Series: The Sacrifice Series by Natasha Knight
Total pages in book: 80
Estimated words: 76048 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 380(@200wpm)___ 304(@250wpm)___ 253(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 76048 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 380(@200wpm)___ 304(@250wpm)___ 253(@300wpm)
She’s here because of me.
Raven bumps my bound feet with hers, drawing my attention to her face. She doesn’t have to speak. We’ve always been able to communicate this way, and I can hear her perfectly without words.
Calm down. It’s going to be okay.
She’s still clinging to that hope, but she knows as well as I do how this will end. She was with me in the aftermath of Caleb’s brutality. She watched as my physical wounds healed, but the mental scars never did. All my sisters saw the way I changed—the way I shut down, closed off my emotions, and became a different person. One who smiled when she was supposed to. One who laughed when it seemed appropriate. It wasn’t real.
I don’t know when the last time anything was… except for maybe when I was with Azrael.
That thought feels like another punch to the gut, and a wave of grief washes over me as I consider that he tricked me too. Before him, I’d been living on autopilot for so long, coasting along perfectly fine as a one-dimensional caricature of my former self. But then he brought me into his home, life, and bed… and made me feel things. Things I swore I’d never feel.
A well of pain opens inside me as the first tear falls down my cheek. I can’t wipe it away because our hands are bound, which only makes it more humiliating when Raven notices it. I’ve always wanted her to believe I was made of stronger stuff, but as it turns out, my titanium heart isn’t quite as impenetrable as I’d hoped.
“Willow,” she whispers, her voice fracturing as she tries to comfort me in the only way she can.
“Shut up,” Caleb growls from the passenger seat, his head whipping in our direction.
“Maybe we should stop and baptize her now.” The driver leers at me in the rearview mirror.
“What did I fucking tell you?” Caleb snarls.
The driver tenses, his knuckles turning white against the steering wheel. “We’re supposed to share. That’s our right—”
His words halt abruptly when Caleb reaches across the vehicle and presses a pistol to the driver’s head. “Stop the van.”
The man swallows audibly, his jaw tight as he stares straight ahead. “I was wrong. We need to keep going. There’s too much heat on us.”
“Stop the fucking van,” Caleb repeats.
“But we ain’t supposed to—”
Caleb pistol whips the driver, sending the van skidding off the road and into the ditch with a violent jolt. Raven and I scream as we slam against the metal walls, and Bec manages a whimper when we come to a jarring stop.
“Now look what you did,” the driver grunts. “Frederik was right. You weren’t ready to leave prison—”
Caleb launches across the front seat, slamming his pistol into the driver’s face again. There’s a sickening crunch, followed by another, as he starts to pummel him over and over.
Blood spatters across the windshield, and rage bleeds into Caleb’s voice as he makes his violent declaration. “She. Belongs. To. Me.”
Frantically, I wiggle my wrists, trying to loosen my binds while Raven does the same. Bec watches, her eyes wide, and I know she doesn’t have the strength. If, by some miracle, we can get ours undone, I don’t know what we’ll do next. I just know we have to try.
“What’s going on in here?” The passenger door opens, and another voice filters in from outside. It’s one of the men from the vehicle behind us. “Holy shit, Caleb. Frederik isn’t going to be happy about this.”
“Fuck off,” Caleb spits. “Leave us be.”
There’s a pause, then the door shuts, followed by the sound of the truck leaving. I manage to loosen the knot around my wrists, but not enough to slip free. When I glance around, I notice a small piece of the metal panel behind me is bent. I don’t know how sharp it is, but it’s all I’ve got right now, so I back myself up against it and start to rub the rope up and down, sawing through it with painstaking slowness.
I can feel it fraying, starting to give, and hope alights within me. But then Caleb stops his assault on the driver, and when I glance up, I realize it’s because he’s dead. He beat him to death right there in the seat the same way he nearly took my life before. Without any care, he opens the door and shoves the limp body outside, the thud solid and final.
I work manically, sawing the rope harder and faster until Caleb turns his brutal gaze on me.
“No!” Raven screams as he pushes between the seats, coming for me. “I’ll kill you, motherfucker!”
She tries to stop him by flailing her body into his path, and he kicks her across the van so viciously her head bounces off the metal, and she goes limp.