Broad Daylight

by A. M. Wilson

  Dani cries out, the pathetic noise sending shards of glass ripping through my heart just as easily as the whip is doing to her back.

  I don’t know how many times I lash her back or how much time passes. Each and every hit, I feel against my own flesh.

  “Stop.”

  I drop the whip like it’s a hot brand burning my hand. My chest heaves, and vomit rises in my throat. Before I can stop it, I’m on my knees and throwing up the food I ate earlier.

  I’m dry heaving when I hear Bolt approach. Out of the corner of my eye, I spot the control gripped tight in her hand.

  I flinch when her fingers gently run through the hair at the nape of my neck.

  “Such a good pretty boy. Your performance was perfect.” My mouth fills with saliva at her praise. “I was going to make you go back to your room, but since you did so well, I’ll leave you in here for a while.”

  Relief mixed with the ever-present animosity has my breathing slowing down.

  I keep my head bent, not willing to chance looking at Bolt for fear I may attack and make things even worse.

  After a moment, I hear her feet retreating and the door closing with the snick of the lock. Every bit of energy is drained from me, but I get to my feet and go to Dani. She stopped screaming a while ago. The only indication that she’s alive is the slight rise and fall of her shoulders.

  I don’t look at her back. I’ve already seen it, and I can’t take looking at it again at the moment. Walking around her, I tip her chin up. The fracture in my heart splinters all the way in two at the dried streaks of tears mixed with dirt on her cheeks. Her face is pale, and there’s a trickle of blood out the corner of her mouth, probably from her biting her lip or tongue.

  I set my shoulder in her stomach and lift her enough that I can untie her hands. Her body falls limply against me, and I carry her over to the mattress.

  “Reece?” she croaks as I maneuver her onto her stomach.

  “Shh…” I brush her hair away from her face. Her eyes are slitted open.

  “Is it over?”

  “Yes.” I can barely get the words out past the lump in my throat.

  Uselessly, I look around the room. I don’t even have anything to clean her wounds with.

  I slide my gaze to her back, forcing back the vomit trying to resurface at the destruction I caused. There’s not an inch of flesh that isn’t marked.

  Tipping my head back, I scream up at the ceiling, “Bring me some fucking water and bandages!”

  “Reece.” I look down at Dani as she weakly calls my name. “Will you… do something for me?”

  The vulnerability in her voice when she’s usually so strong has fresh tears springing to my eyes. I force them back, not wanting to upset Dani more if she sees them.

  “Anything.”

  “Lie down with me.”

  Situating myself on the edge of the mattress, I roll to my side, keeping my hands to myself when I want nothing more than to pull her into my arms.

  “I tried to stay strong,” she croaks out.

  Unable to stop myself, I lift a hand to her cheek and rub my thumb over the smooth skin. “You did, baby. You were strong. Stronger than anyone else would have been.”

  She licks her lips, her eyes sliding open a little more. “I’m sorry.” I open my mouth to ask her what in the hell she has to be sorry for, but she continues. “I'm sorry you had to do that.”

  I close my eyes, too ashamed to look at her anymore. With a ragged breath, I move my head forward until my forehead touches hers.

  With our breaths mingling together, I send up a prayer to the Almighty above that He gets us the fuck out of this place before it swallows us whole.

  19

  Dani

  “I miss the sun.”

  My words echo and bounce off the dusty cinder block walls. I speak to them as I wake up to more darkness. Time is a blur in this tomb of torture, but I know from the food deliveries we’ve been here for more than a week. Maybe even more than two.

  Hunger pains, bodily functions, hell, modesty mean nothing here. After the brutal whipping, Reece has done his best to tend to me, including carrying me to the disgusting toilet in the corner. I’m starting to suspect her providing us with decent food is just another method she uses to degrade us. I can cross taking a crap in front of another human being off my list of things I never thought I’d do.

  Then again, being held captive by a torture whore can get crossed off too.

