UNTIL LOVE SETS US APART ( JENLISA)

Chapter 15

Lisa POV

"Are you sure we're in the right place?" I asked Rosé, fidgeting next to her in the car. She reached over and patted my shoulder.

"I'm sure we are," she assured me. "It's going to be alright, Lis. We're going to get her safe again." Rosé had turned the world upside down to find Jennie ever since I had declared my love for her, and I owed big time to her.

I turned to look out of the window and tried to take her words to heart, but it was hard when all I wanted was to see the woman I loved safe once more.

And we had worked so hard to get to this point. I chewed my lip as we drew up on to the street where he was meant to be staying, and forced myself to take a deep breath. This was going to be fine. I had to keep telling myself that. Then I actually might start to believe it.

In the car behind us, Jennie's parents were following close behind. If this was hard for me, I couldn't imagine how hard it had been for them; to think that their daughter, the one they had been so sure was lost forever, had been so close and yet so far to them. And that even now she could be in a danger that they wouldn't be able to save her from.

I had worked closely with them ever since we had put the pieces together and realized where she had been taken, and while they had done their best to keep their game faces on, I could tell that the agony of this was burning them from the inside, the same way it was burning me.

"What do we do?" Mrs kim had asked helplessly, as Rosé and I paced around their living room, trying to figure out the best way to approach this mess.

"We need to start by running down every thing that we know about her," Rosé kneeled next to Mrs kim, and took her hand. I felt a swell of pride seeing her like that. My sister had such a deep well of compassion within her, and I knew that I wouldn't have been able to get through any of this if it hadn't been for her.

"And how do we do that?" I asked her. She turned to me.

"I'll talk to all the girls we have down in the shelter right now," she informed. "And then we take it to the police. They were part of the investigation into the brothel in the first place; they should have some decent information about the people who frequented it and the people who ran it."

I nodded, trying to keep my face from show ing the panic I was feeling at that moment. Because I had a feeling I knew exactly who had taken her. That pimp, the one who she had been so certain she had seen at the shopping center. If only I had taken her more seriously then.

Everything kicked into high gear in the days following the revelation - I went with Rosé to the shelter to help out as much as I could. I found myself even more intent on getting Jennie back once I had spent some time with other women who were part of the same brothel. All of them had been hurt in ways I could never imagine. I couldn't believe a human being inflicting such misery on an other, and Jennie could be stuck in the middle of that even as I sat there with them.

I lay in bed at night, my arms craving for her. It was something I had never felt before, a true craving for another human being, and I knew it was not physical. I needed her near me because I wanted her safe, and I knew the only way to guarantee that was if we got her out of whatever situation she was trapped in at that moment.

Irene  had been reaching out to me constantly over the last few days, and I had been doing everything I could to ignore her increasing attention. I just wanted her to go away, to leave me alone, and to give me some space so that I could figure out what we were going to do about Jennie. Any other time, I might have been kinder to her, happier to turn her down more gently than I might have before, but now every time my phone buzzed with a message, and I saw it was from her, I found myself filling with anger. I wanted her gone from my life, but she obviously didn't feel the same way.