by Jane Blythe
“Let’s go,” he said, already standing and grabbing his jacket and keys.
“They might not be there,” Will warned.
“And that’s why Fletcher and Julian will continue to contact anyone else who fits our profile while we go and check it out,” Abe said, practically running out the door. The Roberts house was a little over twenty miles away from the police station, it had been snowing overnight, and although it had stopped now it was still slick out, so even with lights and sirens going it would take at least fifteen minutes, maybe more, to get out there.
That was fifteen minutes Meadow might not have.
Just because he believed that John Smith wanted his baby enough not to kill her, didn’t mean he wouldn’t get carried away and accidentally kill her.
Even if he didn’t he would be hurting her.
And that was enough to shred him inside.
Meadow had been through so much, and she deserved to feel safe and finally be at peace. When he found her, he was going to make sure she never suffered again.
* * * * *
4:40 P.M.
Her whole body burned with pain.
Inside and out.
Meadow felt woozy, lightheaded, and that scared her. She had to have her wits about her if she was going to find a way to escape. Her chest ached with each shallow breath that she took, and her head beat with a steady drumming of pain from him hitting her. Her insides felt like they had been ripped to shreds, and there was a myriad of bruises on her arms and legs, and a particularly painful wound on her neck where he had bitten her.
The temptation to close her eyes and drift off into the sweet, peaceful blackness of oblivion was strong.
So strong she nearly gave into it.
It would be so nice to be transported out of this room, even if it was only because she had fallen into unconsciousness. There would be no more pain, no more taunting from her husband, and she wouldn’t have to be reminded of the fact that she had married a heartless, vicious monster who enjoyed every second of hurting her.
Her eyes begged to close.
Surely she had put in a good enough fight so far that she deserved just a little rest.
She had confronted John, asked him about his past, she had tried her best to hold in her screams because she knew they were like music to John’s ears and would only spur him on. She had fought him, maybe not physically, but she didn’t know how long she would be trapped with him so the war they were fighting was a psychological one, not a physical one.
John wanted to own her soul as well as her body.
And while she couldn’t stop him from owning her body, she just wasn’t big and strong enough, she could stop him from owning her soul. He could only touch that if she let him. Before she hadn’t had any reason to fight, she had believed John when he told her that she was nothing and couldn’t survive on her own, but now she knew that was wrong. She had had a taste of true joy with Abe, and she was going to fight to get that back, even if it was just keeping those memories alive in her mind and making sure that she never forgot what Abe had taught her about herself.
She was a different person now.
One who wouldn’t let John manipulate her so easily.
Meadow shifted on the bed, and a resulting stab of pain zinged its way along every single nerve ending in her body until she was engulfed in an agony that had her eyes closing no matter how much she wanted to fight.
Footsteps sounded outside the bedroom, and a moment later a shaft of light spilled over her as he must have turned on the hall light.
Instinct had Meadow evening out her breathing as best as she could and closing her eyes, trying to convince him when he came into the room that she had passed out.
John walked over to the bed. She could feel his presence beside her even though he wasn’t making a sound and she hadn’t opened her eyes, not even a crack.
“You think you can fight me, my sweet Meadow?” he whispered quietly, apparently fooled by her pretense at being unconscious.
Something cool and smooth touched her skin.
It was his knife.
The very knife that he had threatened to shove inside her and cut her open with if she ever betrayed him. The knife she now knew he had used to kill over a dozen innocent girls.
He pressed the blade to her cheek, then moved it so the tip scratched her flesh as he drew a line from just under her eye down to her chin. It wasn’t enough to cut too deeply, but she could feel blood well up and bubble out.
She was no stranger to pain, and her body hurt enough that she didn’t flinch at the new cut, instead she waited to see what John was going to do next.
“You think you can get out of this by sleeping?” he growled in her ear, so close that she could feel his hot breath against her skin. “You sleep when I give you permission, and if you think you can snatch moments of sleep then you’re mistaken. Maybe I’ll never let you sleep again.”
John chuckled, and she felt him move away from her.
He went down to the end of the bed, and when it dipped and she felt him settle between her spread legs she wanted to scream and beg and implore him not to do that to her again. She couldn’t stand the feel of him inside her. While she hadn’t known just how amazing sex was when it was done right and with someone you cared about, she had always known that what John did to her was wrong on so many levels and she had always hated it so much more than the beatings. Right now, she would gladly endure whips or knives or fists or whatever else he wanted to do to her if he would just not touch her there.
Just as she felt him prodding at her entrance, she felt something lying on the pillow beside her.
The knife.
John thought that she was unconscious so he hadn’t worried about leaving the knife right beside her.
Earlier, he had cut free one of the ropes he’d used to bind her limbs to the bedposts because he had wanted her to touch him.
