28 Everleigh Stay—Telander #2
“I’m your saviour!” Christopher visibly seethes.
“Did you save Isabel? Or Rachel?”
He selects a glinting medical scalpel, not unlike the one that slashed into Piper. My blood runs cold. I find enough strength to scuttle back, putting the wall at my back.
“Silence, Everleigh. Else I’ll do to you what I did to them.”
“Go right ahead. You won’t make me submit.”
His teeth bare, a feral snarl. “I’m going to slice that mess from your skin to cut the attitude right out of you.”
“You still won’t break me!”
“Then I won’t stop until I’ve cut you to pieces!” he booms.
There’s nowhere to run from him in this paradise of horrors. My weak punches fall short, bouncing off him as two long legs straddle my waist. I resort to scratching, attempting to rake my nails over any available flesh. Including his face.
Christopher howls more wildly than a rabid wolf, his forehead crashing into mine to stupefy me. Brilliant stars burst across my line of sight. But not enough to obscure the demon crouched over my body, eyes alight with malice and scalpel poised to inflict his will.
“You shouldn’t have run from me,” he whispers, lifeless and without mercy. “You were so close to perfection.”
“Get off me!”
“Hold still now, darling.”
“No! Stop!”
My bones crunch against the tiles where I’m trapped on the floor. What little energy I have left funnels into bucking frenziedly, attempting to throw him off. It’s futile. His trim muscles and height offer him the power to take full control.
When the point of his scalpel carves into my flesh, nothing can hold the agonised scream back. Vocal cords shred and oxygen inflames like jet fuel. Every sense is telling me to fight back, but the laser point slicing through skin and ink scares me enough to let myself go limp.
“You’re making me do this,” he justifies, deep in concentration. “It’s your fault, Everleigh.”
“Please,” I weep hysterically.
“Don’t worry, it will all be over soon.”
“Stop it!”
With each slash, my fury depletes. No matter how loudly Sterling’s imaginary voice growls in my head to keep counting, keep breathing. Not even when Leo and Fletcher join his internal pleas. I’m too tired to listen.
Heat dribbles over my elbow and arm, taking my determination with it. The one piece of myself that doesn’t belong to him is being surgically cut away from me by a doctor of death. It’s a defeat like no other.
Because I’ve failed.
I came to atone . . . and I’m giving up.
“Halfway there,” he mutters, tongue darting out. “I’ll fix everything. You’ll be perfect again.”
“You c-can’t . . . fix me,” I snivel.
“I unmade you, Everleigh. And I can do it again.”
“S-S-Stop . . .”
“That’s it. Just relax. When you wake up, it’ll all be over.”
Just as my vision begins to tunnel, a beam of light shines through the bathroom window behind Christopher’s perch.
It illuminates my face, causing my eyes to slit.
God, I’m ready to go into it. Anything to leave this moment.
But the light only grows, joined by several others until movement blurs behind the frosted glass.
Smash.
Black-clothed blurs infiltrate my flickering view. A bloodless hallucination, perhaps. The shapes swing into the bathroom through destroyed glass and crash-land behind Christopher without missing a beat. Lithe. Confident. Controlled.
I collapse sideways in a heap when he’s torn from me and brutally tossed across the room, causing the shower door to shatter around him. Two blurs advance on my husband while a third stoops next to me, growing clearer at this proximity.
Blinking lazily, I will the image to settle.
This is a nice dream.
Hands lift a dark balaclava, unveiling a stranger’s face. His mouth curves down as he surveys me, then flames erupt on my arm where he grabs the wound Christopher was inflicting to staunch the bleeding. With pain comes clarity, and I snap back into the room, howling in shock.
“Sorry, sorry,” he grunts. “Keep still please.”
“S-Stop! Leave m-me alone!”
“I’m here to help, Everleigh. Take a breath.”
Streaming blood oozes between his glove-covered hands, pooling on the bathroom floor. I pant between gritted teeth as he barks orders at his two companions, both looming over an unconscious Christopher, slumped in the shower tray.
