Chapter 21
Chapter Twenty-One
I really hated hospitals. They ate away time and I had lost another full night in one. Because I had fainted, they ran a bunch of tests on me. Everything came back normal. Apart from the cuts, swelling, and bruising, I didn’t have anything life-threatening going on. The doctors assumed I had fainted due to stress, and I was released.
In the middle of all the testing, the attorney general had shown up with a high-ranked, gentlemanly police officer and another official-looking guy in a suit. Both were very kind. They had taken my statement of what had happened in the interrogation room. As I’d spoken, I’d felt detached, factual. It had been easier to tell it that way. Everyone around me had been quiet as they’d listened. My guys, even more so.
After I’d told them what had happened today, they’d had me go over my previous interactions with the sheriff, which had led to everything that I’d been dealing with from Cassy and her friends. It had been a long night.
Yet again, it was almost morning by the time we returned to the guys’ house.
“Can we get you anything?” Keelan asked.
“I just want to take a shower,” I said and left them to go to the twins’ bathroom.
I stood in front of the bathroom mirror for the longest time. I felt like Two-Face from Batman. One side of my face looked normal, but the other was purple and puffy. There was a cut across my cheekbone and along my jaw. Both my top and bottom lips were split from being smashed against my teeth.
I had gotten my butt kicked.
There was a knock on the bathroom door before Colt poked his head in. “Can I come in?”
I nodded.
He stepped inside and shut the door. We stared at each other without saying anything for a moment and then he reached into the shower and turned it on.
When he pulled off his shirt, I asked, “What are you doing?”
He toed off his shoes and yanked off his socks. “You have the same look in your eyes as you did when we first met. You’re barely holding yourself together. You’re fighting so damn hard to stay strong, you’re not letting yourself feel what happened.”
I looked down. “Someone once told me, to survive something terrible you have to bury how it makes you feel. And after you get through it, when it’s safe, you can allow yourself to feel. The thing is, she didn’t survive to show me how to dig it back up.” I hadn’t thought about those words in a long time. It was one of the last things Shayla had said to me.
A finger came under my chin and made me look up. Colt had closed the distance between us, and his eyes bored into mine. “I can show you.” He grabbed the bottom of the Desert Stone T-shirt I was wearing that Keelan had luckily had in his Jeep. I lifted my arms and Colt removed the shirt. He helped strip me and finished taking off the rest of his clothes. We climbed into the shower together. I washed the smell of that interrogation room off of my skin and Colt helped me wash my hair, being careful of my stitches.
When I was clean, he pulled me to his chest, and we stood under the hot spray. Like I’d always done, I tried to bury my face in his chest. Right away, I learned that was a mistake when I put pressure on my hurt cheek. I had to settle with resting my forehead on him. His hand ran up and down my spine.
“You got through it, babe. You are safe,” he said. “I want you to take in a deep breath, and when you let it go, you stop holding everything back. Don’t be afraid of what’s going to rush to the surface. Just let it come. Whatever it is, I’ll be right here holding you. And even though it will be unbearable at first, know that it will ease. I promise, it will.”
Not trusting my voice, I nodded.
“Ready?” he asked.
He took that deep and long breath with me. When it was time to exhale, I almost didn’t. I was too afraid. Then I realized he was holding his breath, too.
I wrapped my arms around his waist and held him tightly as we exhaled together. Before the last of the air left my lungs, I mentally made myself let go. As Colt had said, it all rushed to the surface. Everything that had happened in that interrogation room, the terror of knowing what the sheriff had been about to do to me, the pain of him hurting me, the fear of what would happen next, the realization that I’d had no way out of that room, and the loss of hope that anyone would come to save me.
My eyes welled up and my tears mixed with the water pouring down on us. My body shuddered as I began to sob. Colt stopped rubbing my back to just hold me.
Letting myself feel all that had been like opening a gateway, because the next thing to consume me was everything that I’d endured on Halloween, then when the sheriff had ransacked my house, and when Gabe had attacked me at the mud run. Every bad thing that had happened back to when Jacob had drugged me came to the surface. I faced it. I faced it all because I trusted Colt when he said it would eventually get better and I knew he would hold me until it did.
I slept all day and didn’t drag myself out of Colt’s bed until around dinnertime. I was making my way down the hall, toward the living room, when I heard something strange.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Colt said.
“You need to know.” Was that Logan?
“I’d prefer to wait until our girlfriend is ready to tell us,” Keelan said.
“She’d probably prefer it this way,” Logan said. “It will take the pressure off of her.”
There was a clicking sound and I could hear Ian’s voice, but it was recorded.
“Interview of Shiloh McConnell—sole survivor ? —”
Panic surged through me and I rushed toward the sound of the recording. I stepped out from the hall and found my guys and Logan all sitting around the dining-room table. Logan was seated in the chair I usually sat in and placed in front of him on top of a tan folder was a voice recorder.
I went to stand behind the chair next to Keelan that was normally vacant and directly across from where Logan sat. “What are you doing?” My question was for all of them, but my full focus was on Logan. Hearing my voice come on the recorder, I lunged for it.
Logan scooped it up before I even got close to touching it and paused it. “They deserve to know.”
How dare he?
“I know,” I snarled. “But dammit, Logan! Why can’t I tell them in my own time? When I’m ready? I’m in therapy. I’m doing the work to do it. Why can’t I do it on my terms? What happened…what I went through—” My voice broke.
