Page 48 of Bratva Stalker Kidnaps His Bride

Then the light from one of the eastern windows catches something near the far wall.

A package sits on the floor against the base of the wall, visible from the door, hidden just about enough from sight.

Has someone left it here for me specifically?

Crossing the warehouse floor with my phone still in my hand, my eyes move through the space while my heartbeat pounds in my ears. Crouching down in front of it, I look before I touch it.

It is a flat, sealed package, used for document storage, wrapped in what appears to be oilcloth and secured with a binding that has been knotted carefully.

My name is written on it. Handwritten, the script italicized like whoever wrote this knew exactly who this package was for and wanted there to be no possibility of mistake in its delivery.

The oilcloth binding resists my fingers for a moment before it gives, the knot loosening wearily.

I peel it back to see photographs.

They spill from the package—different sizes, different quality, some printed on paper that belongs to the older, thicker stock of a decade ago and some on the thinner, more recent variety, edges worn on some and clean on others.

My legs fold beneath my weight as I flip through them.

The dust on the concrete is cold through the fabric of my jeans, which I don’t notice for several seconds because of the first photograph.

It is of my father.

He is standing with his back partially turned to whatever camera took it, and he looks considerably older here than in the handful of photographs I have collected over the years through manila folders.

His hair has gone entirely gray at the temples and significantly along the top, and his shoulders carry the weight of a man living a difficult life. But he is upright, and his hands, visible at his sides in the image, which is the thing that breaks me open.

He is alive.

A small sob tears out of my throat and I quickly seal my mouth with the back of my left hand. I set the photograph down gingerly, and I pick up the next one.

My mother is seated in this image, her hair longer than any photograph I have of her, streaked through with silver. Her chin is slightly lowered, as if she is looking at something in her hands, and her face is carefully blank, artificial peace.

I go through the photographs one at a time, suspended in time; the warehouse light and emptiness belongs to a different dimension from the one I come from.

There are dozens of these photographs: thirty, forty, more—spanning what appears from the aging in their faces and the quality of the paper to be a period of several years, possibly as many as eight or ten.

In one, my father is carrying something across a courtyard, in another, my mother is standing near a window with the light falling across her shoulder. Both of them together in three photographs, captured in the loose, unguarded proximity of people who have been living in close quarters for a long time.

And in all of them—beneath the aging, beneath the gray hair and the changed postures—the background never changes. By the fifteenth photograph, I wonder how I missed it.

The same wall in the background of my father’s images—rough stone, with a specific course of darker material running horizontally through it. The same intensity of light through the same window in my mother’s photographs—the angle of it is fixed, only seasonal variations in intensity but the angle is the same.

They must be stuck in one place.

They have been in one place, in the same building or compound or whatever this location is, for years… Possibly for the entirety of the time they have been gone, possibly for longer than I have been looking.

The photographs do not look like surveillance from multiple sources, but a record kept by someone who has known where they were and has been watching and waiting for the right moment to send this package to this warehouse with my name written on the front.

Someone has been watching over them.

Someone, for reasons I do not yet have, has been documenting the proof of their survival across a span of years.

Now, it is all in my hands.

As the light creeping in the warehouse grows weaker, my fingers have gone pale with how tightly I’ve held onto these photographs. Since the letter arrived three months ago—since before that, since I was eight years old and understood for the first time that hope was the most expensive thing, I finally let the creature of my heart do one thing I’ve always stopped it from doing:

I let myself hope.