The girls hadn’t been murdered. They’d killed themselves. He found razor blades near their slit wrists.
It chilled him to the bone.
What kind of monster could convince two beautiful young girls to do such a thing?
The two girls had been sent to him as gifts from the Sultan the day before.
They were lovely, fair-haired, and well-versed in the pleasures of the bedroom.
When they knocked on his door, one of them had handed him a note. It said, “Compliments of the Sultan.”
Smith told them to leave.
But one of them began to cry.
“If we don’t stay, he’ll punish us.”
Smith thought about it for a few seconds. “Well, what am I supposed to do with you?”
“We want to be your daughters.”
Then one of them grabbed his hand and put it on her breast. He couldn’t help it. He immediately responded. “Very well.”
He took them to his bed, and they did things to him that he’d only dreamed of.
But then they’d killed themselves. He choked back a sob.
A few hours later, after his sheets had been changed and the girl’s bodies burned in the special outdoor stove they had, his phone rang.
“Did you get the Sultan’s message?” the little girl’s voice said. “Next time it will be your daughters.”
Smith winced.
“Yes,” he said in a small voice. “I will find him a dark-haired girl by the full moon.”
“Good. We’ll be in touch,” the girl said and hung up.
Smith found a girl. A dark-haired eleven-year-old walking alone after dark near Sydney. Bryce had brought her back. When the Sultan’s girl called, he’d been ordered to leave the girl tied to the altar stone the next night. Alive.
Smith had been tempted to spy on who came to retrieve the girl, but remembering the two dead girls in his bed made him think twice.
The next day Bryce reported that the altar stone was empty. And there weren’t any signs of blood or a struggle.
He hadn’t heard from the Sultan again until just recently.
Of course, right when the police were investigating him, the Sultan had reached out with a new demand.
This time there was a specific target. A girl who had just arrived in town.
An older girl. A teenager.
Now that Smith had her—or almost had her—the Sultan seemed to know. His phone rang and the little girl told Smith to leave the girl at the altar the following night. Again, he wanted her alive.
27
Present Day
Australia
Rose had been staying in the stone guesthouse for three days.
Every morning, Damon woke her early and they made their way down to the beach.
They rarely spoke and Rose didn’t have any more nightmares.
It was only after they were done surfing that they’d sit on the sand and warm up and talk.
Rose learned that Damon had his heart shattered last winter.
He’d caught his fiancé in bed with her boss. She’d begged forgiveness and he’d taken her back. But on the day of their wedding, she was a no-show.
She’d left a video message, and it was clear she didn’t even feel bad. She told him she’d been meaning to break up but hadn’t known how to do so.
His way of dealing with it was to get fucked up every single night.
“That makes sense,” Rose said.
“It got a lot worse.”
“Oh yeah?” she asked.
But he’d clammed up. When she pressed, he said, “My parents pointed out that I had a choice that was really no choice. It was basically come here and live or stay there and die.”
“They wanted you to stay with Tilly and Tom here to dry out?” she asked.
She knew Tom ran an addiction center in town.
“Something like that,” Damon said vaguely.
“You’re totally clean and sober?”
He nodded.
The first few days being sober, he’d had a tough time, he said, but then got used to the idea of not drowning his problems in booze.
“That’s not easy to do,” Rose said.
“Tell me about it.”
“Is it hard when we are all drinking at dinner?”
Damon bit his lip, thinking. “I’ll admit it was at first. I didn’t understand why they would still drink in front of me, but Tom says that I’m going to have to get used to people drinking around me and not be tempted.”
“That makes sense,” Rose said.
“Not drinking hasn’t been the hardest part. The hardest part has been dealing with the emotions that I’ve tried to avoid,” he said. “Alcohol helped me push the hurt aside. Feeling it has sucked.”
“I bet.”
“You don’t seem like someone who has gotten through this life unscathed,” he said.
Rose didn’t answer.
“You don’t smoke weed, either?” she asked sneaking a glance at him.
His hair was wet and hanging around his face. He was staring out at sea. His nose was tanned and freckled. He saw her looking and turned and smiled.
Rose thought she’d never seen a man or boy so beautiful.
For a second they locked eyes, but then he turned away.
“I don’t think I can do anything right now—alcohol or weed or whatever. I just need to feel all the shit and not dull it.”
“That’s tough.”
He stood. “You coming?”
“I think I’ll stay here for a few more minutes,” she said and lay back on the sand, closing her eyes. “I just want to soak up some more sun.”
She felt his eyes on her, but after a few seconds heard him walk away.
The truth was, she wanted some time to process what had just happened. When they looked at each other, a current of electricity had seemed to flow between them. She hadn’t imagined it. He wanted her as much as she wanted him.
She’d been crushing on him for a few days now, but he’d been distant.
He was always polite, but aloof.
It was driving her crazy.
But just now when he looked at her, she realized that there was something there.
After she was sure he was gone, she sat up.
Then she smiled. He was cute, but it was more than that.
She really liked him. She liked the way he made her feel. He made her feel safe.
Something she hadn’t felt since Timothy.
Standing up, she decided to take a long walk down the beach.
She heard Dylan and Honey up at the house barking.
Damon must have been giving them their mid-morning snack.
She’d settled into a comfortable routine at the house.
Tilly and Tom told her she could stay as long as she wanted.
She told them thank you but that she’d probably leave after the trial of the Family. But secretly, she also didn’t really want to leave.
Having to testify delayed the inevitable—the day she’d have to leave and go back to her old life and her quest to hunt down the Sultan.
Rose didn’t know she’d walked as far as she had until she looked up and saw that she was near the set of stairs leading down to the beach. The spot where Maddie May’s arm had been found.