Logan shook his head. “They need to know. I understand it’s hard?—”
“You don’t understand,” I barked. “You saw the aftermath. I had to live through it. I had to watch him kill them. I had to hear their screams and see their fear. I had to watch the life leave their eyes. I was stabbed, cut, beaten, and almost raped. I disfigured myself to get free.” I held up my wrists. “I fought to stay alive all while enduring the lowest level of hell. It broke me in a way where I will never be glued back together the same. So do not say you understand. You don’t. You want this for you. To get your way, and who cares what the cost is to me, right?” I shook my head. “What you’re doing won’t work, Logan. You need to realize that.”
His jaw clenched. “If it were me, I’d want to know what was on the line before deeper feelings developed.”
“I love them, Logan. There are already deeper feelings,” I snapped. Knox and I hadn’t said those words to each other yet, but I did love him. I had been in love with him for a while. “You’re acting like they don’t know anything. Like I downplayed the seriousness. I haven’t. I’ve told them pretty much everything and they’ve done their own research,” I argued. “Them not knowing the details from that night isn’t going to make a difference.”
“Details matter.” He shoved his chair back and stood. Grabbing the tan file that had been lying untouched in front of him, he flipped it open, and he dropped a piece of paper on the table for all of us to see. The guys either hissed or cursed before looking away from what Logan laid out. The moment my eyes landed on the blood, I realized it wasn’t a piece of paper, but an eight-by-ten photograph of a brutally murdered girl. A brunette girl, around my age, with many, many stab wounds and bruises, and a picture of my face stapled to hers. She was lying on her stomach, head turned to the side, on what appeared to be a bed. The picture was from her waist up, but it was obvious she was naked. There was so much blood on her skin and around her on the bed. Before the need to blink hit me, I saw rope still tied around her wrists.
I closed my eyes and didn’t open them right away. I didn’t know why I thought closing them would hide the image of the girl or ease the feeling of the room closing in on me. It didn’t. The picture of the dead girl Mr. X had killed because he couldn’t find who he truly wanted was carved into my brain.
“Olivia Berns,” my uncle said, and my eyes shot open. I watched as he pulled another picture from the file and tossed it on the table. “Jessica Rivers.” It was another brunette girl with my picture stapled to her face, killed in the same manner. Logan tossed down picture after picture of girls, saying their names that would haunt me for the rest of my life.
“Jonathan McConnell,” he said with a strained voice and before I could finish processing my father’s name, he tossed down the picture.
Tears fell from my eyes without warning, or maybe I was just too shocked to realize they’d started, as I stared unblinking at the image of my father lying on the couch, gray eyes open, blood everywhere from his nose down, his insides on the outside. Seeing it seemed to sharpen the memory I had of finding him that way.
Logan’s voice broke with the next name he said. “Heather Mc—McConnell.” Like the girls Mr. X killed, my mom had been killed by multiple stab wounds.
She was fully clothed, though.
I didn’t know why that thought popped into my head.
Maybe I thought it would lessen the brutality of her death and thus help me feel slightly better.
It didn’t.
Logan held one more photo in his hand. His hesitation in tossing it down drew my eyes up to his. He was staring at me, his expression schooled. “Shayla McConnell,” he said, dropping my sister’s picture on the table. My gaze dropped with it.
Colt looked away. “All I see is Shiloh.”
The others were quiet. I didn’t know if they looked away like Colt had or couldn’t look away from the photo like me.
I felt dead inside as I took in my sister’s pale pink hair, her vacant gray eyes. Blood had crusted the corners of her mouth. Her skin was ghostly. The blood all around her neck made it more apparent.
Numbly, I pulled out the chair in front of me and sat. I stared across the table at my uncle with tear-streaked cheeks. Colt reached for my hand at the same time Keelan grabbed my knee. They both squeezed a little, a silent way to ask if I was all right. I didn’t give any indication that I was.
Logan wouldn’t stop. He was so convinced that the details of that night would be the push that the guys needed to leave me. Them still sitting here after seeing horrific pictures of murdered girls and my butchered family was evidence enough that they wouldn’t.
Details matter , Logan had said. I couldn’t be more detailed than a photograph. Yet he still stared at me, waiting.
“Play the recording.” I tried to sound confident, spiteful, as if I couldn’t wait to prove him wrong. But my words came out defeated and weak. I had no fight left. Just forced acceptance.
“No,” Knox said. “If you are not ready, I will not take that from you. None of us will.”
Logan didn’t seem to care about that and pressed play on the recorder. My voice poured from the small device.
“I can’t do this,” I cried.
“Yes, you can, Shi,” Logan said firmly.
“Please, Logan, tell me it wasn’t real. This isn’t real. I’m dreaming! I’m dreaming! I need my mom. I need her! Mommy!” I wailed.
“Turn it off! Turn it off!” I yelled frantically, slamming my hands down on the table. “I’ll do it! I’ll tell them! Just please turn it off!”
Creed snatched up the recorder before Logan could and turned it off.
I couldn’t sit here and listen to that. The pain. The despair. The voice of a broken girl who had lost everyone she’d loved, whose life had been completely destroyed. Even though it was me, a moment captured from my past, it was the rawness of it I couldn’t take. Like the first sting after a cut. The hurt would never be as painful as it had been then. To sit here and listen to it…it felt like a violation. That girl didn’t deserve to have that horrible moment where no amount of begging and pleading would change what had happened broadcast like this. I didn’t deserve this. Maybe one day, I’d let the guys listen to that recording, but it wasn’t today.
Glaring at Logan, I steeled myself for what I was about to do.