Chapter 13
Chapter Thirteen
K elly glanced at her watch, unsure of what she should do next. There was an hour until she was supposed to meet Nathan and darkness already prevented her from knowing where she needed to go. In the daylight, she could find the pasture they’d used. In the dark, she was lost. Maybe she should’ve left her cabin more.
Then again, according to Sam she’d be moving tomorrow. No, you won’t. Her inner voice startled her, mostly because it didn’t sound like her. If she met with Nathan, he wasn’t going to let her go back to her cabin. For the first time, she considered the fact that this might be how those people Nathan had bragged about never getting away had all disappeared. They’d either been rescued, or he’d found and disposed of them after they’d escaped.
She leaned against a tree, trying to find the area where she’d ridden with Sam. Maybe if she had her horse, it would know where to go. Saddling it would be impossible, though. She’d only ridden once and hadn’t paid the slightest attention when Sam had saddled it. No. She had to do this on her own. The whole point was to make sure Jasmine was still alive and to make Nathan left Wayside alone.
She hadn’t met any of the other guests. Other than seeing Rebecca, she hadn’t even seen them. There were only a few of them, but since she hadn’t gone to a meal yet, she hadn’t had the opportunity to talk to anyone. Nathan wouldn’t want anything to do with a woman in a wheelchair, but what if Nathan wasn’t there just for her? What if his real plan was to take all the women who lived at Wayside Ranch?
A twig snapped in the distance, and she held in a scream. That wasn’t going to help her get there without anyone noticing. A cold, wet nose pressed into her palm. Odd that the feeling was a comfort. She glanced down to find Zeus standing at her side.
She shook her head and kneeled, whispering softly to the dog so no one else would hear her. “You can’t be here. I need to go, and you can’t go where I’m going.” The overwhelming urge to hug the dog and succumb to more tears was almost unbearable.
Zeus gave a soft snort, similar to a whimper, though the muscular dog could barely manage the weak sound. Kelly needed a dog like Zeus in her life. A dog who cared about her safety and found her even when his master didn’t know where he was.
“Kelly?” Sam’s voice cut through the darkness.
Kelly closed her eyes tightly and jumped back to her feet. She pressed her back to the tree, wishing Zeus would go away, yet she wouldn’t hurt him and couldn’t speak to tell him to go. She nodded her head slightly in the other direction, hoping he would get the hint .
Zeus sat down instead and tilted his head, as if he was curious what she was doing.
“Kelly?” He was only a few feet away now. “What’cha got there Zeus?” Sam’s voice was so friendly toward the dog. No one had cared for her like that since Sam, talking to her in a voice laced with care and affection. She hadn’t realized how much she’d craved that, needed that, until that moment.
Sam came around the tree and glanced at her. “Out for a walk?”
She’d expected condemnation. At the very least, she’d expected to hear that she was in trouble. Even with the coat, it was freezing outside. Not the kind of weather that would usually make her want to take a stroll.
“I just needed to be outside,” she said as she lifted her chin in mild defiance. Sam wasn’t her boss. She shouldn’t have to answer to him.
“There are large animals in Wyoming that might appreciate a wandering woman all alone in the dark. If you don’t want me to go with you, take Zeus. It seems like you like his company and he’ll protect you. Though even Zeus can’t do much against a bear.”
“Bear?” her voice definitely squeaked that time.
“Not often, but sometimes.” Sam didn’t seem to want to leave.
Asking him to do that the day before had been one of the hardest things she’d done since coming to Wayside. “Why are you out here, Sam?”
“You missed supper. I brought your tray, and you weren’t home. We don’t care if you go out for walks, but it’s pretty standard procedure to let someone know where you’re going or at least that you won’t be in your cabin, so we don’t think you’ve been kidnapped. It’s a real fear when all the people we work with have been trafficked. You wouldn’t believe the number of people who become victims a second time: more than one in four. We’re trying to change that, by equipping our guests not only with the means to talk, but to know their surroundings and be aware.”
One in four. And in less than an hour, she would either add to that statistic, or she would help add to another one. “And how many die?” she whispered.
Sam looked away, his face shadowed in the dark. “That’s a tough statistic. Both to think about and to find the answer to. A guess is almost worthless, so why don’t we say that if even one person dies, it’s too many,” he matched her moderated tone.
Everything inside her urged her to tell him. If he knew the situation, maybe he could help her come up with a plan. She’d never been good at thinking ahead, but Sam was a professional at it.
“He’s going to kill her, Sam.”
She closed her eyes and leaned her head against the tree. She didn’t want to talk about her time ‘there’, but Jasmine had been the closest friend she’d had.
Sam moderated his voice, “If you’re ever going to trust me—and I hope you do because we’ll be in the same cabin as of tomorrow—then I have to trust you with what I know. Dominic knows about the texts you’ve been receiving and sending. We’ve read them. I remembered Jasmine and even had her in a picture. I gave that to Dominic.”
