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I looked up, using the back of my hand to brush the damp hair off my sweaty forehead. Agnes stood in the open doorway of the shed; a shed I’d been scrubbing and scouring, trying my hardest to clean so I didn’t have to find out what came if I’d failed her first trial.
I wasn’t dumb enough to think it was the only test she had in store for me. I just needed to hold out. I could deal with any pain. I could deal with her torment and cruel words. I just needed to hold out for him.
Because Iknewhe was coming. There wasn’t a doubt in my mind.
I forced myself to stand tall, even though my back was screaming from being hunched over, scrubbing the grime and filth and blood from the shed. My clothes were covered in the filth I’d just cleaned. I was hot and exhausted, but more than anything, I just wanted to go home.
“What do you want from me, huh? You never wanted me. You got what you wanted when I left. You always resentedhaving to take care of me, so why do this?” I threw my arms out at my sides. “Why not just let me go?”
“Because you owe me!” she shouted, her face turning red with rage as she stormed in my direction, spittle flying from her mouth. “You belong to my son! You’ve always belonged to him. You were promised to him! The only reason we let a whore like you stay for as long as we did was because he wanted you. If it had been my choice, he’d be with a nice, respectable girl within the Fellowship, not trash like you. But he didn’t care. You owe this family for all the years we kept you alive and fed and safe, and we’re going to get our due, you hear me?”
I blinked, bewilderment making it hard for me to process. “You’re insane,” I finally whispered. “You really have lost your mind.”
Her demeanor calmed. She stood tall and pulled in a breath as she brushed her hair out of her face. “Maybe I have,” she said calmly, the kind of calm that only came before a raging storm. And I knew that storm was upon me when she produced a gun from behind her back. “But you’re going to do as I say or pay the consequences. Then I’ll go after that little boy.” She stood to the side and waved the gun toward the door. “Now move.”
Terror coursed through my veins. Not for me, but for Cash. I couldn’t let anything happen to him. I couldn’t let this terrible woman anywhere near him. With no other choice, I followed her out of shed and back toward that terrible little hunting cabin deep in the woods in the middle of nowhere.
I scanned the inside of the small cabin as soon as I walked through the door. Sherman was sitting at the small, rickety table off to the side, cleaning one of his shotguns like he was so fond of doing, and right beside it was my cellphone. I didn’t know how, but I had to get my hands on that phone.
“Where’s your son?” I asked, noticing he wasn’t anywhere in the cabin.
“He’ll be here soon. Don’t worry. But a man isn’t supposed to see his bride before the wedding.”
I froze, my head whipping around. “Wedding? What wedding?”
That wicked smile stretching across her face once more. “Your wedding. Now go. We have to get you ready.” She jabbed me in the side with the barrel of the gun, forcing me forward.
She led me through a door just off the living room. It was the only bedroom in the whole cabin with a twin bed and nothing else. The window that looked off into the dense forest had been boarded over. They’d clearly prepared for this, meaning it wasn’t on a whim.
I stepped through the threshold, praying for any other means of escape, but there were none. Panic gripped my throat as I turned back to Agnes. “What am I supposed to do in here?”
She barely gave me time to catch the piece of beige material she threw at my face. I scrambled to unfold it, and held it up to reveal one of the hideous dresses the women of the Fellowship had to wear, a dress that I’d worn for more years than I wanted to recall. Just the sight of it made my stomach pitch.
“You’re supposed to get ready for your wedding. Now take off those whore clothes and make yourself presentable.”
On that order, she slammed the door and locked me in.
One thing I knew for certain: I needed to get the hell out of there.
Laeth
It had takena bit of work to track Deva’s phone. There was no signal wherever she was, making the task harder, but notimpossible. As soon as I got a ping, I got to work doing what the police wouldn’t have been able to do. I hacked the satellite feed over the area so we could pinpoint the exact position of Deva’s phone.
The cabin was in the middle of nowhere, surrounded for miles by nothing but thick, dense forest. It had to have been the Oakes’s hunting cabin that she’d told me about. That’s where she was being held.
We found the road leading from the community to the cabin, a worn-down access road off the beaten path that wasn’t on any regular map, and took off. The drive was longer than I would have liked, and with each second that passed as we raced up the mountain, Gage behind the wheel, I felt like I was coming out of my skin.
“What’s it reading?” Jensen asked from the back seat where he was prepping our gear for whatever was to come.
I looked down at the screen of my phone as the trees whizzed by so fast, they were nothing more than a blur of brown and green.
“The signal’s stationary. That has to be where she’s being held.”
“We’ll stop a mile back,” Jensen said. “Go the rest of the way on foot so they can’t hear us coming.”
“Works for me—wait. Shit!”
Gage pressed harder on the gas. “What? What is it?”
