Pawn (Nightmares Trilogy #1) by Sophie Davis Read Free Book Online

pause.
    “Okay, right, sure. Bye.” I hung up
quickly, before I could remind my mother the moratorium on
visitation only extended until my eighteenth birthday. My father
was legally free to call and see me as much as he liked
now.
    My parents’ marriage had never been a
happy one. They’d fought constantly about everything. Mostly about
me, though. Even back then mom was overprotective, and Dad thought
she was smothering me. After an epic battle of wills that lasted
well into the night, my father moved out.
    I was twelve then.
    Two days later he picked me up from
school and said we were going on vacation. Apparently, Mom never
received the memo. She called out the National Guard, and my father
was arrested for kidnapping.
    A bitter divorce came next, complete
with a nasty custody battle that my mother won. Initially, my
father had been awarded limited visitation. That didn’t last long.
My mother was still a US Attorney then, and she convinced a judge
that it was in my best interest to sever all ties with my father.
By the time I was thirteen, my mother quit her job and we moved
from our home on the edge of D.C. to the suburbs of
Maryland.
    The laptop hummed to life in front of
me, and I waited while the internet connection was made. I
considered searching for my father online and finding a way to
contact him. But I’d tried that numerous times over the past five
years without success. After the judge had stripped him of his
parental rights, my father became a ghost. He risked my mother’s
wrath once a year to call and wish me happy birthday. He always
called my cell from a blocked number and refused to give me a way
to contact him.
    My cell
phone , I thought, brightening a little. I
hadn’t checked my messages since the previous night. I picked up
the cordless again, this time calling my own voice mail. I typed in
my access code and waited.
    “You have one new message and five
saved messages,” a mechanical voice informed me. I hit one to hear
my messages and crossed my fingers.
    “Please be Dad, please be Dad,” I
chanted.
    “Hey, Eel. Happy birthday, sweetheart.
I’m sorry I missed you, but I hope you did something fun for your
eighteenth.” A fist tightened around my heart at the sound of his
voice. I clutched the phone harder so I wouldn’t miss a word.
“Listen, Eel. I really need to talk to you as soon as possible. Try
and keep your phone nearby and charged. I’ll try to reach you again
tomorrow.”
    The strained quality in my father’s
voice gave me pause. Something was wrong, and he was going to try
to call back tomorrow. Not tomorrow, today. And my phone still
didn’t work. I swore under my breath. I really wanted to talk to my
dad. Not only because it had been a year since our last catch-up
session, but he sounded almost scared in his message. Maybe he was
in some kind of trouble?
    I dialed my voice mail again. This
time I chose the option to change my outgoing message. After the
beep I spoke in a slow, deliberate tone when I said, “You have
reached Endora. My phone is not working, so it is safe to call me
at 410-545-9189 until further notice.” I hoped my father would
understand that giving him the house number and telling him it was
safe to call meant my mother was not home.
    Two hours later, I had yet to work on
my history paper, receive a phone call from my father, stop
obsessing over the lake monster I’d imagined and the boy who’d
pulled me from the water, or figure out how I knew the Bronco would
run the stop sign. Instead, I was sitting on my bed dissecting
every moment of the past twenty-four hours like it was the fetal
pig in my anatomy lab.
    Deciding my fixation was reaching an
unhealthy point, I grabbed the antique-style phone on my bedside
table. When I was younger, I’d been enamored with all things turn
of the century; so when my mother had finally decided I was
responsible enough to have a telephone in my room, she purchased
the 1890s replica. Luckily, I knew Devon’s