That wrist was still free.
Her heart began to hammer in her chest.
Could she really do this?
Could she pick up that knife and kill her husband?
Anything less than killing him wasn’t going to get her out of here alive, so it was all or nothing.
The idea of taking a human life made her feel ill, but what choice did she have?
Her husband was a monster, and he would never let her and their baby go as long as he was alive.
This was the only way.
John was preoccupied with readying himself to rape her, so she cautiously moved her hand until it touched the knife. Then she curled her fingers around the handle, and as John spread out above her, she lifted the knife, and her eyes popped open so she could see her target as she shoved the blade into John’s neck, burying it up to the hilt.
Her husband’s dark eyes grew wide, and his hands clawed at the knife, pulling it out.
That only caused the blood to flow more freely.
It squirted out, drenching John’s naked body and her own.
The knife fell onto the bed beside her, and a moment later, her husband dropped to the floor.
Was he dead?
Was it over?
She hardly dared to hope that it was.
Even if he was dead she wasn’t out of the woods, no one knew where she was so she couldn’t just lie here and wait for the cavalry to come running to her rescue.
Picking up the knife, she tried to cut through the rope binding her other wrist. Her fingers were shaking badly, and any movement made her already aching body feel worse, but she wasn’t giving up.
Taking longer than she would have liked she managed to cut through the rope on her wrist, and then the ones on her ankles.
And she was free.
Slowly, she swung her legs over the side of the bed and pushed herself into a standing position. She swayed, and her knees wanted to buckle, but she refused to let them.
She had to get out of there.
Steadfastly avoiding looking at her husband’s still body, Meado
w quickly grabbed the jeans and sweater she had taken off earlier and threw them on, not bothering with the underwear, she didn’t have time for that. She kept expecting John to stand up at any second and launch himself at her, knocking her down and wrapping his hands around her throat, squeezing the life out of her and their baby.
Meadow couldn’t find her shoes, and she didn’t have time to look for them, she wanted out of there.
Now.
Grabbing the blanket that was piled on the floor on the other side of the bed, she wrapped it around herself and headed out the door.
Her legs were shaking badly, and she felt weak and drained all over, the pain made her want to give in and just curl up in a ball and let whatever happened to her happen, but she couldn’t.
Every time she thought of giving up she pictured Abe’s face. Those serious hazel eyes, and the red beard that she wanted to run her fingers through, the way he only quirked half his mouth up in a smile, and the way his big strong hands felt touching her body. She wanted a chance to be held in those arms of his again, she wanted to hear him call her sunshine and feel him moving inside her.
She wanted a chance at a future with him.
The only way to have that future was to get out of there.
The cold air nearly knocked her off her feet when she wrenched open the front door, but she ignored it and started running.
* * * * *
4:56 P.M.
It was exactly sixteen minutes since he and Will had left the station.
Sixteen long minutes as they navigated along the snow-covered roads as they drove out to Taralynn Roberts’ house.
What were they going to find when they got there?
Was Meadow still alive?
Was she in one piece?
What was John going to do when he realized that he wasn’t getting what he wanted?
“We should have brought more back up,” Will said as Abe took a corner at breakneck speed.
“If we arrive with a whole team he’s going to see us,” Abe reminded his cousin. “We need to arrive silently, we don’t want him to know we’re there until we have the situation under control. If John knows we’re there he’s going to kill Meadow and the baby, he’d rather she was dead than free and someone else’s.”
Not just someone else’s.
His.
Meadow was his, and he wouldn’t do anything to risk her safety.
That meant that he and Will had to approach the house quietly, they would park out of sight, go the rest of the way on foot, enter the house silently and find where he was. Then once they had a clear shot of him and he was convinced that Meadow wasn’t going to get caught in the crossfire, they would announce themselves. Whether he wanted to leave in handcuffs or a body bag was up to John because he wouldn’t hesitate to shoot the man if he refused to surrender and presented himself as a threat to him, Will, or Meadow.
“I’m going to park here,” he announced, stamping on the brakes. They were both jerked forward, but he hardly noticed the seatbelt holding him in place because he was already getting out of the car and pulling out his gun.
“I’ll circle around the back, and you go in the front,” Will said.
“If you see him don’t shoot if he has a weapon on Meadow, I don’t want her getting in the crossfire.”
“Don’t worry, we won’t do anything to get your girl hurt.”
His girl.
Abe liked the sound of that.
Meadow was his girl, and as soon as he found her he was going to make sure that she knew that. If John came peacefully, they’d get her a divorce, and if John decided he would rather go out with suicide by cop, she would be a free woman, but either way Abe knew that John Smith had never owned Meadow’s heart. Their marriage had been a trap, a way to get himself a victim he had free range to do with as he pleased whenever the desire arose. As far as he was concerned, the marriage wasn’t real, it had never been real, it was just a piece of paper that John had used to get what he wanted.
