Total pages in book: 196
Estimated words: 180438 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 902(@200wpm)___ 722(@250wpm)___ 601(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 180438 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 902(@200wpm)___ 722(@250wpm)___ 601(@300wpm)
Mary was a bit easier to deal with than I expected; she didn’t ask as many questions as I’d thought she would, but then again, she seemed very distracted, maybe because she was dealing with some issues of her own. Scott and Matt were pretty much the same, and I wondered what the nieces, as I’d come to call them, had done to them in the last twenty-four hours to make them act this way.
All the same, I was glad for it since I didn’t have the acting skills needed to keep up the façade for long. They accepted my excuse that Saunders was willing to put me up since I had so much work to do on his project and didn’t seem too put out that I didn’t accept their halfhearted offers of a place to stay if I didn’t want to stay at a hotel until this all blew over.
As preoccupied as they all seemed to be, especially Scott, his main interest was in how things were going with the Saunders group. I’d been coached to tell him that Saunders would be getting in touch with him soon, and that seemed to pacify him as he was all about the money. Matt was more interested in when he could see me next, which reminded me of the things Elena had told me earlier about him and what it was he was really doing in my life.
Of everyone, I think I felt the most betrayed by him, only because of the essence of our relationship. He’d portrayed himself as a righteous person, someone I could trust. And because of him, I now have to revisit my every thought and belief of the last six or seven years. Knowing that the whole time I was trying to get myself together, he had been using my weakness against me is something I find hard to deal with.
Not only because I now know he must’ve been laughing at me behind my back but because he’d played with my head in a way that might’ve been hard to come back from had it not been for these strangers that had come to the rescue, as well as the woman I didn’t deserve. Heaven knows how long it would’ve taken me to make peace with all this had the men not been here to reassure me that this was not my doing.
I’ve been accused of and been guilty of some serious shit in my life, mostly in my wayward youth, but none of it comes even remotely close to this monstrous shit. Had Lyon not shown me the proof, I doubt I would have so easily accepted it as truth. But seeing some of the faces of the young girls who had come backstage to meet me over the years and then reading the reports of their disappearances not long after that somehow never made it into the news, there was no way to deny it.
Of course, I didn’t remember all their faces, but there was evidence that they had indeed been to my concerts because more than one account made mention of them being last seen at one or of them disappearing not long after having attended one. In most cases, it was days after they’d met with me, I guess as a way to hide the connection. But that wasn’t all. Some of the girls had posted about our meeting or the fact that they had been invited to a meet and greet.
It was a gut punch to see the smiling innocent faces, some of them wearing braces, young, with their whole lives ahead of them, full of excitement because they were going to meet their favorite artist, only to be snatched away days later and taken to a world of hell on earth. After seeing that, it was hard not to blame myself. And I wished like hell that someone had seen something or said something sooner because the numbers these guys were throwing around were nothing to sneeze at.
With all the evidence laid out in front of me, it was hard to imagine that no one had put the pieces together after all these years, and I was disheartened to learn, once Lyon revealed the truth, that Mary, Scott, and whoever else was behind them, had threatened those families not to mention my name in anything to do with their kid’s disappearance. That just made the whole thing seem even more diabolical.
The thought that there were people out there who might actually believe I had a hand in all this leaves me cold, and I plan to make things right with each and every one of those families as soon as we rescue their loved ones, something Lyon reassures me can be done as long as they get the information needed. Which is where their men moving into my house comes in, I assume.