55. Emery #2
“Where is she?” I begged as I pounded my fists against his chest, no strength to the punches as I wailed against him.
He shook his head, and he held me closer as he buried his face in my neck. As if he could stop me from floating away on the deluge of grief. “I don’t know, Emery. I don’t know. I tried to stop them. I fucking tried. I tried so hard. But I failed. I’m so fucking sorry.”
“No, you were there. It was you.”
Misery poured from his being. “I was. I was there that night. I told you I wasn’t even close to being a good man. That I’d done horrible things. But the second I saw what was in the back of that truck…”
He swallowed thickly, the words trembling as he released them. “ I saw my purpose for my life, Emery. I knew exactly what I’d been meant to do.”
My head thrashed against the wild grasses and dirt, while my entire being bowed toward him. “I remember you.”
I wanted it to be an accusation, and it somehow came out in some kind of prayer.
“I remember what you said. You were wearing that bracelet.”
He angled back to look at my face. Shame covered him whole. “I know what I said, Emery, but I had to so they wouldn’t catch on to what I had planned.”
Confusion bound me as I tried to process everything that had happened that night. But I had been close to delirious by then. Our senses distorted since we’d been blindfolded for so long, plus we’d hardly been given any food or water. Compounded by the trauma…
I sucked for the air I couldn’t find as it slammed me.
It had been reported afterward that there had been a gunfight between the police and the criminals inside the truck. They’d managed to rescue four girls, while three had been lost.
But I could almost feel it then.
His aura.
His scent.
The ferocity of the man who’d pulled us from the back of the truck.
Find me in the darkness, bring me to the light.
A shattered breath wheezed into my lungs.
It was him.
It was him.
The gunshots and the shouts and the desperation of the man who’d been willing to do anything to get us out.
“I would never, I would never, I would never.” Kane spilled the words out across my chest, peppering them over the top of my shirt like he could pour them directly into my heart.
A jagged cry erupted, a sob of misery and relief.
My fingers sank into his shoulders, desperate to get him closer. “It was you. It was you. ”
He pulled me closer. His arms banded around me as he rocked me and whispered as I wept, “I would give anything to go back and stop it before it started. I’m so sorry. I’m so fucking sorry.”
“It was you. You saved us.”
Then I shot upright, pushing him back. “Maci,” I rasped.
Kane brushed back the hair matted to my sweat-drenched face, and his emerald eyes flashed beneath the glints of the sun that streamed in through the breaks in the leaves. “She’s safe. She’s with Cash.”
Another cry tore out of me as I threw my arms around his neck. He curled his around my waist, his words a rough scrape as he murmured, “It’s over, Little Warrior. It’s over. You don’t have to fight any longer.”
Night had fallen two hours ago, and Maci had been asleep for about thirty minutes. The entire family left just before sundown, at the prompting of Kane telling them we needed rest, though Raven and Charleigh had a difficult time leaving.
Hugging us and hugging us as they whispered how thankful they were that we were okay.
Kane had insisted that Dr. Reynolds come to the house to check us out as well.
I could barely see out my left eye, but that was the extent of my injuries, and Maci had little more than a scratch, though I knew what would really scar her would be the mental and emotional traumas that she had faced today.
Kane had told her over and over how brave she’d been. Running, then hiding herself away. He promised that she’d done exactly what she was supposed to do.
She was scared, but I didn’t think she really understood the full scope of what had happened.
Had no clue her mother’s killer had come here with the same intention for me.
A tremble rolled through me at the thought, and Kane tightened the blanket he had wrapped around me, but the real warmth was the way the man was curled around me from behind.
His big body a furnace that blazed into the frozen planes incited by the horrors of the day.
He sat against the headboard of his bed with me tucked between his legs, his chin resting on my shoulder as he looked down at the tablet I held in my hands.
“Are you sure you want to do this tonight?” he asked in that low, hypnotic voice.
“I need to try,” I told him.
I still couldn’t comprehend what happened to my sister. How to make it all fit. How to rearrange what I thought had become a disturbed obsession but now believed was something much bigger.
I clicked on the folder I had never been able to open. The one that had left me unsettled since the moment I found it.
