Total pages in book: 78
Estimated words: 77422 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 387(@200wpm)___ 310(@250wpm)___ 258(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 77422 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 387(@200wpm)___ 310(@250wpm)___ 258(@300wpm)
Most knew my story.
Most had also caught me doing something illegal over the last month. Lucky for me, they hadn’t booked me.
They’d obviously been reporting it to their boss, though, which would explain why I’d just been put on administrative leave for the unforeseeable future.
My phone rang the moment I walked into the cool night air, and I put it to my ear.
“Hello?”
“We had a sighting. She’s somewhere in Utah.”
By the time we got to Utah, Wolf and I, the trail was cold.
And it continued to stay cold for two more fucking months.
***
July
My breathing was choppy as I looked out of the blacked out windows of the big rig I was in at the man that I loved with all my heart.
“Dean,” I tried to whisper.
Dean’s eyes lifted to the big rig as he did a scan of the truck.
The truck was carrying cows.
How did I know, you ask?
Because I was in there with them.
The smell of the manure was so disgusting that I could hardly breathe.
To make matters worse, I was bound and gagged, tied to a chair in the middle section of the trailer, cows behind and in front of me.
There was also one tied to the post on either side of me.
I’d made friends with the one to my left, mainly because she’d peed on my foot, unable to go anywhere else with how she’d been tied.
When the truck moved far enough away that Dean couldn’t see me anymore, and I couldn’t see him, I let the tears slip from my eyes.
The last month had been terrible.
I hadn’t eaten more than one meal a day in well over thirty days, and I hadn’t slept more than the odd hour here or there since then, either.
My eyes left the passing countryside to settle on Raven who was across the trailer from me, her back up against the disgustingly filthy divider between the stalls.
I didn’t look behind me.
If I didn’t know what was there, it was better, I’d found.
Our eyes connected, and sympathy showed in her eyes.
Sympathy for me. For what I was going through.
Raven, I’d learned, had been dating Jensen and had inadvertently been brought into this entire mess when she overheard Jensen and Barrett talking about kidnapping me.
Now, for the tenth time since I’d been taken, we were being moved.
Lucky for Jensen, and unlucky for us, he had a brother who was a truck driver.
While Jensen and Barrett waited for the buyer of my contract to make travel and flight arrangements—something they didn’t bother to hide from me as they spoke in detail about what was about to happen to me—Jensen’s brother drove us around in his big rig trailer while he transported various cargo all over the country.
I’d been to Mississippi, Utah, Alaska, New York, and everywhere in between.
I’d learned that being on the move was key to staying hidden from the people that were looking for you. Something I wished I never, ever learned.
Raven’s eyes went to my belly, and then to my face, asking silently if I was okay.
I nodded, even though my stomach was roiling.
Thankfully, being kidnapped and beaten on a daily basis gave me a good reason to be throwing up, otherwise I would’ve never been able to hide my pregnancy from the men who’d been my captors over the last thirty days.
Compared to the day that Dean had offered up the news that he thought I might be pregnant, now I could no longer deny what I knew.
I was pregnant. How pregnant, I didn’t know. Without a doctor to confirm, I could only go on my suspicions.
I could also see the difference in my body, something that was becoming increasingly harder to hide from the men that watched my every move.
Raven was a huge part of the reason that I’d been able to hide it as long as I had.
She was taking care of me, shielding me from everything and anything that she could.
And I would forever be grateful to her for that.
I gave her a nod and returned my eyes to look out the oval holes of the trailer we were in.
My eyes lit on a familiar red pickup as it passed, and everything inside of me cried out in protest.
“Don’t leave me!” I tried to cry.
He didn’t hear me.
Chapter 20
That moment you realize that you just pissed off the one man in the world that would kill everything in his path to get to the woman he loved.
-Wolf’s secret thoughts
Dean
Two months later
I was about to reply when his phone rang, Ozzy Osbourne’s Crazy Train filling the cab of the truck, interrupting my reply.
“Hold on, Dean,” he said. “That’s Griffin’s ringtone.”
Wolf sat back so he could reach his phone. We’d been discussing possible sightings, leaning over the center console with a map in between us, as he put tacks where there’d been sightings.