  My dulled mind takes moments to realize Reece didn’t respond to my comment. I worry for him. The torture she inflicts on me whittles down his strength, and I fear for what’ll be left of him when we get out of here.

  “Reece?”

  I rotate my head to look at the other side of the room and find him directly across from me. He sits just beneath the window, back to the wall, feet on the floor, and his forearms rest on his knees. His hands dangle limply in the space between his thighs as he stares vacantly at the ceiling.

  “Reece!” I screech as my heart claws its way from my chest into my throat. I crawl from the mattress onto the floor in one swift motion. Scabs rip across my healing back from the sudden movement.

  “Fucking hell, stop,” he rasps, dropping his head to meet my gaze. Shock forces me to immediately comply. His face pinches in concern.

  “I-I-I—” I stutter and fail to pronounce any other words as my world spins. “I thought you were dead,” I manage in a strangled whisper. I wouldn’t put it past the bitch to kill him while I slept. I can’t hold it in anymore. A sob forces its way out through my clamped lips and tears stream down my cheeks. Hitching, broken breaths steal the air from the room. Reece must see my struggle because in seconds, he’s on his feet and dropping down beside me.

  “You’ve torn your back to shit, magnet.”

  As if I weigh nothing, he scoops me into his arms and deposits me back on the hard mattress. I hear him retrieve the tiny tube of antibiotic ointment from the basin Bolt delivered the night of the whipping.

  A throat clearing is the only warning he gives before he swipes a finger across one of my open wounds. My back tenses at the onslaught of pain, but I keep the cry locked down as best as I can. Silent tears continue to stream down the ridges of my cheeks, both from the residual fear and from the current pain.

  The sound of fabric ripping reaches my ears. Reece lays a single cotton strip across the freshly opened wound. His T-shirt was destroyed the night of the whipping, and he’s been using it as a makeshift bandage. Though I’m sure we’re coming down to the final scraps.

  He moves to stand. Lightning fast, I reach out a hand and snag his wrist.

  “Stay.”

  “I don’t think I should.”

  “I’m cold.”

  His wrist turns in mine so that he clenches my forearm. His fingers depress into my soft skin as if he’s doing everything he can to hang on.

  “Please,” I tack on. “If this is it for us, I don’t want to spend it alone.”

  “Don’t,” he snarls, dropping to his knees on the mattress at my hip. “You can’t give up now. Not yet.”

  I roll my head side to side on the mattress. “I’m not giving up. I’ll fight until the very end. But if that end comes sooner than we expect, I don’t want to have spent the last moments of my life away from you.”

  His jaw slackens. He clenches it a second later and pairs it with a hard stare. “I will die if it means getting you out of here.”

  The need to touch him, to soothe him, overwhelms me. I release his wrist, but he hangs on tighter.

  “I wish I understood you.”

  “I’m the one who doesn’t understand.”

  “My people will be okay when I’m gone.” I turn away to hide another tear as I speak the brittle truth into existence. Reece moves fully beside me, stretching his long body down the length of mine. The heat of him chases away the chill.

  “That’s just not true.”

  I sniffle and choke out a humorless laugh. “It is
.”

  “Bullshit. You moved back to take care of them, didn’t you?”

  “I did. That’s true. I wanted to be closer to help. I also have a nice pension and a life insurance policy that’s more than enough to hire home nurses or put them up in a care facility for the remainder of their lives. And Madison has her kids, so she also won’t be alone.”

  “That’s not—”

  “But you,” I cut him off as I turn to look him deeply in the eyes. My gaze pleads with him to dig deep and hold on. “Niko and Aislin. Their kids. Your parents and Tori. You all have been through so much, not just recently but for years. Reece, baby, they love you, and they need you.”

  He severs our eye contact and looks beyond my head. “Not as much as you think.”

  “You should have heard the way my boss spoke of your family. I don’t know what exactly you’ve been up to over these past two decades, but no matter how far you removed yourself, those people still care about you.”

