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I held tighter.
Jessica looked up at me beneath the lock of hair that fell in her face. “Those whims became horrible, Savannah. We were tied up. Forced. Used. Nothing but playthings and entertainment.”
Her words got tangled as she forced out the next. “Brianna snapped one night… She started screaming that she was going to expose every person there. Screaming that she was going to go to her husband who was the Sheriff and give every single name. Out them all. Jack had laughed, humoring her, like she wasn’t anything to worry about.”
Sadness hitched on the shaky breath Jessica inhaled. “When Jack wasn’t paying attention, she grabbed me the same way she’d done that first night…her nails cutting into my skin as if she was trying to get through to me. She said she was going to run, and she wanted me to go with her. She was going to empty out her bank account, take off, and start new. But not before she let her husband know what Jack was doing. She was dead the next day.”
Grief blurred my eyes, my heart torn in a thousand directions.
“Who killed her?”
“Samson.”
God. Disgust lined my insides. Ezra had speculated that it had to have been him, but knowing it?
She chewed at the inside of her cheek as her head bobbed through the disorder. “Samson never participated, but he was on the payroll. There to cover tracks. To make sure no one picked up a trace of what was happening. An insider so Jack would always be one step ahead of the authorities.”
“And after Brianna was killed, Jack didn’t let you leave?”
It was all clicking together. These sick, twisted pieces. I’d seen so much cruelty in my life, but this? It went so much deeper than I could have imagined.
“I was never allowed to leave the basement again.” Her words quivered as she was taken back to the horrors that she’d just been freed from. “Brianna was the example of what would happen to us if we ever tried. Jack had me right where he wanted me. Reliant. Weak. No one having a clue where I was. No one to know I’d gone missing. It was the exact same thing he’d done to the others.”
Jessica blinked slowly, wading through a reality she wished hadn’t existed. “I don’t even know how long I’d been down there when one of the men came to me. He asked me who I trusted most…who would fight to find me…and I gave him your name.”
“Hayden. He sent me the journal.”
Guilt burned through my spirit. God, I’d been so wrong about him, and he’d been killed for it.
Killed for trying to save my sister and the other women down there.
If I’d done it differently, would he still be alive?
Sorrow cut me in half. I hated it, wished I could go back and do it all differently. But I guessed all of us would have done it differently if we’d really understood what was happening. But this cesspool had been so deep and ugly that there’d been no logical, prudent way to move through it.
Jessica’s nod was slow. “I knew the first time he came down into the basement that he wasn’t like the others. He seemed…shocked. Completely shocked by what was happening down there. He never participated. I got the sense he was a prisoner every bit as much as me but in a different way. Jack had that way about him. Keeping every person around him under his thumb. Either terrified of what he would do or so swept up by his promises that you didn’t realize what was happening until it was too late.”
I set my palm on her tear-stained cheek. “Jack is gone now, and he can’t hurt you anymore.”
She curled her hand around my wrist. “Because you never gave up on me. You fought for me. You saved me.”
My head shook, and I was barely able to push out the words through the emotion. “I could never forget you, and I will fight for you for all my days. I promised you before and I’ll promise it again. You can always trust that.”
She inhaled. “I should have listened to you all the times you told me not to trust anyone but you.”
Love billowed, a flood that ran just under the surface of my skin. Covering me like a shield. “I think we were just trusting the wrong people, Jessica.”
Her blue eyes flicked back and forth across my face. “You seem different.”
“I am different.”
“The Sheriff?” she asked.
My nod was slow. “I came here looking for you, Jessica, and I am so thankful that I found you. So thankful. But I also found everything that I never knew that I needed. I found my heart.”
“I guess the only thing we can be thankful for is that something good came out of this mess. That you found joy.”
