Total pages in book: 30
Estimated words: 27756 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 139(@200wpm)___ 111(@250wpm)___ 93(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 27756 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 139(@200wpm)___ 111(@250wpm)___ 93(@300wpm)
I’m lucky I’ve not gotten frostbite.
Hell, perhaps she had and simply didn’t know it.
If they were on the same schedule they had been, she should be taken outside today for another splash bath and she wanted to see if she could pick up on anything.
No one is coming for me. No one knows where I am. If I’m going to survive this, I have to get out on my own.
Honestly, she depended on herself more often than not, so this was fine. Sure it is.
Okay, so that insidious ugly voice in the back of her head that said you have no friends and are expendable, wasn’t helping. At all.
Friends? She had a few, but she’d distanced herself from all of them recently. Using work as her excuse. There were a couple of fellow badges that she worked with she would go out with on occasion but even that had been slowed to nearly nothing. The person she spent the most time with was her partner and she had no idea at all what had happened to him. He wasn’t her favorite and had become disgusted with the lack of ambition he had in his career and by effect in hers. She wanted to keep moving up, he seemed okay to float by on mediocracy.
Sometimes she believed he’d been behind her when she’d spun to find the car heading a direct line toward her. Others, she couldn’t recall seeing him at all, not since she’d taken point and headed to the end of the alleyway they needed to check out.
Human trafficking was serious and she would always go above and beyond to help solve cases and break up rings. And that’s what they had been there to suss out.
That didn’t go well. At least, not for me.
But while she was a lot of things, a quitter wasn’t one of them.
Dianna stopped pacing and rubbed her chest. It hurt. I hurt. And not merely a physical pain, something deeper than that and she wasn’t sure how to handle it, so she did what she always did. Toss up walls and push people away.
She was damn good at her job. Dianna snorted. “I was until I got blindsided at the docks.”
It still bothered her. The events of that night. They’d had a tip called in which in turn had sent her and Michaelson to check it out. She stopped pacing and braced one hand against the cold wall.
Damn it!
Recollection wasn’t coming. Nothing past arriving and getting out of the car. She hadn’t been shot but hit. By a goddamn car. Other than that, though, she didn’t know.
“I won’t complain about the mugginess of Miami again though. I’m fucking cold.”
And she had been for a while now. The unpleasant feeling had become a way of her new life. Increasing after they thrust the water on her.
The door swung open. She’d not heard them coming, however, she never did. The walls were thick as fuck. If there were others wherever she was, she never heard a single peep out of any of them.
She didn’t make them get her, simply walked obediently to the door where two waited. One on each side of her, not touching, but she knew it wouldn’t take much out of her for them to manacle strong hands onto her body and force whatever they wanted. While she was out getting her weekly douse, someone would switch out the bucket she had for a bathroom.
Head down, doing her best to appear weak and cowed, she shuffled along. Squinting her eyes against the glare, she couldn’t repress the shiver, even if she wanted when the cold wind bit into her exposed skin.
Again, without direction, she moved to stand in the same spot she had for the previous weeks and waited. Through slitted lids, she gazed around best she could without alerting anyone as to her actions.
Forest. No city sounds. Fair enough, you could be in the Glades and not hear the hustle and bustle of Miami.
I’m definitely not in the Glades. Not close to Miami because it’s to damn cold. Add to that, there’s snow on the ground and no way I am still in Miami.
It wasn’t fresh snow for she didn’t spy boot prints when those watching her moved. Crusted over and thick if it didn’t do anything beneath their larger weight. Good to know they would have a harder time tracking her when she made her escape.
See, I can be fucking positive. Just like I am in that my Panthers will bring home Lord Stanley.
Wherever she was, the forest was quiet. She’d learned a few things about being outdoors after one of her best friends got married and moved to the rainforest in Brazil. And there, it wasn’t ever quiet.
Unless a predator was around.
Unease slithered up her spine. Why was it quiet here? Other than the men, what sort of predators did she have to contend with?