Total pages in book: 103
Estimated words: 96167 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 481(@200wpm)___ 385(@250wpm)___ 321(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 96167 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 481(@200wpm)___ 385(@250wpm)___ 321(@300wpm)
She retrieved her phone from her purse and pulled up her contact list. A shudder raced through her as she stared at the last number dialed.
Van Quiso.
The man who kidnapped her when she was seventeen.
The man who imprisoned her for a year and trained her to be the perfect slave.
As it turned out, he hadn’t died from that gunshot wound in his shoulder.
No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t parse her feelings about that. They ran too deep, too entangled and confusing, much like everything else in her life. So she detached from it, held herself at a distance, and focused on the goal. She had a slave trader to torture and kidnapped girls to save.
She tapped his name on the screen. As the call connected, her heartbeat roared past her ears.
Van answered with silence.
“It’s done and ready for pick up.” She steeled her breath.
“On my way.” He disconnected.
She slumped on the edge of the mattress, her shoulders loosening.
Ironically, asking her kidnapper to help her take down other kidnappers wasn’t the worst call she had to make. That special pang of dread was reserved for her impending conversation with Matias.
God, she missed him. Almost as much as she feared him.
A soon-to-be dead man lay hogtied beside her, eyes closed and mouth stretched around the balled up maxi pad. She could dispose of the body herself. At the risk of getting caught and sentenced for murder.
If she involved Matias, he would shield her from the law. At the risk of him finally locating her.
Then what? Whatever connection they’d shared as children was a distant memory. She knew nothing about the man he’d become.
If his overbearing, razor-sharp tone over the phone was any indication, he hadn’t lost his protective ownership over her.
But she hadn’t spoken to him in four years. What if he’d forgotten about her? What if he was married?
Her heart punched painfully, and she reached up to rub her chest.
There had been a time when he’d gallantly stood between her and anything that threatened to harm her. If he knew she was taking dangerous risks, would he try to stop her? She was so close to finishing this. So fucking close.
And maybe she was protective of him, too. Maybe she still cared for him against her better judgment. If that were true, she couldn’t take him where she was going.
She needed to forget about him.
Except she couldn’t. In the back of her fucked up mind, she looked forward to her next kill just so she’d have a reason to hear his voice again.
CAMILA PACED BESIDE THE floor-to-ceiling windows in Van’s living room, her impatience burning a short fuse. She dragged a hand through her hair, fingers snagging in the shoulder-length, black strands. She needed a fucking haircut.
She needed a lot of things.
Sighing, she turned to Van. “Why won’t he fucking talk?”
After a week of interrogation, Larry McGregor was a goddamn mute. Strapped naked on a table in Van’s garage, he’d endured sleep deprivation, starvation, solitary confinement, and her endless threats of permanent disfigurement.
All he had to do was tell her who he worked for and where he was supposed to deliver the girl he’d kidnapped. Two simple answers and his suffering would end.
Van reclined on the couch and rolled a toothpick between his lips. “You need to up your game.”
“Oh, please enlighten me.” She narrowed her eyes, her voice edged with bitter resentment.
She’d spent an eternal year in Van’s shackles, learning obedience one welt at a time. At least this house didn’t have an attic. She didn’t need any more reminders of him whipping her body and picking apart her mind. He probably would have taken her virginity, too, but the man who had intended to buy her wanted that sick pleasure.
Van never managed to break her, though. What made him think he could give advice on breaking Larry McGregor?
Tossing his chewed toothpick on the coffee table, he removed a new one from his pocket. “Threaten his kids.”
As a father, Van knew all too well how effective that was. But she couldn’t do it. Even if it were a hollow threat, she refused to stoop to that level.
“No innocents.”
She’d been an innocent kid once, one of the reasons Van had captured her. Back then, he was a vicious son of a bitch. Still was. But the past four years had diluted some of his poisonous nature. Or maybe his wife had something to do with that.
Unfortunately, his wife had put a full stop on Camila’s plan to chop off Larry’s fingers.
“Amber?” she shouted toward the second-story loft, where the strange woman had vanished moments earlier.
Amber approached the railing upstairs, her brown hair cascading in curls around her model-perfect face.
How Van had been able to coerce a beauty pageant queen into marrying him was anyone’s guess. He’d kidnapped her, for fuck’s sake. Yanked her right out of her house and imprisoned her in this remote cabin, not to be sold, but to be used as his own personal sex slave.