  “If only you knew,” he mutters beneath his breath.

  But I heard him just fine.

  “Tell me.”

  He swallows thickly. I turn fully into him, ignoring the sting in my back as I do it, and tuck my head beneath his chin. My ear rests against his naked chest, and my nude torso presses to his. I glide my fingers along the hair over his pecs and flatten my palm as I listen to his heartbeat with one ear and his voice with the other.

  “Tell me why you did what you did. Start at the beginning. Start with why you pulled away from me and why you kissed Coreen.”

  He wraps his free arm around my back, careful of the wounds Bolt forced him to inflict.

  “It seems to me you already know.”

  “No, it seems that I think I know. We had dreams. Plans for college and a future. We graduated high school, and then without warning, you cheated on me.”

  I try to pull out of his hold, but he tightens his grip.

  “I take that back. You warned me by pulling away for a few days first.”

  “Dani, whatever you thought the reason was back then is probably correct.”

  “I’m not going to lie and say I didn’t think about it. That first year was absolute hell. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t eat. I dropped weight that I didn’t have on me to lose in the first place. I almost failed my first semester of college.” And I lost more than just Reece.

  The repressed rumble in his chest vibrates beneath my ear. I lift my head and palm his cheek.

  “Stop making me guess.”

  He swipes his thumb along the ridge beneath my eye. “Losing Aislin tore Niko apart. He was just a young teen, and it damn near killed him.”

  My brows dip in confusion. “I don’t understand how that has to do with you kissing Coreen.”

  “I couldn’t let that happen to me. I refused to set myself up to lose the one person who meant everything to me.”

  “So rather than break up with me, you made me think you were with someone else,” I state flatly as the truth sets in.

  “I didn’t know how to face you. You were so damn strong back then. You still are. I knew if I told you the truth, you’d find a way to convince me otherwise. I didn’t want to be convinced.”

  “Did you date her? After I saw you two together?” Thinking back to the moment I saw him kissing another woman at Rook’s opens a gaping wound in my heart that I convinced myself was long healed.

  He barks a humorless laugh. “No. I pushed her away the second you walked out the door to Rook’s and never saw her again. I acted like a coward.”

  I rear back. “You think? My God, Reece. I wasn’t kidnapped by a madman, but you let me go anyway. How wasn’t that just as painful?”

  “At least I knew you were safe.”

  “Did you?” My voice raises to dangerous levels. “Because losing you damn near killed me.”

  He carefully takes me to my back and towers over me until he looms chest to chest and almost nose to nose. “It was a fucking sham.” His stare drops to my lips before returning to mine. “I thought letting you go on my terms was safer than losing you down the road. Of course it fucking hurt, but not as much as it would hurt if you were kidnapped or died. I decided right then and there that I’d never let anyone get close enough that their loss would hurt me the way Niko was hurt. That included pushing away my entire family. So it wasn’t just you.”

  “But it was just me,” I answer softly. “Because your family still got to have you. It might not have been all of you, but I would have done anything for even the smallest piece.”

  “Yeah, well, a lot of fucking good it did because here we are anyway. Pushing you away wasted twenty years of my life that I could have spent with you, and I still wound up in the place I tried so hard to avoid.”

  His confession triggers a question I haven’t brought up lately. “Tell me how she got to you.”

  He drops his head so low it nearly touches my bare chest. “You.” He groans the word and drops his forehead to close the distance. The heat of him sears my breastbone. “She showed me a live feed of a sniper on you. She said she’d leave you alone if I went with her, but she fucking lied.”

  The hairs on my neck stand on end. “Was it real, do you think? The sniper?”

  “I don’t know. It sure looked real. Why?”

  “I’m trying to understand how far her reach goes. She knew she could use me to get to you. Does that mean her threats against our families are valid?”

