55. Emery
FIFTY-FIVE
EMERY
Terror thudded and throbbed.
My heart hammering through the short and ragged breaths I exhaled as the monster forced me deeper into the forest.
One of his hands was locked in my hair and the other held a gun under my jaw as he jostled me through the cragged terrain and underbrush.
“Keep moving, bitch.”
Another shiver ripped through me at the vitriol he wheezed into my ear, and my head spun as I tried to find a way out of this. How to get loose of the ruthless clutch he had on me.
The only thing I could be thankful for was Maci got away. He’d tried to hold onto both of us, but when she tripped over a branch and stalled our speed, he’d swung the gun in her direction.
I knew the wickedness he intended.
He’d been distracted enough in that second that I was able to flail around and ram my knee into his stomach, while I’d screamed at Maci to run.
When he realized what I’d done, he’d whipped the gun across my face, though he hadn’t gone after her.
It was the only thing that mattered .
Her safety.
Her freedom.
Now, he shoved at my back as he urged me through the dense woods.
It was the same man who had targeted me at the grocery store. I had known it in an instant.
The same old recognition had finally struck me as a slew of visions and memories impaled.
The bare glimpse I’d caught of a man with brown hair with the emblem embroidered on the leather vest he’d worn.
The same type of vest that I found in Kane’s closet.
Kane who I’d run from—who I should run from—but still, who my spirit was howling for. Praying for him to come for me.
I couldn’t process it all.
This horror I felt against the pleas my soul shouted.
Kane told me that he lived this life to repay the horrible deeds he had committed. The sins that he shared with me as if he trusted me to hold them. But how could it be enough? How could it be enough after what he’d done?
Old wounds thrashed from where I’d kept them hidden. Three days of darkness, blindfolds and sacks over our eyes. The torture we’d endured, our bodies used as if we were nothing.
Playthings to be abused.
Confused.
Disoriented.
Our consciousness coming in and out as the men had come and gone. Their seedy, disgusting laughter. The stench of their scents.
Those words wound on a loop.
“Don’t fuckin’ fight me, you bitch.”
The bracelet.
I knew. Oh, God, I knew.
Kane had done this, along with the bastard who now held me hostage.
Because of them, Jana was gone.
Lightheadedness swam as my face throbbed. My left eye was nearly swollen shut from the impact of the gun, but nothing hurt quite as badly as my heart.
“Let me go.” I thrashed against him, the words grit with the adrenaline that flooded my body as we stumbled out into a small break in the trees.
It was the smallest meadow, and what had to be the same stream as on Kane’s property ran through it.
The degenerate laughed a morbid sound. “Nah, I have plans for you. Same ones I had for your bitch sister who was putting her nose into places it shouldn’t go. Digging around like she thought she was going to stop us.”
Confusion ran rampant while tendrils of awareness wisped at the edges of my consciousness.
The intuition I’d had that something was off.
That she hadn’t just…fallen.
Emmalee.
Emmalee.
My spirit moaned as he kept shoving me through the brush.
“Should have ended you all the second I found out she had been in LA asking questions. But I guess I shouldn’t regret it too much since you led me back to Kane.” He hissed it at my ear.
Uncertainty spiraled. Pressing and pulsing. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
He barked a shock of laughter before he was back to wheezing. “Ah, so innocent. But you were, weren’t you? That’s why you were my favorite.”
With a lecherous grin, he dragged a finger down my cheek.
Bile surged, and I squeezed my eyes against his taunt.
The foul.
The depraved.
My heart raced, a desperate urging at me to do something.
I had to fight.
I had to fight.
Little Warrior.
Sunlight glinted through the leaves above, flashes across my eyes .
I stumbled on a limb and yelped when he fisted my hair tighter. “Keep moving.”
And that fear spun and spun.
Misery.
Grief.
It wound with the deafening roar of my blood. The tumultuous surging of adrenaline.
The air both dense and thin. A crawling of sensation across my flesh.
A flare of intensity.
A flame of severity.
I felt it move, the energy that stirred and incited.
And there it was, the awareness that had possessed me the first time I’d met him.
Kane.
I felt the violent, menacing presence of him rise over us from behind. The shadow of a wraith that covered and consumed.
The connection a blister of ferocity that I felt one second before Kane shouted, “Emery, get down!”
I let my weight go at the same second a thunderclap of footsteps suddenly burst from behind us.
Kane and the rest.
Oh God.
He came for me. He came.
