Chapter 35 Lara
Lara
He looked like Ian, but the only drug responsible for the crazed look in his eyes was hatred.
My sympathetic nervous system screamed fight or flight. Flight wasn’t an option. He didn’t know Rachel was practically unconscious, and I would fight until my very last breath to keep this deranged man from getting to her.
“You should’ve picked me when you had the chance,” he sneered and came closer.
I lifted my hands and rooted my feet. It would be a mistake to move now when Ben’s gun was pointed straight at me and his finger was on the trigger.
Even if he didn’t follow Calder’s rule to never aim a gun at something you didn’t intend to shoot, I wasn’t going to take the chance.
Even if the sound almost stirred Rachel and she made a noise.
“You’re making a mistake,” I said, aiming for the calm tone Calder used.
“Shut up,” he snapped as his heavy boots trod down to me. “On your knees.”
My throat constricted. I didn’t dare defy him, but I didn’t rush to comply, either. Taking my time, I sank one knee to the ground and then the other. Think, Lara. What can you use?
“I’m going to fuck that whore mouth of yours first. Teach you to say no to me,” Ben snapped, stopping about a foot and a half in front of me and reaching for the waist of his pants.
I gagged, feeling something digging into my thigh. Calder’s knife. Hope seared through my chest.
All I had to do was wait for him to get close enough to use it. Well, he certainly planned on doing that. Bile rose in my throat, knowing what that would entail, but I had to. I had to survive. I had to protect my sister.
I waited, feeling my muscles start to vibrate with adrenaline as he came closer, one hand opening the flap of his slacks, the other keeping his gun aimed at me.
“God, I need this,” he groaned and freed himself.
Though I’d probably seen hundreds of men’s cocks at this point, I found in that moment there was a distinct difference in observing the anatomy of a patient and seeing the sad erection of a man who was about to assault me.
He came right in front of me, a sick grin on his face. I turned my face away and pulled the blade from my pocket.
“Don’t you fucking look away from me.” He grabbed my hair and yanked my head straight. Pain burst through my skull, and then the cold butt of his gun was pressed to the side of my head.
This was it. I was going to have only one chance to deflect his gun and sink the knife into his femoral artery. If I was lucky, by the time he realized what happened and could reach for me or try to shoot me, he’d already be slipping into unconsciousness.
One chance, and it involved putting his disgusting penis in my mouth.
“Open wide.” He yanked my head back, obscuring my view even more from the inside of his thigh. “Bite me, and I’ll blow your brains out.”
I stared up at him, his skinny member floating in my vision. I was sorely tempted to ignore his warning, but I wouldn’t. Not because I wanted to obey him, though he’d think that, but because I had a better plan. A better pain in store for him than a damaged penis.
“Fuck you,” I spat.
Rage shriveled his features. “Fucking—”
“Lara!” a voice boomed from the ridge.
Ben spun around. Distracted. And I moved. The knife flicked open and I drove it into the inside of his upper thigh at the same moment Calder fired.
Ben’s wide, shocked eyes came toward me as he fell forward like a sack of bricks. Yanking the knife free, I lunged to the side so he wouldn’t fall on top of me.
“Lara!” I heard him yelling, but it was muted under the thudding of my heart.
I stared at the fallen man, face down in the leaves.
I knew he was dead. I felt it. Just as surely as I felt the sticky heat of his blood on my hand, the dark heme coating the tip of the silver blade all the way to my forearm.
“Lara.”
Calder cupped my cheeks, forcing my eyes to his. Forcing my mind to the moment.
“Are you all right?” he asked, turning my head and scanning over my body like whatever my answer was wouldn’t have made a difference.
“Yeah,” I said, my voice not sounding like my own and my eyes drawn back to my hand.
His curse was muffled as he took the knife from my hand and dropped it to the ground, then used his own shirt to wipe the blood from my skin.
“I’ve got you,” he murmured, pulling me tight to his chest. Only against his strength did I feel how bad I was shaking. “You’re safe.”
Calder couldn’t have held me for long, but he did manage to pick me up and carry me under the shelter, sitting me next to Rachel and using a wipe to clean the rest of Ben’s blood from my hands.
Before I knew it, a helicopter thumped above us and two park rangers had made their way down the ridge to our shelter.
They helped stabilize my sister, who was too knocked out to even wake up as Calder and one of the rangers secured her on a sled and pulled her back up the ridge where the paramedics were waiting.
Thankfully, Adam Eden was already on the medevac before the group of us reached the compound from our campsite. The blades whipped higher, and I was glad I wasn’t the surgeon on call to treat Adam Eden, though I doubted he would make it even with every attempt to save his life.
Just like Ben.
My attacker was dead before he’d hit the ground.
The rangers hadn’t even attempted to help him, and when we left the shelter, Calder had already covered his body with a tarp from his bag so I wouldn’t have to see it.
They’d come back later to remove the body, and with a few more stormy nights, even the ground wouldn’t have any trace left of his blood.
“Follow my finger,” I instructed, holding up my index finger and moving it in front of Matthew’s face.
