Page 254 of At the Edge of Surrender

Now, he shoved at my back as he urged me through the dense woods.

It was the same man who had targeted me at the grocery store. I had known it in an instant.

The same old recognition had finally struck me as a slew of visions and memories impaled.

The bare glimpse I’d caught of a man with brown hair with the emblem embroidered on the leather vest he’d worn.

The same type of vest that I found in Kane’s closet.

Kane who I’d run from—who Ishouldrun from—but still, who my spirit was howling for. Praying for him to come for me.

I couldn’t process it all.

This horror I felt against the pleas my soul shouted.

Kane told me that he lived this life to repay the horrible deeds he had committed. The sins that he shared with me as if he trusted me to hold them. But how could it be enough? How could it be enough after what he’d done?

Old wounds thrashed from where I’d kept them hidden. Three days of darkness, blindfolds and sacks over our eyes. The torture we’d endured, our bodies used as if we were nothing.

Playthings to be abused.

Confused.

Disoriented.

Our consciousness coming in and out as the men had come and gone. Their seedy, disgusting laughter. The stench of their scents.

Those words wound on a loop.

“Don’t fuckin’ fight me, you bitch.”

The bracelet.

I knew. Oh, God, I knew.

Kane had done this, along with the bastard who now held me hostage.

Because of them, Jana was gone.

Lightheadedness swam as my face throbbed. My left eye wasnearly swollen shut from the impact of the gun, but nothing hurt quite as badly as my heart.

“Let me go.” I thrashed against him, the words grit with the adrenaline that flooded my body as we stumbled out into a small break in the trees.

It was the smallest meadow, and what had to be the same stream as on Kane’s property ran through it.

The degenerate laughed a morbid sound. “Nah, I have plans for you. Same ones I had for your bitch sister who was putting her nose into places it shouldn’t go. Digging around like she thought she was going to stop us.”

Confusion ran rampant while tendrils of awareness wisped at the edges of my consciousness.

The intuition I’d had that something was off.

That she hadn’t just…fallen.

Emmalee.

Emmalee.

My spirit moaned as he kept shoving me through the brush.

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