He tries to speak again. “Wait, no, just le—”
I raise the gun and fire.
The bullet tears through his skull. His head snaps backward as blood and bone burst out behind him and spray across the gravel and the side of the car. His body collapses immediately, lifeless before it even finishes hitting the ground.
Smoke drifts faintly from the barrel in the cold air.
“Jesus Christ,” Travis mutters from the car. “Fuck, Seth. Is anyone’s skull safe from a bullet around you?”
I don't answer.
I walk back to the door and shut it.
Because no, it is not. Not if they had a hand in what happened to her. Not if they fed her into this place.
Beau steps out from the other side, gun in hand. His eyes stay on the manor.
So do mine.
I rack a fresh round into the chamber.
“Let’s go get my girl.”
Chapter 26
Brooke
Ikeep thinking about Seth as a kid.
Ten years old. An age when most children worry about school or friends, not being chained in a basement by their father.
This one probably feels a lot like it.
The thought keeps circling in my head while I sit here surrounded by concrete walls, blood and despair. Richard used to drag him downstairs and leave him there in the dark as if fear was some kind of lesson a child needed to learn.
I'm an adult and I can barely breathe through this.
I try to imagine what it must have felt like for him. The cold floor. The silence after the door closed above him. The knowledge that the man who was supposed to protect him was the one who locked him down there.
Seth lived through that kind of terror when he was a child.
And somehow he still grew into the man I love.
Somehow he still became loyal, protective, and capable of loving someone like me with a devotion that still feels almost impossible.
The basement around me stays quiet except for the slow shifting sounds of people trying to rest.
When I finally look up, I notice Miles sitting on the edge of his cot across the room.
He is still awake.
His back curves forward slightly as his elbows rest on his knees. A strip of gauze covers the side of his face and an eye patch is wrapped tight around his head. The white fabric has already soaked through in places where blood bled into it earlier.
He doesn’t look at me right away. He simply sits there breathing slowly, as if he is concentrating on the effort of holding himself together. He looks up when he hears me.
Something shifts in his expression. Like he already knows.
“I lost it.”
