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He had a point.
“And you’re just going to give it all up,” I continued, hoping to get through to him.
“It doesn’t mean anything to me. The house is just bricks and concrete. The plane is metal and fuel. Even this island is nothing more than a pile of rocks and dirt. None of those things would notice or care if anything happened to me. In fact, no one would. I could vanish off the face of the earth, and no one would give a fuck.”
I heard the pain tainting his voice. “I’m sure that’s not true. What about Loretta? She seems to care about you.” Why the hell was I trying to comfort my kidnapper? I should be happy that he was alone and unhappy. But the truth was that I felt responsible for his loneliness. He was a result of what my father had done to his mother, of what he’d witnessed when he’d found her. And my father would never have been able to do that if I’d told the truth and the police had arrested him that night.
He gave a cold laugh. “Loretta doesn’t care about me. She’s only here for one reason.”
I was grasping at straws. “Because you pay her?”
“Yes, I pay her, but that’s not how we found each other. Loretta is another of your father’s victims.”
I felt as though he’d punched me in the chest, winding me. “What?”
I did the math. Loretta looked to be older—in her late fifties, at least. Had my father seen her as one of his victims? She would have been late forties during his killing spree, which I felt sure was far older than he normally went for. Even Hayden’s mother was slightly older, but she’d been in her thirties, not approaching fifty. It didn’t make sense.
“What happened? He tried to hurt her somehow?” I was trying to make sense of it all.
But Hayden shook his head. “Not her. He killed Loretta’s daughter. She was twenty-six.”
I felt sick. I lifted my cuffed hands to cover my face. “Oh, God.” No wonder the other woman hated me so much. Did she see my father’s face when she looked at me? I’d protected the man who’d murdered her daughter. Fuck, I would have Tased me too, given the opportunity. I was surprised she hadn’t done worse, but then I realized the reason she hadn’t.
“So, she knows about your plan,” I said, lowering my hands to look at him again. “She wants you to kill Patrick Dorman, and she’s happy for you to use me as bait.”
“Of course. Why wouldn’t she be? She knows what you did.”
Shame flooded through me, and I lowered my gaze to the floor. “I was twelve years old. I was trying to protect my dad.”
“You were protecting a murderer. There’s no excuse for that.”
A rush of cold flooded my veins, and I shivered. I’d already felt as though I was in a place of animosity, but now I fully understood the reasoning behind it, I felt their feelings as though they were my own. A part of me wanted to stand in front of Loretta and beg her forgiveness and allow her to electrocute me as many times as she liked. I wanted her to give her pain to me, to let me carry that burden. I couldn’t even imagine what it must be like to raise a child and have her grow up to be a beautiful, successful woman, only to have her torn away so brutally. Just as with Hayden, some of the hatred I’d felt toward her seeped away now that I knew her story.
Perhaps people would argue that I’d only been a child back then. But I wasn’t a child any longer. I’d thought I was trying to do my bit and pay back to society by studying psychology in the hope of eventually helping young people who’d gone through traumas of their own, but perhaps it was all too little too late.
I stared down at my hands, and my vision blurred as tears flooded my eyes and a painful lump choked my throat. “I’m sorry,” I managed to say. “I never wanted any of this to happen. I wish I could go back in time and speak up when I’d had the chance. I wish my father was never a murderer, and I wish my mother hadn’t killed herself. I wish my brother was still a part of my life, and that you hadn’t decided to kidnap me to use me as bait.”
But he growled. “Stop it. I’m not interested in your tears.”
I swiped at my face with the back of my hand.
“We’re stuck here for the moment,” he said. “I don’t know how long the storm is going to last, but my pilot won’t be able to get back to the island until it’s passed. And I’m still waiting on word to see if that last letter was enough to push your father into breaking out, or if we’re going to need to step things up a level.”
My heart lurched into my throat. “Step things up a level? What does that mean?”
The threat in his tone was unmistakable. “I think you know exactly what it means.”
