Total pages in book: 76
Estimated words: 74898 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 374(@200wpm)___ 300(@250wpm)___ 250(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 74898 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 374(@200wpm)___ 300(@250wpm)___ 250(@300wpm)
“But…” Mina asked carefully neutral.
“But my father and mother still have some on a jump drive.” I growled under my throat. “And this wasn’t the only thing the two of them found. They found hundreds of thousands of pictures, all of children.”
She moaned beside me.
I couldn’t look at her, my shame was too great.
“And there were manifests. Times and dates that showed shipments,” I said. “Shipments that I found out later were of children who had been kidnapped from all over the country, sold and then delivered all over the world to buyers who had a desire for little kids.”
Mina moved, ran straight to the bathroom, and threw up her breakfast into the non-working toilet.
I stayed where I was, frozen in my own horror.
“What else?” Mina croaked from the bathroom.
“We took everything we found to Silas, who took it to Lynn. Lynn had already been investigating them, unbeknownst to me, but what we found on them wasn’t enough. The search, was done illegally, so it couldn’t be used against them,” I continued. “So I pledged to help them find whatever they wanted me to find. I started digging right away, and in doing so, I ruined our lives.”
“How?”
She was sitting on the tile floor of the bathroom, staring at me with her hands wrapped tightly around her knees.
“I tried to help. I had no fuckin’ clue what I was dealing with at the time. I was so incensed and full of rage that I couldn’t see how far I was getting myself in until I was already at the bottom.” I looked away. “Then, not paying attention, I tried to help Rue that day.”
She looked at me sharply.
My club brother had trouble following his woman, and I’d been helping watch over her when someone had tried to set her house on fire with her in it.
“While I was trying to help her, I got a message.”
She sat up to her knees, reading the change in me immediately.
I gathered her clothes, leaving her panties that had some questionable liquid on them, and handed them to her.
She dressed without another word.
“I was to either agree to help them, or they’d shoot you.”
“But…”
“They had a rifle pointed at your head. You were at work, in a room with a patient. You were smiling and had your favorite blue scrubs on with the white flowers. The ones I’d seen you leave for work in that morning.”
Her eyes went huge. “I could see you through the scope. They’d taken a picture and had sent it to me. I was to agree to help them, or they’d kill you. Right then and there.”
“And you faked your death?” she gasped.
“Not intentionally, no,” I disagreed. “That was just how it worked out. I agreed, yes, and about that time a beam fell in front of me, blocking my exit.”
“So, you really did die.”
I nodded.
“Twice, actually,” I said. “I was clinically dead. On the way to the hospital, it was just a formality since I was a police officer. They wanted to say that they did everything that they possibly could. With the brothers doing CPR on me, it’d gotten enough oxygen into my lungs that when they started CPR in the ambulance, it actually worked. I regained a pulse. I wasn’t going to live, though. My lungs were fucked up, and they weren’t sure if I’d suffered oxygen deprivation or not. I was on the road to death. But somehow…” I shook my head. “I don’t know how they did it. Falsified patient reports. Reported me dead. Nobody, luckily, requested to see my body.” I looked at her pointedly. “It all worked out perfectly for my parents to steal me away. They searched donor registries, and then killed him for his lungs…I had a lung transplant…”
“The scar,” she whispered, eyeing my chest.
I nodded. “The scar.”
“They saved you.”
I nodded. “They saved me…but only so I could live to kill for them. Be their puppet.”
She sucked in a breath. “What’d they make you do?”
“That first seven months I was little more than a bunny. I couldn’t do a damn thing because I was learning how to breathe again.”
She waited.
“The first job they sent me out on, they wanted to test my loyalty to their cause.”
Her eyes closed, and she sat down on the toilet as she waited for me to say it.
“They wanted me to assassinate Silas.”
Her eyes snapped open.
“You tried.”
I nodded.
“I was there, waiting to do it, with a man standing over me ready to blow my brains out if I didn’t connect.”
My eyes lost focus as I remembered that day in such vivid clarity that it almost hurt to think about.
I’d seen him, through the scope of my rifle. I’d watched him reach into his pocket, look at his phone, and smile, my finger caressing the trigger.
“And…”
“And I couldn’t do it. That man, he’d done so much for me. I couldn’t do it.” I closed my eyes. “I didn’t have you. I didn’t have Sienna. I didn’t care.”