Page 39 of Nines's Time

“You call him, I’m heading out.” I start past them, looking at my phone. Sure enough, there’s a GPS location. “Looks like she’s out in the woods near the farm,” I announce and look between Blow and Sniper.

“My folks’ farm?” Sniper frowns.

“Yeah.” I nod.

The farm isn’t just any farm or Sniper’s folks. They’d passed away a while ago and left it to him. Since then, it’s been maintained by a friend of the club under the stipulation they can keep the profits from running the place, and we use it whenever we need. They don’t bat an eye at what we do. In fact, they help us with clean up. On the farm there’s a shit ton of hogs, a couple cows, and two horses.

Sniper narrows his gaze, his brows meeting in the middle. “Fuckin’ hell.”

“Fuck, he wouldn’t take her there, would he?” Nerd asks eyes on his dad. He’d intended to leave this afternoon after church, but that won’t be happening now.

“What?” Blow growls before I can. “Where are you talking about?”

Sniper’s gaze bounces between Blow and me. “The farm isn’t just about what’s being used by Tyler,” he says, blowing out a breath. “Back when my folks had it and those before them . . . there’s a lot of land there.”

“What Sniper’s trying to say is, they didn’t just raise hogs and sell them, they butchered them in a cabin that they had near the edge of the land far from the farm itself,” Nerd finishes for his dad.

Fuck.

“Let’s go,” I grind out, more than ready to get to Meadow before it’s too late.

I can’t lose her. I can’t.

CHAPTERTWENTY-FOUR

MEADOW

After what feels like hours, but could only be a couple of minutes, Johnathan walks in, his eyes coming to me, eyes glittering with amusement. I don’t know where his minion went after he hung me up in here. He’d left and never came back.

“Glad to see you hanging around,” he sneers.

If my arms weren’t throbbing from being shackled and raised above my head, I’d roll my eyes and tell him to go to hell, but then again, I know better and will end up beaten. Though that’s sure to happen, considering I’m dangling here, so instead, I whisper the one question that’s always plagued me. “Why?”

“Why?” he mimics. “Why what?”

“Why have you done all of this?”

“Because I can.” He grins deviously. “Because everything that should have been was fucked from the beginning.” The grin drops from his face and his features contort, making him look like the monster he truly is. “Because my life was supposed to be with the love of my life, and she ruined everything by falling for someone else.”

“Calyx,” I whisper the name. Johnathan whirls on me and smacks me hard enough that I taste blood on my lips.

“Don’t you say that name to me,” he snarls. “You should never have come here or learned that name.” He starts pacing back and forth. “You forced me to come back here and take back what belongs to me.”

“I don’t belong to anyone,” I declare, earning another blow to my face.

“You fucking do. You and Libby are mine. Mine. Mine. Mine. She and you. To do as I please.”

I swallow down the bile that threatens to come up as I watch Johnathan.

He points his finger at me as he stalks over to the table against the wall in front of me. “You’ll finish paying for what your mother did. Soon you’ll be where you belong. You were supposed to go with Johnny, be his bride, it’s what he bought you for, but then he ended up dead. Now, you’ll go to his uncle. He’s due to pick you up in a couple hours. He doesn’t care what I do to you, long as I leave you breathing.”

He sold me to Johnny? Why didn’t I ever figure that out?

“What did Libby do?” I ask, unsure if I want to know.

“She got pregnant with you. She was going to marry that fucker, Calyx. She was mine, and she was going to leave me.” Johnathan shakes his head, looks down at the table, and picks up a knife before turning back to me. He stares at me with beady eyes. “If not for him, she would have been mine always. I would never have had to share her attention. I did what I had to and threatened her with killing Calyx, with paying someone off to kill him while he was away. She begged me not to go after him. Said she’d do whatever I wanted. She was already pregnant with you, and I told her you both would belong to me. She would become my slave, do as I told her.”

My stomach churns as I think of what he made her do. I don’t need him to tell me that part of his story. I already know.

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