The quality of his voice had changed. He sounded somber, sad. She knew without asking that nothing she did was going to help Jasmine anymore. “She’s already dead, isn’t she? ”
Sam slowly pulled in a breath and let it out just as slowly. “I’m sorry. Her body was found a day after you were rescued.”
“He lied to me. Again.” She knew she shouldn’t ever believe a word he said, but in this case, if she hadn’t, she’d have been risking a life.
“He’s never going to tell you the truth, Kelly. But I do have good news. Come with me?” He gestured back toward the barn. “On the off chance that he’s out here, I don’t want to announce anything.”
She knew it. Sam had a plan. He was still the same Sam she’d always known. Protector and constant Sam, a shoulder to lean on. She followed his lead, and Zeus stayed at her side. He didn’t look up at her as he walked like he did with Sam sometimes, but she still felt safe with the huge German shepherd next to her.
Once they reached the barn, Sam glanced down at her hand. “I don’t know if that watch has the capability to hear, so I’d like you to take it off and leave it outside. I’d prefer if you left it off completely, but I can’t make you.”
She slipped the watch off and put it in the grass outside the barn. Sam led them all the way to the other end, so there was no way it could hear anything. He paused by the tack room where Edwyn had talked to her the first day and offered her a seat on a short bench just outside.
“Okay, I’m listening. What is this good news?”
Sam tensed, which made her worry meter slam into overdrive. “Sam? What’s wrong?”
“This has to do with the time we were together before. We haven’t talked about it and bringing it up isn’t easy.”
“But . . .” He had said this was good news. Why was he bringing up the past? She hadn’t told him what she was doing when they were together. Did this mean he knew? What was left of her hope shattered into a million pieces. He’d never love her again if he knew she chose that life. What kind of woman would do that? Whether she’d become saved since then or not, it didn’t wash away what she’d put him through, nor what she’d been through. She was a bad girl and always would be.
He held up his hand. “Just let me get through this before you start panicking. I saw Nathan when he was here, but I didn’t recognize him. When I was looking through some of our old pictures earlier tonight, I found one of you talking with him at a party. I have no way of knowing if that was the first time you’d met him or if you’d known him for years at that point. Pictures don’t tell me that. What I do know is that I gave that picture to Dominic. The man is a tech genius. He was able to isolate Nathan’s face and find it. We now know exactly who he is, and we were able to give that information to not only local law enforcement, but to the feds, too”
Her breath came fast and hard. Nathan might be arrested? No more texts. No more broken lives. No more death. It also meant that all those lies he’d told her about paying her would never come true. Somewhere deep inside, she’d hoped that was the one thing he hadn’t lied about. She wanted to trust that promise. If she did, maybe she wouldn’t be stained by this label of human trafficking victim anymore. She would just be a woman who chose an ugly path but who won in the end.
“What does that mean for me and for all the people he was holding?”
Sam reached out and touched her shoulder. She couldn’t understand how every other touch left her skin crawling, but his was simply warm and welcome because she knew that’s how it was intended.
“It means they’ll have to find where he was holding everyone. He doesn’t deserve leniency, and I doubt he’ll survive long in the system if they catch him. But I also didn’t want him to hear anything through that watch and disappear.”
She couldn’t bring herself to think anyone deserved to die, but she’d leave that up to those who had to protect Nathan once they caught him. Catching him would be the first step.
Sam sat close to Kelly on the bench, thinking about his words and where this conversation needed to go. Just hours before she’d asked him to leave. Now she was standing so close to him he could smell her shampoo. She wasn’t running and she hadn’t been shocked when he’d told her that they’d known about the texts. That might have been because he didn’t accuse her of doing anything.
When he’d first come to Wayside, Connor had taught him that many of the victims would hide things from them. It could be information, parts of their pasts, food, or, in this case, communications with someone who could harm them. When those things were discovered, it was really important that they confront the behavior in a way that didn’t accuse the guest. They’ve been manipulated, groomed, conned, abused, and lied to. They’ve been trained to feel guilt for everything. Helping someone overcome that way of thinking was a slow process and couldn’t be done if the client felt the same about the path to healing as they did about being a captive .
Unfortunately, she now knew that he was aware of the possibility she was already a captive when they were together. He hadn’t forced her to answer that question and had given her multiple options for talking to Nathan. He’d hoped giving that bit would lead to better trust between them. “Is there anything you want to tell me?”
She hunched her shoulders and seemed to shrink by three sizes there on the bench.
He didn’t want her to feel condemned. “This isn’t about guilt, Kelly. You aren’t required to tell me anything. It’s only a question.” He wasn’t her husband. She could see anyone she wanted to. Trouble was, he didn’t want to hear about her wanting to see anyone because his past hadn’t really caught up to the present yet.