With the medevac gone, there were only two people available with advanced medical training: me and one of the other women who’d been a nurse before joining Eden’s Children.
Both of us had flipped into emergency-response mode.
I asked for the first aid kit from the rangers and, after confirming no serious damage, instructed her to bandage the guard with the gunshot wound to his shoulder.
Meanwhile, I went to evaluate Matthew and Dr. Julia for any sign of concussion or brain injury.
Dr. Julia was shaken, but the least injured—at least physically—of the two. Emotionally, I wasn’t sure even her professional training was strong enough to unpack all the trauma Adam Eden had heaped on her for decades.
Matthew, on the other hand, I found sitting on the steps outside Adam’s cabin, staring off like he was hoping to see a ghost.
“He made Hannah write him letters. That’s how I realized what was happening. I found an unfinished one in her room where she wrote about being nervous to leave school and move out here.” Matthew spoke, though I wasn’t sure he was really talking to me but instead just . . . getting it out.
On the hike back to the compound, Calder revealed Matthew was Hannah’s boyfriend who’d joined Dr. Julia and Wilderness Within to get justice for Hannah, and I shared how Matthew had helped Rachel and me escape.
“I confronted Hannah. I told her they weren’t helping her. That they didn’t care about her. I told her I loved her and I wanted to marry her.”
My throat tightened as I checked the lump on his head.
“She wouldn’t believe me. She went back and told them what happened—what I said.
They were furious that I knew—that I found out.
She called me when she left Dr. Julia’s office.
I’d never heard her so upset. She said they didn’t want her.
They didn’t love her. That it was my fault.
I’d made them not love her. I told her I loved her, but it wasn’t enough.
” He paused then, emotion clogging his voice. “The next morning, they found her.”
I ran through the cognitive tests for any signs of a concussion, all negative.
“You told the investigator about the letters.”
Slowly, he nodded. “Then they disappeared, so I came here to find them.”
“She didn’t recognize you?”
“Dr. Julia?” He shook his head. “I transferred in sophomore year on a soccer scholarship. I never met her, and in college, I went by my middle name, Jack. My dad’s name is Matthew,” he said by way of explanation.
“You didn’t find the letters?”
He shook his head like that was the worst part of all this. “I think I came out here knowing I wouldn’t find them. Deep down, I knew it would come to this.” To killing them. “I wish there was something worse than death for him.”
He looked up at me, desperate for something to relieve his pain.
“There is,” I said, and stepped back. “The life Hannah would’ve wanted you to live.”
The heartbroken man stared at me long and hard, then hung his head and sobbed.
Satisfied that he showed no sign of brain injury, I left him to sit with his grief. My own emotions were already at their bursting point, and I needed to make sure everyone else was okay.
After checking on the nurse and the bandage she’d applied, I returned to Rachel’s side. They’d laid her on a shady patch of grass. Kneeling next to the sled, I took her hand in mine, anchoring myself to its warmth.
“You’re okay now,” I murmured and bent over her, kissing her forehead.
When I looked up, my gaze swam into focus on the people congregated in the grassy middle of the buildings.
Calder had joined the police and rangers as they rounded up everyone else in the compound and began interviewing them.
The irony of the scene struck me. All of the women were in the same area where Eden ministered to them on their knees.
Some were crying. Others were holding each other in shock.
Only now, they weren’t kneeling. They were standing.
Warmth fizzled along my spine, my gaze searching for the source. For him.
Calder finished talking to the officer he stood with and then came over. Dirt and blood caked to his clothes, same as mine, and that only made me pull him harder to me.
His lips went to the top of my head. “You okay?”
“Yeah.” There were so many other things I wanted to say—to tell him—but my body was nose-diving into an adrenaline crash, and all I wanted was to close my eyes and never leave his arms.
I got my wish for a few minutes. Nothing but the breeze invaded our embrace until the cavalry arrived.
Another police SUV and an ambulance drove through the gates. Behind them, Cassius’s truck slowed to an idle just outside the perimeter.
“Time to go,” he murmured, and released me. Looking down at Rachel and then over to the ambulance where Dr. Julia and the man with the shoulder injury were already being loaded into the back, Calder asked, “Do you want to take Rachel to the hospital?”
“No.” The sedatives they’d given her would wear off in a couple of hours. Until then, my sister had her own personal doctor to look after her.
Nodding, Calder went over to the EMTs and handled the conversation and the natural pushback that came when anyone refused formal medical assessment.
It would’ve been easier if I had gone and told them I was a doctor, but right here, right now, I wasn’t a doctor.
The last of my honed authority had seeped out from me the moment I’d walked away from Matthew.
Now I was a victim who’d killed my attacker.
I was a sister who was both exhausted and relieved, worried for Rachel and wanting to weep that I’d found her at the same time.
And I was a woman, wanting nothing more than to let go of the weight I carried and be taken care of by the man who always protected me. The man I loved.
“Let’s go home,” Calder said when he returned. Crouching and lifting Rachel into his arms, we headed for Cassius’s truck.
Home had never sounded so good. Nor so right.