Page 84 of Avenging Angel

“Roger, the entrance is blocked. It appears as if the team clipped a tripwire and set off an explosion. Brad led them into a trap!”

“Stay put. We’re on our way,” Roger says.

“Bennett and I need to help them. Bennett, move out!” I get up and run toward the pile of rubble when I feel a stinging sensation in my thigh. My leg buckles under me, and I go down like a sack of bricks.

Though the sound is too far away for me to be certain, I swear I hear a man say, “No one can help you now.”

As my eyes roll back in my head and I feel my body being dragged up the hill by my ghillie suit, I know there’s One I can always turn to for help. “Lord, please let the good guys win.”

Chapter thirty-four

Daisy

Ionly had a few seconds at most to look at the face of my enemy before the anesthesia took hold, but the tingling sensation as feeling returns to my extremities warns me that roughly four hours have passed since I was taken. Six tops.

The pinch of zip ties around my wrists and ankles, the Ghillie suit on the seat next to me, and Bennett’s pale gray eyes staring at me tell me everything I need to know. I’m once again a captive. This time, instead of waking up on a cold, damp cave floor, I’m surrounded by the luxury of soft leather seats and going 400 miles per hour in a Gulfstream.

Once the tingles disappear, I finally utter the words, “How long have you known?”

Bennett leans back in his seat, crosses his legs, and sips from a highball glass filled with two fingers of whiskey. “Known what? That you’re Sadie?”

He tips the top of his glass toward me. “Since the beginning. You definitely weren’t the 14-year-old girl sniveling in her own snot, but it’s the necklace that gave you away. I wasn’t a hundred percent sure, though, until you mumbled words I’d said to you 20 years ago.”

“What words?” I ask, going through my mental Rolodex of interactions with Bennett.

Then it dawns on me. It was the moment we were sitting around the table and Bennett showed us pictures of all the missing girls, including the one of me. Vinny had asked why the girls wouldn’t want to draw attention to themselves and try to escape. I repeated the words that I say out loud now: “You won’t even remember me a year from now. In fact, you won’t remember your family, your friends, or have any reason to want to come home. The life you’re about to lead is one full of opportunities. You should embrace it rather than fear it.”

“Those are the ones!” Bennett says with glee. “Imagine my surprise to see a ghost walking up the hill toward me, all because you’d triggered the alert I had on Kenneth. I’ll admit, I thought you were dead, Sadie. The FBI did a great job covering up your survival story. Care to share it with me now? We have hours to kill before the plane lands.”

I look out the window and see the Rockies 30,000 feet below me, not giving Bennett the satisfaction of knowing how I escaped.

“Ah, we’re going to play the ‘silent treatment’ game. How boring.”

If glares could incinerate a person, Bennett would be burned to a husk. “You’ve taken enough from me already. You don’t get anything else.”

“I was going to give you the world, Sadie. I never meant to rob you of a meaningful life. Only to give you one.”

I shake my head in utter dismay. “The sad thing is you actually believe what you’re touting.”

Bennett finishes the last of his drink, setting the glass in a cup holder built into the armrest of his plush seat. He leans forward casually, resting his elbows on his legs and never taking his eyes off me.

“Sadie, every girl I’ve taken is living a dream life. They’re either working for someone with authority, wealth, and position, or they’re married to them. Their every whim is catered to. Not one girl chose to return to their families. I take that back. There was one, not including you.”

“What happened to her?”

Bennett runs his finger around the rim of the glass. “I’m just the delivery man, but if I had to make an educated guess, she’s likely dead or in a psychiatric ward. Loose ends get clipped so that nothing unravels later. Dominion gets paid a hefty amount of money to see to that. You, Sadie, are a loose end. As is Eva.”

“Is Eva dead?” I ask, horrified by the thought.

With a look of utter disappointment, Bennett says, “I’ve never killed anyone, Sadie. Including Eva. If you look behind you, you’ll see that she’s sound asleep and dreaming peacefully.”

Obviously, I can’t look behind me with my limbs bound, and he knows it. “It’s Daisy, and you may not physically take someone’s life, but you take away everything they hold dear by brainwashing them into believing a lie is truth. It doesn’t matter if you’re the one doing the brainwashing, Bennett. You’re guilty by association. Or should I call you Logan?”

Red creeps across Bennett’s neck at the mention of his former name. “That part of me died the same day my sister did.”

“And Sadie died the day you took me. You had to know that life wasn’t ever going to be the same for me.”

“I hadn’t accounted for your escape. To this day, I still don’t know how you did it. No light. No water. No food. Not only did you somehow navigate the cave system in the dark, but you survived two weeks in the wilderness all alone.” Bennett arches an eyebrow as though he’s waiting for me to spill my secrets.