And I remembered that one line in the letter she’d written me, her statement that Kane would know what to do, her faith that I would find him and discover who he was.
The clue she had left.
He’ll protect her and take her into his sanctum.
So this time when the box popped up for a password, I typed in Sovereign Sanctum .
Moisture blurred my eyes when it granted me access, and Kane let go of a weighted exhalation.
“She knew,” he mumbled in quiet surrender.
I blinked through the blear of tears.
Go to him. Find him. Give him the chance to raise her. She deserves to have a father like him.
“Yeah,” I whispered, unsure where to start, but I clicked on another folder that contained a slew of reports.
Reports of missing women and children, the strange circumstances of their disappearances detailed. Their faces printed with pleas from the men I was sure had tormented them.
“You saved these women and children? ”
His nod was slow against the side of my head, and I nodded, too, as I clicked into another folder.
My insides trembled when I saw this one contained news articles of a slew of unsolved murders across the US. Speculation that they were members of criminal organizations and that their assassinations had been delivered by rival associations.
Pictures of their vile, disgusting faces sat like mug shots across the pages.
“Do you recognize these men?” I could barely ask it.
A disturbance rolled through Kane. “Yeah, baby, I recognize them.”
My nod was short. It was difficult to fathom. To understand. While a whole different piece of me whispered in awe.
He’d been seeking these men out. Ending them before they could inflict the type of pain that had been inflicted on us.
Kane hugged me tighter. I didn’t know if it was an apology or a promise that he would never regret what he did.
Standing for the vulnerable.
I clicked into another folder, and I shivered when I saw what it contained. It was like the open folder I’d found before with the journal-like letters she’d written then saved and printed.
The same type that had contained the letter she’d written me about her wishes for Maci.
Though there was only one here. It had been written and saved two days before her death.
Obviously, it was private. A secret she was keeping.
Tyke’s horrible words filtered back through my mind. The way he implied that he’d killed Emmalee because of what she’d known, and I had to imagine these were secrets she’d planned to share.
I opened it to her handwriting forever imprinted on the screen, and the tears only thickened as I began to read.
Emery,
I can’t sit still as I’m writing this letter to you. It’s the middle of the night, and I can’t force the fear away .
They’re coming for me. I can feel it. I don’t even know how I know, but something in the air has shifted. The peace that I found with Maci—with all of you—my amazing family—no longer exists. Unrest keeps sweeping in to take its place.
Even now as I write this, I don’t know if I would take it back. Because I had to try. I couldn’t give up like the authorities had done.
And most of all, through the twists and turns that I’ve followed for the last years, I got my daughter out of it.
How could I regret it?
But God, it’s terrifying, being sure that someone is watching me. The police took a report, but they wrote it off since I have no evidence of anything other than a feeling.
Other than knowing I’ve gotten too deep.
A tear streaked down my cheek. “I wish she would have told me. Wish she would have let me in.”
Kane snuggled closer, his mouth buried in my hair. “She was protecting you.”
“And it cost her life,” I quietly choked.
“I’m so sorry, baby. I wish I would have known. I—” He clipped off.
“It’s not your fault, either,” I whispered.
“Sometimes it feels like it, though. Like I haven’t come close to doing enough.”
“You give your life for them. For us .” I breathed it before I turned back to reading my sister’s words.
I knew what I was doing. I knew what I was doing from the beginning, but I couldn’t not do something.
Jana was gone, and my soul burned with the desperation to find her. To know what happened to her .
I knew where to start. I had to find the man I would never forget from that night.
I never told you this, but the entire time we were held, I could see through the sack they placed over my head. I witnessed it all. The horrible things they did to us. The fiends that came and went.
But I also saw him.
I saw the look on his face when he found us piled in the back of that truck that might as well have been a hearse.
I was certain what he’d done. At least, I came to believe that helping us had been his intention and I hadn’t misconstrued his actions in some way.
I told the investigators questioning me that there was a man who had saved us, but they suggested I was delirious.
Hallucinating as they tried to convince me the events had occurred differently.
I couldn’t understand why they would lie.
Who they were protecting.
But the one thing I was certain of was I had to find that man. He was the only one who might know where Jana had been taken.