Page 25 of Reclaiming his Honor
The men started for the door when Lewis spoke up. “Is there a dog racing track around here?”
Mac cocked his head. “I don’t know. Why?”
“Something Turner said back when we still lived in Mobile. My uncle Roger had this dog, an old German Shepard. Turner used to yell at it, said you had to be mean to dogs or they would never respect you. I got mad at him, and he told me all about how he used to race dogs for money when he was growing up, near the Georgia border.”
Moto’s fingers were flying across the keyboard. “Ernesto Montalbano Raceway. Thirty-five miles from here. Closed in 1985, scheduled to be demolished at the end of the year. Checking search history.” Mac held his breath as he waited for Moto to do his magic. “Got it,” said Moto. “A search for Montalbano Raceway was made from this machine two days ago.”
Mac clapped Lewis on the back. “Good going, son.” He turned to Sloan and Moto. “Let’s go.”
“I’m coming with you,” said Lewis.
Mac shook his head. “It’s too dangerous. We have no idea what we’re up against.”
Sloan and Moto squeezed past them and out the door, the latter carrying Turner’s laptop.
“You might need me,” said Lewis. “Maybe I can help some more.”
Suddenly, he wasn’t a twenty-two year-old man. He was a ten year-old kid, desperate for Mac’s attention and begging to come to go to the bar with him. Mac hesitated. “Okay, but if I tell you to stay in the car, you stay in the car.”
Lewis agreed, and the O’Brady men headed out of the hotel room and into the humid night, in search of Turner and the only woman Mac had ever loved.
CHAPTER15
Turner led Ellie through the dark stadium hallway, her hands tied behind her back with a painfully tight wire that dug into her skin. She tried to keep the wire from going deeper into her skin, but the way he was pulling on her arm made it impossible to keep any slack in the line. “You’re hurting me, Turner.”
“You hurt me more than you could know, Ellie.” He yanked on her arm harder than before.
Their footsteps echoed in the cavernous concrete structure, the smell of dank, humid air seeming to permeate every crevice. She wondered where he was taking her, but she didn’t dare ask. She’d tried pretending to be on his side when they first got out of the car. She’d told him she was in love with him and desperate to become his wife, but he simply laughed at her attempts to deceive him and tugged the wire more tightly around her wrists.
She needed to be taught a lesson, he said, though it was a lesson she now fully expected to end in death.
He talked as they walked, telling her about his experiences with Godak, the women he’d abducted and the things those women had gone through before their macabre deaths. Each had been raped by Turner and tortured by Godak before being strangled in the basement of Godak’s home some days or even weeks later.
Ellie couldn’t stand to think Ursula had been alive for weeks enduring that fate at the hands of those madmen, and all because Ellie had been unable to work. It was a cruel twist of fate, a moment’s decision to stay with a sick child, that had spared one woman’s life and taken another’s.
There will be no sparing my life this time.
She should have been terrified, and she was afraid, but more than anything, she was filled with regret at what might have been. Mac had only just come back into her life. She would never get the chance to know him again, never have the opportunity to love him and watch him be a part of their children’s lives.
She hoped they would find their way without her. She hoped Lewis would be less thick-headed and let Mac into his life. They were two peas in a pod, her men, just as she herself had been so very much like Shonda. Callie would be okay, so full of love and always open to receiving more of it. She thanked the universe for having each of her children in her life.
Turner stopped at an opening in the wall, a doorway of some kind. “Come on,” he urged. “This is where we’re spending the night.” He all but pushed her into a cold, damp room, the concrete floor covered in thin industrial carpet. “The honeymoon suite, if you will.” He chuckled as Ellie’s stomach roiled.
“I never would have married you,” she said quietly, testing the waters to see how he’d react. She didn’t expect the force of the blow as he struck her face, or the fierce strength of his hands as they gripped her upper arms.
“You will do as I say.”
She lifted her chin. “I will not.” This time, she was unsurprised by the blow. Her head hung down, her chin nearly touching her chest. How nice it would be to leave it there, to end this face-off and be free of this experience. She longed for death, if it meant she could escape, and she wondered if this was how her dear cousin had felt at the hands of this man.
How did I not see it? How could I have ever believed Turner to be a good man?
She’d always thought of herself as being a good judge of character, which struck her as wildly funny now. She grinned, working to keep the laughter from bubbling up. She was hysterical, and she knew it.
God, take me now.
Please.
Take me now and let me rest in peace.
