Total pages in book: 75
Estimated words: 73716 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 369(@200wpm)___ 295(@250wpm)___ 246(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 73716 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 369(@200wpm)___ 295(@250wpm)___ 246(@300wpm)
“Your brother, Dante, doesn’t work at his own business anymore?”
Wow, that was terrible.
“He and his wife built Hail Auto Recovery from the ground up together right along with Travis. The place reminds him of her, and he wants nothing to do with it anymore. Travis is now the man in charge, at least until we can get Dante to see the light.”
That poor man.
I knew what it felt like to lose a loved one. I knew that it felt like someone was stabbing you straight through the heart, and that it didn’t matter that what you were supposed to be doing was living your life. Instead, you were holed up in your apartment, staring at the wall, wishing your life away in exchange for one more chance to see him again.
“Tobias,” I hesitated.
“Yeah?”
“You know I’m fucked up, too, right?”
I was going to tell him. I was going to tell him everything.
I felt like I was going to throw up.
He turned to look at me, no longer staring out over the horizon anymore like I was doing.
“I know.”
I didn’t have the courage to look at him.
“Do you know why?”
Please say yes. Please say yes.
“Yes,” he said. “Your brother told me a little when I came to get you.”
I didn’t look at him, but he had to know the details.
“I was about a semester and a half away from graduating nursing school,” I swallowed.
He didn’t touch me, but I could tell he wanted to by the way his hands tightened so tightly on the railing as I looked at him out of my peripheral vision.
“I’d just walked out after my shift in the ER. I was a tech,” I cleared my throat. “I didn’t do anything special. Just made sure I was there to offer assistance if anyone needed it.”
I closed my eyes as the images started to assault me.
“The way our parking lot was set up, the front lot was for patients and visitors. Then you had to walk down the street, past a cemetery down to the overflow lot where all the employees like me, the nurses and registration, parked. Doctors got to use in the parking lot at the front.”
He grunted. “Nice.”
“Anyway, I was on my way to the car, about halfway between the lot and the hospital, when something hit me from behind.”
As I retold the story of my rape, my breath hitched and tears pooled in my eyes. But I didn’t stop. Not until every single detail was out in the open between us.
“He told me that it was because of something one of my friends had done.” I rasped. “But really it was one of my mother and father’s men ‘teaching me a lesson.’”
He growled.
My parents were bad people. I hadn’t had any idea how bad until my brother, who I had thought was dead, came back into my life hell bent on vengeance.
Tobias had been sent to pick me up because my parents were blackmailing me to get me to work for them.
To save me, Ghost – who was actually my brother, Tunnel—had sent Tobias to bring me to him, and in the process, had thwarted my parents’ plans for me to give them and others in their employ medical attention if the need ever arose.
Now my father, as well as my rapist, were in jail.
They were doing life sentences.
Josh, my attacker and rapist, was serving time for embezzlement and the murder of two of his wives. The rest? My rape? Everyone thought it’d be best that we not put me into the position that I’d have to testify and relive the event.
I’d agreed that it was for the best.
Josh would already be serving two life sentences. If there wasn’t a reason for me to subject myself to that, I knew that I shouldn’t.
Honestly, it burned that he wasn’t serving time for everything he’d done, but he would be in jail for a very long time and would be almost ninety-three when he got out—if he lived that long.
Though my brother had wanted to kill him, I’d made him promise that he wouldn’t.
Josh deserved every single minute of that time he had to serve and then some.
I took pride in the fact that I played an integral part in the prosecution’s case against him. It was immensely satisfying that my testimony was one of the reasons he would be serving nearly the rest of his life in prison, even if it was just telling the judge and jury what I’d heard when I’d been his captive.
Josh had helped my mother and father kidnap not just me, but Tunnel and Mina as well.
If it wasn’t for the quick thinking of my brother, then they might very well have had Tunnel’s daughter and Tobias, as well.
“I want to walk into that prison and rip his arms off his body and beat him to death with them.”