Pain splintered across my scalp as I dropped to my knees, and the monster gripped tighter, refusing to let me go as he turned around and fired.
Gunshots rang out.
Chaos erupted.
Shouts and dust and animosity.
I fought, refusing the agony of the fistful of my hair being ripped out as I smacked my hand frantically around on the earth, searching for anything I could use as a weapon.
A rock .
I grabbed it, grunting as I swung it high and wide, and I whipped it around and slammed it into the beast’s hip bone.
He howled, and his grip slackened with his surprise, releasing the hold he had in my hair.
I used it to my advantage, sucking in a shattered breath as I scrambled onto my feet.
“Run, Emery. Run!” Kane’s voice penetrated from behind, and tears leaped to my eyes.
The torment at odds with the relief.
I turned to do just that, only the beast launched himself at me, his hand swiping out to get ahold of me. I spun, just out of his reach, though the sole of my shoe slipped against the slick, soft dirt. It nearly brought me back to the ground.
I fought the tumble, one hand hitting the ground, which I used to propel myself back up onto my feet.
The asshole reached out again and grabbed me by the ankle.
I yelped, struggling to break free.
“You fuckin’ whore. You don’t know what hurt means yet,” he growled.
Air rasped from my lungs, and I wavered for only a second before I gathered my strength and stomped on his face with the heel of my other shoe.
He roared as he released me. Frantic, I stumbled back, slipping and sliding on the damp earth as I struggled to find my balance.
“You cunt. You’re dead. Dead, just like your sister. You should have heard her begging as I tossed her over the side of that roof. Gonna make sure you do the same. Beg for days before I finally end you.”
I gagged at the cruelty he spat, my heart shredding apart, but I managed to force myself to move. Turning, I propelled myself around a tree and into the forest.
The second I was out of the meadow, mayhem erupted, and I froze as a hundred shots went off at the same time. Loud and disorienting.
Shock pinned me to the spot, my eyes wide with horror as I watched from behind the trunk of a massive tree as my captor staggered to his feet .
His body jolted and lurched as he was impaled over and over.
He dropped to the dirt, and a piercing silence suddenly swept in, a cloud of smoke and dust and a keening ring that reverberated in my ears.
River stepped out into the fray and came to stand over the body that lay limp in the middle of the ground.
I covered my mouth as he stood over him and fired once more.
Theo and Otto ambled out behind him.
Though Kane. He turned those eyes on me.
The same aura of duplicity radiated around him, but his wickedness was no longer shrouded.
My spirit moaned and pled and screamed.
I wanted to drop to my knees and beg.
But instead, I turned and ran.
Ran from the fear and the pain and the confusion.
From this man I had known better than falling for.
I needed to find Maci. Get to her and get her out of here. She had to be terrified. Scared and wandering and alone.
“Emery!” Kane’s shout carried on the gust of wind that whipped through the trees, and I gasped, pushing myself harder.
“Emery!” Desperation filled my name, and I could feel the pound of his boots as he began to chase me.
With each step, the ground rocked beneath my feet.
An earthquake.
A landslide.
A black hole that I’d known I’d be sucked into.
“Emery, please. Please don’t run from me,” he begged.
Breaths wheezed from my aching lungs as he neared.
The energy thrashed. Thrashed and whipped through the howling branches of the trees.
The connection wailed.
Bowing between us in a force that I couldn’t fathom.
He was right behind me.
All around me.
His aura surrounding .
I dropped to my knees.
He couldn’t stop his momentum, and he stumbled into me from behind, his arms wrapping around me as he took me all the way to the ground, pinning my stomach to the earth.
Gently, though it felt as if I’d been hit by a truck.
The crashing and grating of our bodies.
“How could you? How could you?” It was a sob that erupted from my soul. The grief I’d held for so many years burst free of the boundaries where I’d tried to keep it shored. “How could you? How could you?”
Kane’s heart battered at my back, and his breaths jutted violently from his chest. “Emery.”
“How could you?” I fumbled around, trying to push out from under him, my feet kicking up and my fingers sinking into the soggy soil beneath me as I struggled to get away. “How could you?”
Kane gripped onto my calves, and a low moan of agony rolled out of him. “No, baby, no. I?—”
“You took her. Where did you take her? Jana… Oh, God, Jana.” The cries hurtled out. Caught up in the storm that raged around us.
“Emery, please, listen to me.”
Kane gripped onto me with those hands, crawling up so he could wrap his arms around me.
Trapping me.
Holding me.
I couldn’t tell.