“Kade! First aid kit!”
The slimmer of the two jerks into action. “Incoming!”
My saviour captures the compact tin pulled from his friend’s cargo vest. He frowns at the selection before retrieving rolled bandages, using his teeth to tear them open and put pressure on my arm.
“Who are you?” I breathe raggedly.
“Warner Mead, Sabre Security. I’m an old friend of Fletcher Wright.”
“The investigative f-firm?”
“That’s the one,” he confirms.
“W-Why?”
“Heard you were in some trouble.”
Leaving one man on Christopher, a tall, wide-bodied brute stomps over to us, holding a walkie-talkie to his lips. He spares me a long look, then depresses the button to murmur.
“Hudson here.”
There’s a low crackle.
“Update?”
“We’ve got her. Stand by.”
“Copy that. Got some angry dudes ready to knock this door down, Hud.”
“Fuck,” he curses. “Coming.”
A gentle but firm hand cupping the back of my head, Warner helps me sit up against the wall again. I bite back a wail as he presses cotton to my arm, then begins to wind temporary bandages around it as thickly as possible.
“H-How?” I stammer.
Two oceanic eyes flutter over me. “Phones can be tracked, Everleigh. I owe Fletcher a favour from our military days. He called it in to get us on the case.”
Shock dizzies my injured form, almost taking me out entirely.
“Thank y-you.”
“Wish we’d known about you sooner. I’ve had a team investigating these disappearances for a while now. Glad we’ve finally got our perp.”
“He k-killed Rachel . . . Heavensly. Her body . . . I saw it . . . The flat. In H-Hackney.”
“It’s okay, Everleigh. We’ll find her.”
“He’s hurt so m-many people,” I sob.
“And he won’t get away with it any longer.” Warner’s smile is pure reassurance. “You’re free now.”
Relief unlike anything I’ve ever experienced hits me in a drowning wave. My tears no longer leak despair and hopelessness . . . but freedom at last. The shackles that have weighed me down since that engagement ring landed on my finger clatter in my mind as they fall free.
“Can I lift you?” Warner requests. “I’ll go slow.”
Nodding, I brace myself for the pain of being scooped into his arms. The bathroom and all its blood-slick chaos disappear over his shoulders, carrying my abuser out of sight. I weakly return the smile Christopher’s captor, Kade, gifts me.
Barely held back from entering the house, three familiar shadows battle to get past their dark-clothed bouncers. Warner’s colleagues step aside to let him pass outside. The poor man can’t fend off my guys from swooping in.
“Sweetheart,” Leo exclaims, hands hovering without touching. “Oh, Jesus.”
A hand on his shoulder, Sterling ducks to feather a kiss over my forehead. “You’re okay, baby.”
“Hi,” I whimper.
Fletcher stands behind them, his intense stare locked on me. He summons a smile. My lips twitch in return. They all came for me. My men. My home. They’re here to take me away from this place for good.
Once I’m set down on a medical stretcher in the back of an awaiting ambulance, I can wrap crimson-stained fingers around Sterling’s paw and Leo’s wrist. Fletcher takes a moment to shake his friend’s hand, then climbs in, presiding over us all.
“Wait,” I gasp, ignoring the paramedics swarming. “My b-boots . . . The phone.”
Warner hesitates. “Sterling’s phone?”
“Confession. I r-recorded it.”
“Goddammit,” Sterling cusses. “That was your plan?”
Leo smooths hair from my face. “You’re fucking crazy.”
“It w-worked. He can’t pay his way out of th-this.”
Chuckling, Warner tousles his salt-and-pepper hair. “Good work, Everleigh. We’ll take it from here.”
“Thank you.” Sterling nods to him. “For coming to help.”
Warner shrugs him off. “It’s what we do at Sabre.”
The fluorescent doors close on him, leaving me with my family. Not the one that bartered me to a psychopath for some shallow reward, but the one that showed up when I needed it. That gave me a home and a future.
A future . . . with them.
It’s mine.