Page 4 of Deceptive Lies

Twelve days.

Twelve horrific days filled with pain, terror, and the dwindling hope that she was going to be rescued.

No one was coming for her.

That was finally beginning to sink in.

Instead of coming to Egypt to find the proof she’d been looking for to bring a dangerous man to justice, she was going to wind up becoming a casualty of that same man. She’d thought she had what it took to make it in this industry, she wanted to be a good journalist, one who cared more about finding the truth than fame andfortune.

Not like them.

Not like the people who had gotten her father killed.

Shifting her battered body again, Willow did her best to ignore the way the hard ground dug into her. After being given nothing but a little stew to eat once a day since she’d been caught, not only was she weak, but she was beginning to lose weight, her bones protruding where they never did before, making sleeping on the floor that much worse.

Over these last two weeks, she’d moved through a gamut of emotions.

Fear, of course, she’d come here to try to do something good and it had spectacularly backfired. Anger had followed, there was no way she deserved to be subjected to this when she’d come here with the best of intentions to find proof a university professor was, in fact, recruiting young men to join Allah’s Warriors, a small but steadily growing sect and terrorist cell. Acceptance was the next step, she was going to die in this house that looked nice enough on the outside but on the inside was run by a vicious man who enjoyed inflicting pain just because he could.

Now she was mostly numb.

She wanted this to be over.

Not that she had any intention of rolling over and giving up. That wasn't in her nature. She was a fighter, she had to be after living through what she had as a child.

Eight had been much too young to learn that every person in her life had an ulterior motive and most didn't care who they hurt as long as they got what they wanted for themselves.

Valuable lessons, hard as they’d been.

Accepting her fate didn't have to mean giving up. It just meant that she was ready for death when it came for her, but she’d still try to hold it off for as long as possible. Just in case fate decided to throw her a helping hand.

Not giving up meant taking care of herself the best way she could.

Which meant trying to sleep.

Doing her best to ignore everything else, the suffocating heat, the hard ground, the pain coursing through her body, Willow concentrated on evening out her breathing, relaxing each muscle, and calming her brain until finally, shedrifted off.

Only sleep wasn't restful here.

It was just another way to suffer.

Just like that, she was eight years old again, climbing out of her bed when the sounds of someone hammering on the front door dragged her from sleep.

Like the curious child she’d been, Willow climbed out of bed and went to her window, looking down to the front door below to see who was there.

There were men.

Lots of them.

At least twelve that she could see.

She didn't recognize them, but they were yelling her dad’s name, so maybe they were his friends?

A scream stuck in her throat when her dad opened the door and the closest man grabbed him, pulling him out into the front yard.

“No!” Willow screamed as the men began to hit her dad.

Over and over again.

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