Total pages in book: 72
Estimated words: 69909 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 350(@200wpm)___ 280(@250wpm)___ 233(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 69909 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 350(@200wpm)___ 280(@250wpm)___ 233(@300wpm)
Where the fuck are we? How is anyone going to find me?
Is anyone even looking? Is Zeke? Will he come for me?
But it’s worse than that horrible house, I realize, when, once we reach it, he walks me around the back to another building that wasn’t visible from the other side. This one is newer, still dark, pitch black. It’s a large shed or something. We get to the door where I notice the small keypad. Keeping hold of my hair, he punches in a code. There’s a beep before a click and the door opens.
“In,” he says, and shoves me only releasing me when I’m inside. I stumble into the musty smelling place. He closes the door behind him before switching on a light and I look around the windowless room, take in the ancient looking huge bed against the center of the back wall, the leather cuffs hanging off each of the four wooden posts. The mattress is bare and there’s nothing else. No pillows. No blankets. No one sleeps here.
But this isn’t a place for sleep.
The walls are painted black and against one stands a wooden cross. It has leather restraints at the top and bottom for wrists and ankles. From several large, rusted-looking nails hammered into the walls hang various whips. What the hell, is this some sort of kinky playroom?
I turn to look at my captor, take two steps backward. The floor beneath my feet is dirt. Just dirt. My gaze moves to the rings nailed into the ceiling beams, the restraints hanging from them and when I see his grin and watch him pull on a pair of black leather gloves he takes from his pocket, I think no. No. This isn’t a kinky playroom. It’s a torture-room. Worse.
“Where the hell are we?” I ask as he takes a step toward me.
“Somewhere where no one will hear your screams,” he says, advancing toward me so fast, I barely have a chance to make any sound, to turn and try to get away before one of those big, gloved hands closes around my throat. I clutch his forearm as he walks me backward to the wall before slamming my head against it once, twice. My hands fall away from his arm and the room spins before I crumple to the floor.
2
EZEKIEL
Blue is gone. Vanished into thin air.
Paramedics load Isabelle onto a stretcher. She’s conscious and Jericho is by her side.
“The baby. The baby,” Isabelle is saying. She’s disoriented and cries out when they strap her onto the stretcher.
“Her arm is broken,” the paramedic tells Jericho.
“She’s pregnant,” Jericho says.
“Let’s get her in the ambulance. Sooner we’re at the hospital the better.”
“Zeke?” Isabelle calls out.
I turn to her trying to process what the hell happened. Where Blue is.
“Zeke, where’s Blue?” she asks as if reading my mind. She lifts her head. Jericho tries to calm her down. “The man. Oh God. The man—”
Her wide eyes collide with mine. I see both pain and terror in her expression.
“What man?” I ask. “Where is she?”
“Sir, we need to get her into the ambulance.”
“There was a man,” she says as they lift the stretcher. “I saw his face. He crashed his car—” she cries out in agony as the stretcher tilts.
“Christ! Take it easy!” Jericho barks.
The paramedic and Jericho follow her into the ambulance. I grab hold of the door to stop them closing it.
“What man?” I ask.
“From the dinner. The one you were looking at. One of the Councilors’ guards.”
Jericho and I exchange a look. “I need to take my wife to the hospital. Now,” Jericho says. He glances over my shoulder, then back at me. “Go home, Zeke. Change your clothes. Wait there for us. Look in on Angelique. Tell her we’ll be home soon. She’ll expect us to check on her.”
I nod, glancing at Isabelle then back to my brother, realizing how bad this could be for them. Isabelle is only a few months pregnant. What if she loses the baby? “Let me know how she is, will you?”
He nods and I close the door.
Dex is just waking as they load him onto a stretcher. I rush to it.
“Where’s Blue?” I demand.
He blinks, pupils not quite focused. I want to shake him.
“Sir, step away please. Give us room to do our work,” a paramedic says.
“Where is she, Dex?”
“It was no accident,” Dex manages before they roll him away and into a second ambulance.
Police are rerouting traffic. Where the fuck is she? She couldn’t have disappeared.
I scan the street and realize something. The car that crashed into their Rolls Royce is gone.
“Sir, you can’t be here,” a police officer says.
“There was another woman in the car. Where is she?”
The officer looks over my clothes and I follow his gaze, realize why Jericho told me to go home and change. I’m covered in Wyatt Hoxton’s blood.