“I should’ve told you that he’d contacted me, but I was afraid. He told me he was following me. I’m still afraid. You sent his picture, but he hasn’t been charged with anything. He could still be free. He’s good at hiding.”
“They all are. Let’s agree to drop this right now. I won’t ask you for that watch, but I want you to know that he only wants to make sure that you don’t tell anyone what you went through. Being here puts him in danger. He knows that. That’s why he wants you back.” He didn’t mean to sound so callous to her situation or make her think she was worthless, but to her pimp and trafficker, she was. To the rest of the world, she was valuable.
He’d become just as good at reading body language as he was at avoiding blaming victims, and Kelly’s body language spoke volumes. She didn’t want to talk about their past or Nathan. She didn’t want to talk about what she knew or how it could help them. Probably because the information she had would hurt Sam. Victims were also good at taking on pain to make sure others didn’t have to deal with it. They almost felt like mental anguish was their superpower.
He’d failed her. She didn’t say it out loud, but she didn’t have to. He’d realized when he’d found that photo that Kelly had likely been trafficked back then, before he’d left, and he hadn’t seen it. He hadn’t been trained back then, but he had loved her and noticed she’d changed. He even remembered asking her about her stress, her lack of smiles, and her continual fatigue. She’d brushed it off as life and told him that it would all change once they were married.
Now he knew why.
The unfortunate truth was that a marriage certificate didn’t stop a woman from being trafficked. Nathan had probably tricked her, or he’d lied to her as he had been the last two days. He couldn’t change what he may have done back then. No matter what he thought, it would be speculation. He could do something right now, though.
“No asking about the past. Not now anyway,” Kelly said quietly, and looked up at him with wide eyes, pleading for him to understand.
“When Brendon asked me to work with you, I said no strings attached and I meant it. If you don’t want to broach the past, then we don’t. No questions asked. But you may want to break that rule with Brendon, because I feel like you need to process some things. If that picture is any indication, this guy coerced you into believing in him. That’s a lot to deal with.”
Instead of nodding, Kelly’s mouth dropped open as she glanced behind him. He turned as Edwyn walked into the barn. Edwyn glanced between them, then focused on him. “Everything all right?”
Kelly immediately nodded with her mouth still slightly open, as if they’d been caught doing something they shouldn’t.
“Yes. I was just worried. Kelly had gone out for a short walk, and I didn’t know she’d be gone. We were having a chat out here.”
Edwyn, who was Mr. Rules at Wayside, ignored him and went straight for Kelly. Sam’s internal hackles went up. Maybe there was something between Edwyn and Kelly, at least in the foreman’s mind.
“Do you need me to bring you back to your cabin?” Edwyn asked.
She shook her head. “No. I think I can manage. I’m sorry for wandering so far without letting anyone know where I would be.”
He wasn’t about to let her go alone. Not when he knew she’d been headed to meet up with Nathan or someone who said they were Nathan by text. Kelly got up and headed for the back of the barn where she’d left the watch. Sam went after her, but Edwyn grabbed his arm.
“Let her be. You’re not acting like a Wayside wrangler.”
Sam watched as Kelly left the barn and was out of sight. “Zeus, follow.” The dog, sitting quietly in the corner out of sight, would either stay with her all night or he’d come right back when she made it safely to her door, but he wouldn’t leave her without some protection. Zeus had bonded so quickly with Kelly that he wouldn’t let anyone near her if she appeared frightened. The dog obediently followed.
“What’s this all about, Edwyn? Really? Is this about running Kelly a bath? Because that’s an issue. Wranglers don’t do that, either.”
Edwyn turned white, then red. “Did she tell you that?”
“No. I heard you as I was coming by to see how she was doing after her fall. For a man who follows the rules, that seemed like a red flag to me.”
Edwyn swiped his hand down his face. “Look, that isn’t how I normally am, and you know it. I’ve got no feelings for Kelly. Connor told me that I really messed up with her. I was too loud, too direct. I had to do something to get her to trust me again. So, I did something nice. That’s all I did, Sam.” He slowly shook his head, all the steam gone from his voice. “You know me.”
His thumb touched the red wax ring on his finger. He’d known Kelly and had been so wrong about her, too. He’d trusted his eyes instead of his heart. In Edwyn’s case, he’d trusted his ears over what he knew about Edwyn.
“Sorry, man, it just seems like you’re ready and willing to accuse me of doing the wrong thing. This isn’t easy for me. I’m in a very sensitive situation.”
“I can’t imagine. I really can’t.” Edwyn sat on the bench. “I know this is hard, but if you’re feeling too drawn to her, too much for her, you need to step back. Stay distant at least a little. You can’t let those feelings build. She deserves to heal. No matter what Brendon and Connor say. She’s more important.”
Sam glanced back at the door where she’d disappeared and couldn’t agree more.