Chapter 45
Forty-Five
Enoch
The turkey sandwich was taunting me. I glowered at it, nose wrinkling at the smell that shouldn’t have been so offensive but was making me even more nauseated.
“Eat it,” my dad demanded.
I turned my gaze towards where he was sitting at the head of the table three chairs away from me.
I unlocked my clenched jaw and picked up the sandwich, forcing myself to breathe through my mouth so I wouldn’t gag as I took a small bite. Everything about the act of eating felt wrong. I wasn’t hungry, nothing tasted good, and knowing I’d likely vomit it up at some point turned me off even more.
I forced myself to chew and swallow, willing myself not to gag as the food went down the back of my throat.
I gave my dad a sarcastic thumbs up, but my mood didn’t seem to affect him as he plowed through his own meal of a sandwich, salad and chips. You’d have thought the man was prepping for a marathon with the amount of calories he was able to consume.
I turned my attention back to the sleek, black piano in the corner of the room, placed directly in front of one of the large windows that overlooked the outdoor space.
Was it a grand piano? A baby grand?
What the hell was the difference?
When the team agreed to let my dad and I join them in Texas, I had expected some shitty hotel room and eating drive-thru hamburgers for maybe two days max.
I hadn’t been prepared to be staying on over one hundred acres of land in a massive ranch estate with a fucking private chef.
Well, maybe he wasn’t a private chef, his name was fucking Cheeseman, but he was definitely the resident food supplier who was currently standing with his arms crossed over his chest as he stared at me.
It looked like Cheeseman was contemplating coming over, tying me to this chair, and force feeding me.
He'd have to get in line behind my father.
The team my dad had managed to hire with the help of one of his military buddies was a ten-man team of ex-special forces monsters.
And I meant that in the nicest way possible, but they were freaking scary.
It wasn’t even that they were giant, walls of muscles.
It was how they carried themselves with such confidence, how they radiated this energy of ‘don’t ask me what I did last summer unless you want to join the bodies I fed to the pigs’.
Apparently, there were even more of them.
They were just one team from a private security organization that the team leader had started a decade ago after getting out of the Green Berets.
I think I would have been a little more intimidated if they didn’t have names like Cheeseman, Cash and Cow, or my personal favorite Big Bird. One of their many rules in the contract we signed was that they didn’t use their legal names during work.
I managed to take three more bites of food before my stomach cramped painfully, and I excused myself from the table.
Cheeseman didn’t look very impressed when I brought my plate into the kitchen and disposed of the half-eaten sandwich.
But I ignored him and his tattooed hands that grabbed the plate from me.
He shoved the entire untouched half of my sandwich into his mouth.
It looked like a threat, and I shuddered as I backed out of the kitchen.
I stepped out onto the covered patio that overlooked the pristine pool and rolling hills surrounding the property.
I didn’t believe half the shit these guys told me, not after they flew us in a private plane and told us this property just happened to be up for auction, and they bought it the day we flew out here.
It was insane.
I was beginning to wonder if these guys weren’t killers for hire. They were certainly not hurting for an income with how little they’d asked us to pay for their services.
I was skeptical they were up for the job until they produced a detailed background on her ex-husband, his financials, and a deep dive into the financial records from the church within the first six hours of landing in Texas.
And yet it’d been two days since we landed, and I was going in-fucking-sane.
Shiloh had been missing for five days. Five fucking days.
I felt like I couldn’t breathe.
She was only forty-minutes away, yet I was stuck here on this luxury ranch home twiddling my thumbs waiting for this team of experts to give the green light to go and get her back.
Every single second felt like a lifetime too long to be waiting. I had voiced my opinion as such many times over the last two days, but this team wouldn’t budge.
They said they weren’t going to risk anything until they were sure that they could successfully retrieve Emory.
The compound was fucking huge, over two-thousand acres and short of knocking down every damn door, we couldn’t be certain where they were keeping her.
Unless we contacted the FBI, and the team that had extracted her, for details, we were going in blind.
The worst fucking part was that they couldn’t figure out how he had found her.
I told them about the air show, but when they did a search on the internet looking for her based on the one photo I had of her on my phone, they couldn’t find her.
Yet. They were still running a continuous search for her in the background of people’s posts.
And this guy’s financials were squeaky clean.
Bradley told them to look into his father’s financials too and they were, but so far, nothing. Even the church was clean. On paper at least.
They’d been hoping that by continuing to monitor the property with drones, they’d be able to scout Theo coming and going, but so far, we’d not seen any sightings of Theo or Shiloh.
And we couldn’t just drive in either. The entire property had a fifteen-foot wall surrounding it and the entrance manned twenty-four hours with gated entry.
Bradley was hopeful that Theo was too obsessed with Shiloh to kill her, but I wasn’t so sure.
The man had whipped her back with a belt, indoctrinated her with false teachings from the Bible, had her deathly afraid of taking a damn bath…
I thought Bradley was severely underestimating the lengths that man was willing to go to keep Shiloh.
And what hell he could be putting her through right now.
Hell, my mind was a constant loop of every worst nightmare I could imagine. Just thinking about him putting his hands on her, raping her, trying to impregnate her again, had the bile surging up the back of my throat. I made it to a flowerpot just in time to spew the undigested turkey sandwich.
I spat, wiping my mouth with the back of my hand and righted myself to find Bradley holding out a stick of gum. I accepted, shoving it into my mouth, eager to get the taste away.
“They’re serious in there,” he said dryly, dropping into a seat at the large outdoor table. “They’re considering force feeding you. Or making you take some weed to get an appetite.”
I shook my head. “They won’t do that. I’m a year sober.”
He sucked his teeth and nodded. “That sucks. But explains why you’ve not been drinking yourself to sleep every night. I’m sure some liquor would hit hard right about now.”
I groaned a sigh, “Gee. Thanks for the reminder.”
“Fuck, sorry. That was probably not the thing to say to an addict.”
I shook my head with a scoff. “No. Probably not.”
“We’ll get her back.”
“You seem awfully confident for someone who isn’t even doing the work.”
Shit, that was a dick statement, but I didn’t retract it.
He laughed, pointing his finger at me with a grin, “I like you. You’re a lot like Emory, you know? Don’t take shit and certainly don’t filter your thoughts.”
I frowned, not having drawn the same conclusion before. But he wasn’t wrong. We had become more and more alike in the last five years. Sadly, it was likely because I’d finally tasted an ounce of trauma and had lost a little bit of my happy-go-lucky demeanor. Or maybe a lot of it.
Looking back, a lot about her personality could be attributed to the trauma she’d survived. I knew that the knowledge I had about it just barely scratched the surface, but the walls I had to scale to just obtain that information was a feat of warfare.
He chuckled softly to himself, shaking his head. “I spent two months with Emory in a safe house before moving her to Alaska. She was different then. That place, than man, Theo,” he spat the name like it was a curse word, “had really done a number on her. And I don’t mean just physically.”
My stomach threatened to attempt to empty again at the reminder that he had her. He’d had her for five whole days.
“She was reserved. Timid. But slowly, slowly she shed her skin, and I got a glimpse at the real woman inside. I was proud of her, and I just wanted her to be happy. I dunno,” he blew out a breath, swiping his hand over his hair, “maybe it was some misguided sense of fatherly bonding we’d shared while I was nursing her back to health from death’s door, but I let her slip past my defenses, and it cost her.
I should have never broken protocol placing her there, should have at least been keeping track of you before she had a chance to meet you again. ”
“She mentioned that. That she was sick. What happened?” I slowly dragged myself into the chair across from him.