Ryder (Steele Shadows Investigations #2)

Chapter 1

Iknew I was dying.

I knew it when my arms and legs went numb. When I no longer felt thirsty. When I stopped feeling pain, when my body was no longer mine, instead a plaything of the devil himself.

I knew it when I stopped caring.

As I lay there like a gutted fish, my body rocking back and forth under his weight, I stared at the ceiling, merely rotted planks stained with mold. Feeling nothing, I focused on a hole in the roof. At the stars beyond it, gleaming against a night sky as black as coal and as cold as ice.

My thoughts drifted, perhaps as a survival mechanism to cope with the physical and mental trauma. I thought about strange things—things you wouldn’t expect from someone who’d just endured hours of torture.

I thought about the universe above me, about evolution and creation, two things I didn’t know much about but felt like I should at that moment.

I thought of the girls who’d bullied me in school, wondering if they were home with their perfect parents in their perfect houses.

I thought about my first kiss with the boy I was sure I was going to marry.

I also thought of the first time I saw my dad hit my mom, dislocating her jaw. I thought of the first time I saw her shoot up. And of the time she told me it didn’t matter if I went to school or not, because I was born trash and would always be trash.

I thought of hope, and the fact that I didn’t have any. Never did have—not in my whole life, and definitely not in the moment I knew my end was coming.

My parents didn’t teach me right from wrong, good from bad. My mother didn’t teach me to recognize that warning bell, that dip in your gut, that sixth sense telling you something wasn’t right. Telling you to leave, to run.

I knew that warning bell now. Much too late. What a shame.

I wondered what it would be like to have parents who were proud of their offspring. Who would move mountains to make their son or daughter happy.

As he finished on my face, I wondered if my parents were looking for me now.

Would they look for me after I was dead?

Would anyone care that I died?

That thought—that single thought—had more power than my will to survive.

The realization that no one would miss me or care that I was gone was more devastating than what the monster was doing to me.

My name would be whispered for a few days, if that, then gone in the wind, along with the single shred of dignity I’d clung so desperately to.

I was nothing, an eighteen-year-old screwup who’d made one bad decision too many. And for that, I was paying the price. A fitting end to the wasteful life I’d lived.

That’s when I started to cry.

In my final moments, a face appeared behind my swollen eyes like an apparition.

The one person—the only person in my life—who’d made an effort to put me on the right path.

The one person who’d offered me her home when I needed it, and food and shelter.

The one person who believed in me. She wasn’t family. Not even a friend. She was an angel.

As his hands wrapped around my neck, I closed my eyes and accepted my fate with her name on my lips.

Louise.

Find me, Lou.