door as she passed by and continued down the hall. He followed her as she made her way into what she was certain was at one point in time a stunning sitting room. A huge glass window with French doors spanned the entirety of the wall. It faced the ocean and allowed for an open feeling in the room. Natural light flooded the room and cast the different colors of the sunset throughout it.
The wall paper was peeling from the walls in here as well, and the carpet was shredded in some areas. There was a couch sitting against one of the walls. It was shabby and worn, but that wasn't what truly caught the pathologist's attention.
It was the girl on the couch that did.
She had long blonde hair that was tangled in knots around her shoulders. Her already pale skin was flushed, and Molly realized that the girl was shivering. She wore a pair of loose fitting shorts and a long-sleeved t-shirt, and her left leg was clearly broken.
"Oh god," Molly's hand went to her mouth, and she ran to the girl on the couch. She laid the back of her hand on the poor girl's forehead, and checked her pulse with her other hand.
A hiccup from behind her told her that she was not alone, and she turned around slowly, coming face to face with a boy no more than four years old and the spitting image of her older brother. She grimaced at the sad reminder.
The boy's dark eyes were huge in his little round face, and he was quiet when he asked, "Is Lee-Lee gon' be okay? Is she gon' die?" Molly could tell that the child was trying to hold back tears.
A groan from behind them had Molly spinning back around. The girl, who Molly was assuming was 'Lee-Lee' was reaching out to the boy. Her whispery voice cracked as she tried to console him. "I'm going to be fine, Drew. I promise. Aunt Molly is going to take care of us now."
She looked directly at Molly, her fever bright eyes begging.
"Aunt Molly?" Molly couldn't help but parrot.
The girl weakly motioned to herself in answer. "I'm Aensleigh. That's Andrew. You can call us Leigh and Drew. That's what our dad always called us. And you're our Aunt Molly. We're not supposed to know about you, but Dad was terrible at keeping secrets and I came across your name and number in one of his journals once. When Dad found out, he was livid. He made me swear that I would never get into contact with you."
Aensleigh shook her head sadly. "I don't know why he felt that way." She ran out of steam after that and adjusted her position, never taking her eyes off Molly.
Drew whimpered and moved closer to his sister, but didn't touch her. Molly was impressed with how he held himself away in an effort to not cause his sister any more pain.
"Right, then." Molly squared up her shoulders and went back to examining her new-found niece. What she found was not good. The leg was indeed broken. So too were a couple of ribs. She had contusions on her arms, and her nose was bent as if it had been improperly popped back into place.
"We need to get you to a hospital," and she wondered why the girl hadn't gone in the first place.
"No. No hospitals. I have to take care of Drew! Besides they'll be looking for me there." Molly could tell from the twitching of Aesleigh's good leg that she was getting agitated.
She sucked in a breath. That was definite fear she heard in her niece's voice. "Wh-" she cleared her throat, "Who will be looking for you?"
The teenager grabbed Molly's arm. Her grip was much stronger than Molly would have thought possible. "The men who killed our dad! They're looking for us now. It's just luck that they don't know about this place! Please! You have to get us out of here!"
Her voice trailed off again, and Molly feared that she was going to pass out from the pain. "I can't drive you all the way to IAH with that leg the way it is, Leigh. It's no good, and completely unsafe." But even as she said it, an idea was forming in her mind. One that she knew would work. It was just a matter of letting go of some of her pride. She just hoped that the other woman would keep quiet about everything.
Leigh was looking at her now. Trepidation all over her features. She was terrified of whoever it was that had killed her father. (And that was something that Molly would deal with later. There would be some definite justice for her brother.) But first, she needed to call in a long-overdue favor.
She took comfort in the fact that she wouldn't have to talk to either of the brothers.
She didn't know when it had happened, but at some point, Leigh had grabbed her hand. Molly gave it a comforting squeeze before letting go. "Give me a moment. Let me see what I can do."
Standing up, she patted Andrew on his head, took her phone out of her pocket, and stepped out of the room. She opened her contact list and pushed the one phone number that she had never used before. The other line only rang once before someone answered.
"Hello, Anthea? I need your help…"
A/N: You guys are amazing! Thank you for all of your reviews, faves, and story alerts!
Leave a thought for the author?
