Page 66 of Butch

“That’s me. I don’t know what happened to Echo or even if they brought her here. They haven’t mentioned her. Once I woke up, there was no one else but us,” she explained.

Raelynn glanced around the dark room, trying to make out something else, anything else. But it was empty.

“When did they say they were going to be back?” Rae asked.

Demi shrugged. “They didn’t say, and I don’t know how long it’s been. There’s no clock, and they took all our stuff.”

“Don’t worry. Butch will know something is wrong when I don’t contact him. I just hope nothing happened to Reaper…” She trailed off.

She couldn’t think about the possibilities of what had happened to him. He could be dead, or he could be okay, but she couldn’t worry about that right now. She would figure out what was wrong with him if they got rescued. No, when they got rescued.

“They’ll know when I don’t turn up for my shift. I’m never late, and I’ve never missed a shift, either,” Demi explained. “We’re going to be okay.”

“Right. Everything is going to be okay,” she lied.

There was no way to know whether they were going to be okay or not. Raelynn closed her eyes and focused on her breathing. If living with Edmund had taught her one thing, it was to not panic in any situation. Not until she really had a reason for panicking.

They didn’t know who took them, but she already knew, deep down, it was Edmund.

“How are you not freaking out?” Demi asked.

But before Realynn could answer, light filled the room as the door opened and a man walked in. Time stood still as she saw the person’s face.

Edmund.

His six foot frame towered over her. The look on his face was one of anger and wickedness, like he had so many ideas running through his head of what he was going to do to her to make her suffer.

“Do you know how long I have been looking for you?” he asked. “Do you know how many men I had to hire to find you?”

She kept quiet, knowing he didn’t want her to answer.

“At first, I looked into Butch and the Springfield Sinners because I knew you would go back to him, but none of my men saw you around the club, so I had to look elsewhere,” he explained. “But I should have known. I should have known you would he would have kept you a secret. That was, until you had surgery.”

She sucked in a breath. Raelynn should have known that registering the surgery under her real name would have alerted him. She had wanted to use a fake name, but to be under Daddy’s insurance for the rest of her life, she needed to use her real name.

“But we didn’t catch the surgery charge until almost a month later. You’re hard to find when you have people who care about you, but not hard enough,” he said as he bent down in front of her. “You didn’t even try to hide yourself. Did Butch not know you were on the run?”

The corner of her eye she saw Demi looking at her, worried. This was Raelynn’s worst nightmare. Daddy had told her that Edmund wasn’t going to be able to get her. That she was going to fine, and he would catch him. But she should have known that he would find her, regardless.

Edmund was well connected.

“No, that isn’t true. He had one of his guys follow you to the coffee shop,” Edmund said. “Did you really think one man would be enough to keep you safe from me?”

She locked eyes with him, and he smiled. A wicked smile, full of so much hatred.

“I thought you were smarter than that. You should have known that one man wouldn’t be enough, especially a man who wasn’t close to you,” he continued. “A man who was very diligent in what he was doing, looking after you, but he never suspected one of my men. He looked too ordinary, like a townsperson, and before he knew it, he was out like a light.”

“Is he alive?” she couldn’t help but ask.

Edmund chuckled. “You care for him?”

She shook her head, a clear lie. “He’s an innocent person. I don’t know him that well.”

“Are you lying to me?” he asked. “If I find out that you’re lying to me, you can say goodbye to your cochlear implant.”

“I’m not lying. I promise. I really don’t know him that well, but he’s an innocent person who shouldn’t get hurt. You know I’ve never changed my view on things like that,” she tried to soothe him.

“When I saw that you got a cochlear implant, I went through a range of emotions. But then I realized I could easily remove your external processor and render you deaf, like before. Oh, the games I could play with you. The sweet torture I could inflict and watch every emotion flash across your face. The tiny flinches when you think you hear something but you don’t.” Edmund licked his lips as he looked up and down her body.