Total pages in book: 109
Estimated words: 104165 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 521(@200wpm)___ 417(@250wpm)___ 347(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 104165 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 521(@200wpm)___ 417(@250wpm)___ 347(@300wpm)
I hold my hand out for her to come to me. Will my control over her hold? Have I done my job well enough? Just fifty feet separate us.
“Our time is now.” I make her the same offer she did to me all those years ago. “Let’s run away together.” Except I’m not going to let anything separate us this time. “Now. Come with me now, kitty..”
I see light come into her eyes. She’s about to take a step in my direction when her father shouts, “You’re Daddy’s good girl. You know what happens to bad girls, Matilda. How many times have I told you? I will never let you go.”
She freezes and the brightness that entered her eyes seeps out just as quickly.
And I suddenly see how cruel I’ve been. Trying to own her at all.
Oh god, I’m such a fucking fool.
I thought that control had to be taken before it was taken from me. But I only thought that because it was the lesson he taught me.
What Brooke needed the whole time was for someone to trust her enough to choose for herself. Only in choosing me of her own will would she ever be free of her father’s monstrous grip on her mind. Right now, he’s just using her like a puppet between us.
She’s going to be ripped in half.
When he shouts again, “Be Daddy’s good girl, she turns away from me and begins hurrying towards the plane.
I all-out sprint to get to her.
I’m not a scrawny seventeen-year-old anymore. I train at the gym five days a week so that if it ever mattered again, I’d be too big a motherfucker for anybody to hold down. If I can just get my hands on the old man, I won’t stop until I’ve bashed his head into the concrete so many times he no longer has any teeth.
But Mads has a shorter distance to go, and once her father claps his hands sharply at her she starts to run. Feck me but she’s fast.
As soon as her foot touches the bottom stair, the stairs start lifting back up into the plane. She jogs up them as they go. By the time I reach it, the stairs are almost all the way up. I leap as far as I can, as if I’ll be able to catch the foot of the stairs before they disappear. But no, they close solidly into the smooth wall of the plane.
“Brooke!” I jump up and pound the bottom of the plane with both fists. “Madison! Open up. Open up this goddamn door. I’m not going to lose you again!”
But the plane’s engines have been roaring this whole time, probably one of the reasons they didn’t hear our car pull up until the last moment. Now they roar even louder, and the plane starts to taxi.
“Get out of there!” comes Quinn’s voice from behind me.
But I can’t move, just staring at the door of the airplane as it moves away from me. It’s Isaak again to the rescue, tackling me out of the way before the Cessna’s engine on its forward wing catches and drags me into its whirring blade.
Isaak keeps dragging me backwards until we can see the Cessna’s windshield.
The bastard himself is sitting there in the cockpit, grinning down at me.
I see him reach down to push the gear to start the plane down the runway, taking off with the woman of my dreams forever. I’ve never felt more powerless in all my life. If I thought running up and jumping on the plane would do anything, I’d try.
But action movie stunts aren’t real. I don’t know how to get into a plane once the door is shut and locked.
I roar in fury as I realize the humbling truth: I can’t save her. I’ll never be able to save her.
As if to add insult to injury, suddenly she pops up there behind her father in the window. I go silent, trying to drink in my last image of her.
I’ll find you this time, Mads, I swear.
But just then, something glints as she reaches her arm down as if to help her still bent-over father adjust something with the navigation.
He wrenches up violently, though, holding his hands to his throat. We all watch in stunned shock as Brooke yanks her hand back.
Blood splatters the window.
“Jesus fuck!” Quinn says, then reaches down into the leg of her thigh-highs. “She knew I carried a knife in the top of my boot. She must’ve nabbed it when you two were arguing at the club earlier.” She looks up at me. “Right before she went out to her father.”
Holy shit. My eyes are glued to Brooke as she jerks back out of the window’s frame. For several moments, her father just sits there, hands struggling not to let the spurting blood out of his slit throat. It only takes a couple of moments for him to lose the battle, though, his blood draining out down over his chest. He slumps over where he sits.