Page 141 of Finding Noah

But I didn't ask Ben to stay this time. Him leaving meant the man in black would come, and his company was much more welcome, even if he had kept his promise.

I hadn't heard his voice again.

He took care of me though, as if I were a pet to feed and water, trapped in a cage much too small for a man my size.

I thought more about Meg to pass the time. I thought about holidays spent with our joined families. Locking my keys in the car and laughing in the rain. Unsuccessfully installing a bathtub and having to call our fathers to help before we went to sleep angry—her in our bed and me on the couch.

Nights watching shitty movies, cooking failed dinners, and bickering over interior design choices. Nights I'd once thought meant little in the whole of our relationship, in the great tapestry of life, but I realized now that they had meant everything.

I would give anything to bicker with her right now over drawer pulls or doorknobs, and dammit, I would again.

But I couldn't do anything, still chained to this bed.

How long has it been? I wondered.

Time didn't pass the same in this room. My brain was confused, discombobulated, and unsure of everything. Ben had told me a while ago that it'd been a few days … but how long ago had that been?

And where was the man in black?

There was only so much thinking I could do with my eyes glued to the ceiling before I dozed off again, and when I awoke, the light of day streamed through the window once again. And the man in black never came during the daylight hours.

Did he come while I was sleeping? I wondered, but … no. His ministrations were impossible to perform while I was asleep, and blood had crusted, dry and sticking, between my thighs and against the bed. He wouldn't have left me that way; he never did.

He never came.

What if it's all been a lie?

What if it’s all exactly as I believed it to be—a game?

They're working together, him and Benny. And they've been playing with me, giving me hope and taking it away, over and over and over again.

Tears sprang to my eyes at the thought. That I’d put my trust in that man in the plague doctor mask, just for him to rob me of all hope in the same way Ben had robbed me of my dignity.

They’re going to kill me.

And if that was the case … if, in the end, I was going to die anyway … then maybe … maybe …

I knew what I had to do.

I had to piss Benjamin off enough to finish the job.

And I had to take that loose cannon … and it was up to me to light the fuse and find the thing he had once promised he’d give.

Mercy.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

FROM DESPERATION

Meg sat in the passenger seat as Soldier pulled into the parking lot of The Llewellyn Family Funeral Home. The towering Victorian looked out of place in the middle of a street lined with warehouses and big-box stores. It was proof that, at one point, the past had existed here, and Meg found that chillingly ironic when it was the buried past that'd brought them here in the first place.

She was grateful for Soldier's presence as they climbed out of his SUV. Although she would've come on her own if she had to, she knew she would've done so terrified. But with Soldier there—standing at a menacing six foot seven and looking every bit the part of the hardened, mean-spirited ex-prisoner she knew he wasn't—she felt safe. She understood why Noah had been drawn to him once upon a time, when he forced himself into Soldier's life until the man had no choice but to fall in love with his mother and protect them from the bogeyman they knew and feared.

“He came here,” Soldier thought aloud, casting his eyes upward toward the widow's walk at the top of the house.

Meg nodded as she came to stand beside him on the asphalt. “They held the funeral for Tomas Nolan twenty years ago.”

“Right, you mentioned that,” he grumbled. “You said this was the last place he came before driving home?”