  “I think it’s better if we assume they are. I can’t figure out how she knew about you. You weren’t in town that long, and the few interactions we had weren’t pleasant ones.”

  “You said she was in your neighborhood. She was probably watching you. What if she saw me come over that night we talked about the investigation. Maybe she thought I was a girlfriend instead of a cop.”

  His face takes on a thoughtful expression. “You might be right. Or she did a damn thorough job looking into me before she started this circus. She knew about you, Niko and Aislin, this fucking house of horrors. If we get out of here, I’m demolishing this place myself.”

  “I’ll help,” I mutter wryly. “Barehanded if I have to.”

  For the first time since we arrived here, Reece cracks a smile. His lips barely curve, but it warms me inside just the same.

  “Nah. I have the big equipment for that. I’ll make sure this place is fucking leveled.”

  20

  Dani

  Past – Summer after graduation

  When my grandmother died, I spent hours in my room, crying into my pillow and begging God to bring her back. Before we moved to Westbridge, I was at her and my grandfather's house every weekend. She and I would spend our time in the kitchen, baking and laughing as she told me stories of her childhood. Those were some of the best weekends of my life. I felt like my heart was ripped in two when we lost her.

  Penny, the small dog my parents got the year I was born, was hit by a car and died when I was twelve. The loss of her was devastating. Penny and I had a bond she didn’t have with the rest of the family. No matter how hard Madison tried to get her to lay with her at night, Penny always slept at the end of my bed. She was my best friend for many years. For two months after she died, I would sit at her grave in the backyard and talk to her.

  I’ve experienced loss several times in my lifetime, but watching Reece as he kissed Coreen hurt more than anything else had before. I felt like my soul was ripped out and left bleeding at my feet.

  He wasn’t even supposed to be at Rook’s. Earlier, when I called him to make plans to meet here, he said he wasn’t feeling well. I offered to come over and take care of him, but he said he was going to bed early. I knew he was lying. For days, he’s been acting weird, pulling away, coming up with excuses why we can’t see each other, and acting irritated when we do see each other. I didn’t call him out on the lie. Instead, I told him I was still going to Rook’s and just hang out with friends. That if he needed me to call me.

  When I walked through
the doors an hour later, my whole world tipped and forever changed. Reece was sitting in a corner with Coreen on his lap. Each had the other’s tongue down their throat and looked like they had been going at it for a while.

  I didn’t know Coreen that well, but I knew she had the hots for him and would snatch him away from me, given the slightest chance. Apparently, Reece had given her that chance.

  As I stood there, a pain so sharp it felt like a thousand blades were stabbing my chest yanked all the breath in my lungs. Reece’s eyes met mine from across the room. What made that pain double was not finding an ounce of emotion as he looked at me impassively. There wasn’t a shred of regret as he destroyed my world in a single act.

  I didn’t know why Reece was suddenly pulling away, but I never in a million years thought he would do so by being with someone else. We had plans. We were only three weeks away from leaving Westbridge and starting our life together in Florida. I didn’t understand how he could do this to me. To us.

  With a sob, I turned around and fled through the door. I was only inside for a moment, but in that time, the sky had opened up to a horrendous downpour. Lightning lit the sky seconds before a loud boom of thunder cracked all around me. The storm perfectly matched the rage of emotions trying to drown me.

  Madison and I walk out of the coffee shop and come to a complete stop when we see the man getting ready to walk inside. It’s been a week since I’ve seen his face and heard his voice. Each night I’ve fallen asleep with my pillow soaked with my tears, and each night Madison has lain with me, her at my back, comforting me as best as she could. She’s two years younger than me. I’m supposed to be the adult now, but if it wasn’t for her, I’m not sure I would have survived the past week. As sad as it is, she makes sure I get food in my stomach and has forced my ass in the shower. This is the first time I’ve left the house since the night my life was upended irrevocably. I know Madison and my parents are worried about me, but I just don’t have the energy to do anything else except lie in bed.