They split up at the tree line, and Abe dragged in a steadying breath as he prepared to cross the twenty yards or so of open space and walk inside. Never before had the stakes been so high for him personally. When he’d been serving, his team had been his family, his brothers and sisters, but this was the woman who was quickly staking a claim on his heart.
Trying not to worry about whether John was watching from a window, Abe crept across the clearing to find the front door standing wide open.
That wasn’t what he had been expecting, and immediately he was on high alert.
They could have been wrong about John choosing this house, or he could have already decided that he should be moving on before he was found.
When he stepped inside the first thing that hit him was the silence.
It was quiet.
Almost too quiet.
It was like no one was there.
The possibility of finding the house empty, especially if there were signs that John had been there, was too terrifying to consider, so he shoved it away and nodded at Will as his deputy appeared on the other side of the long hallway that split the house into two.
Without exchanging a word they cleared the downstairs.
The coppery smell of blood got stronger as they headed up the stairs.
Abe counted five doors, no doubt four were bedrooms and the fifth a bathroom.
They took the one closest, and as soon as he stepped through it he froze.
Blood.
It soaked the bed, it streaked the walls, there was some on the ceiling, whoever had been in this room hadn’t walked out of it alive.
Was the blood Meadow’s or did it belong to Taralynn?
It made him feel like a cold-hearted monster to hope that the blood was that of thirty-eight-year-old Taralynn. The woman was innocent, she had no part in John’s sick game to get his wife back, and she had already suffered a lot, that she had been tortured and murdered just so a serial killer could hide out in her house was unfair. And yet the idea that the blood was Meadow’s was something he didn’t even want to attempt to comprehend.
As much as he wanted answers, there were another four rooms to clear before he could find out who the blood belonged to, so he tore his gaze away from the red-streaked room and followed Will back into the hallway.
The next room they checked was empty.
As was the bathroom that came next.
That left only two rooms left.
If John was here, he could easily have heard them enter the house, he could be waiting behind the next door, a gun to Meadow’s head, ready to use her as a human shield and a bargaining chip to walk out of here unharmed.
That wasn’t going to happen.
There was no way Abe was surrendering Meadow to John, he’d rather die.
With Will covering him, he moved through the fourth doorway and stopped dead in his tracks.
There was a body on the floor.
A naked body.
John Smith’s body.
There was a pool of blood around it, and the man’s eyes were staring sightlessly at the ceiling.
There was a deep hole in his neck that looked like it had come from a knife.
The body lay beside a bed. There was a knife lying on the mattress, shorn pieces of rope lay in the four corners of the bed, blood on the pillows, and a pool of blood in the center of the mattress, right in the spot that would have been between Meadow’s legs had she still been restrained there.
John had raped her.
Roughly enough to make her bleed.
He had been expecting that the man would but having that fear confirmed brought with it a surge of rage he hadn’t been expecting.
Meadow was his, and he had failed to protect her from the most heinous thing that could happen to a woman.
The urge to bring John Smith back to life just so he could kill him again was strong.
“Meadow must have killed him,” Will announced, crouching beside the body. The awe in his cousin’s voice spa
rked a surge of jealousy.
“She might be hiding in here somewhere. Meadow?” he called out loudly, hoping that she was conscious so she could hear him. “Meadow? Are you here? Meadow, it’s Abe, if you’re here come out, or if you can’t walk then call out to me and I’ll come get you.”
He waited for a response but there was none.
“Her clothes are gone, but her shoes are still here,” Will said, standing and holding up a sneaker. “Maybe she’s gone already. She had no way of knowing that we would track down where John had taken her so she might have decided her best bet was to try to find her way back into town.”
Abe walked over to the window and looked out. There was snow on the ground, and the sun was already beginning to set. The Roberts’ house was surrounded by forest on all sides, the nearest neighbor a mile away, if Meadow had decided to risk it and try and walk to safety she could get lost out in the forest. With the temperatures as they were and the fact that Meadow was injured, there was a very real possibility that she would never walk out of that forest alive.
Helplessness clawed at him. He’d found John Smith, he couldn’t be prouder of his girl for killing her abuser and saving herself, and yet he still didn’t have her safe in his arms.
No matter how hard Meadow fought to find the happiness she sought, life just wouldn’t give her a break.
“I’ll call search and rescue, if she was hurt she couldn’t have gotten all that far, we’ll find her.” Will patted him on the shoulder before walking off to make the call.
He knew that the entire town would rally around Meadow, walking the forest for as long as it took to find her.