It reminded her that her days of leisure needed to end. She was there not to surf and flirt with a cute boy. She was there to find the Sultan. She called the inspector every day. He said they were still building a case against the Family. Each day she asked if he’d heard anything about a man with a big black boat in the area. So far, he said, he had not.
Then tonight, Tilly had come down to the guesthouse when Rose was getting ready for bed. She’d been out of breath. “Come look.”
Rose had raced up the stairs and into Tilly’s bedroom where Tom handed her some binoculars. She took them with shaking hands. Sure enough, there was the silhouette of a large boat far out to sea. It was nearly impossible to see it but a full moon showed
the shape against the horizon. It could have been any boat. But it wasn’t. Rose knew whose boat it was.
“It’s him.”
Rose handed back the binoculars. “I need to rent a boat. I need to get out there.”
“It’s leaving. It’s already further away,” Tom said.
Rose swore.
Tilly put an arm around her. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s gone now,” Tom said.
Tilly gave her a squeeze, and Rose started to make her way down the stairs to the guest house in the falling darkness.
Rose turned at the foot of the stairs and stared out at the horizon. The sea was dark now, blending into the horizon—one vast black nothingness.
The Sultan was close. But if he stayed out at sea, how would she find him? She would go into town that afternoon, risky though it was, and find out how to rent a boat and have it standing by.
There was an odd breeze that lifted her hair, and when she looked down at the sea, she saw roiling clouds and choppy waves. It sent a chill down her spine.
Then she heard a sound behind her. But it was too late. She whirled and caught a flash of someone behind her right as a rag was clasped over her mouth. She only struggled for an instant, and then she saw black.
28
Present Day
Australia
Inspector Harris was just dozing off in the chair at his desk at headquarters. He had his feet up on the desk, an old jacket over his chest, and was reclined the chair, with an alarm set to wake him in twenty minutes.
But then his bloody phone rang right when he’d drifted off.
“Yes?” he said somewhat gruffly, not recognizing the number.
“It’s Tilly. Tilly O’Brien,” the voice said.
He instantly shot up. From the sound of her voice, something was wrong.
“Rose is gone.”
“Start from the beginning,” he said, instinctively grabbing a pen and notebook.
“I saw the black boat—the one she said that guy used, so I called her up to my bedroom to look at it through the binoculars. And then I said goodnight and she left to go to bed and went down the stairs to the guest house.”
“Did she say if she was going somewhere?”
“No,” Tilly said, sounding distraught.
Then, “Wait. She did say she needed to rent a boat. To get out to the big black boat. But as we watched the boat disappeared. She even admitted it would be too late to go look for it right then. So, she just said goodnight.”
Interesting, Harris, said, writing down, “Check marinas and boat launches.”
“Have you looked down at the beach?” he asked.
“Yes, my husband and our houseguest spent the last hour searching the beach. With her dog.”
“She didn’t take her dog?”
“No!” Tilly was nearly shouting. “She’s never gone anywhere without him. Not anywhere. He stayed up here one night when she went to bed, and she came up to get him. It’s a good thing, too, because he was clawing at the door and whining. That’s what woke us up tonight. He was outside the house this time, barking and clawing to get in. I think he wanted us to know something was wrong.”
Harris remembered how Rose wouldn’t even get in his car without her dog.
“Did you check the garage to see if she’d taken a vehicle.”
“We did. They are both there. She knows she can use the wagon. We left the keys outside her room from the first day.”
Harris was quiet for a few seconds. This did not look good.
He thought about where the house was located. Behind it was a state park—a heavily wooded area. Tourists had been lost there before. It wasn’t a large area, but it was rough terrain. One time a visitor had fallen from a steep, rocky path and was killed when he landed on the rocky shore below.
“Any chance she went for a walk in the woods, maybe to think or something, and got lost?”
“I can’t imagine her doing that without her dog.”
He nodded, even though Tilly couldn’t see him. He agreed.
It was ominous.
“I’ll send an officer out right away.”
“An officer?”
He sighed loudly. “I’ll be there in twenty.”
29
Present Day
Australia
When Rose came to, she kept her eyes closed and lay still, trying to figure out where she was and what happened.
Her training at Eva’s boot camp had taught her this.
Immediately, she remembered she’d been attacked. But other than that, she didn’t yet know how or where she was.
Before she opened her eyes, she listened.
Her senses were on high alert as she used everything except her eyesight to figure out her surroundings. She heard the sounds of deep breathing to her left.
As carefully as she could, she tried to do a mental self-assessment of her body to see if she had any injuries. As she did, she gathered she was lying on a soft bed on top of the covers. Her body appeared uninjured. Scanning from her toes to the top of her head, the only thing that felt off was her mind. Her thoughts were a little fuzzy. That was to be expected. She figured someone had used chloroform or something else to knock her out. She could still taste it and smell it as if it had only recently been removed. That made sense. She’d learned through her training that to keep someone knocked out, the chloroform had to remain on a cloth or something pressed up against the person’s mouth and nose.
It seemed as if she was fine and, surprisingly, not bound. It appeared nothing was keeping her from moving.
But it was hard to tell for sure because she didn’t want to move and alert whoever was in the room with her that she was awake.
Behind her closed eyelids, she could see a flickering light. She cracked her lids ever so slightly, trying to peek out between her lashes. Yes. She was in a dark room with candlelight reaching some corners. She opened her eyes a bit more.
It wasn’t as dark as she’d thought. To her left, where the breathing, which sounded like snoring now, was coming from, something like a street lamp shone through two large windows, casting that part of the room in a yellowish light.
Looking out of the corner of her eye using her peripheral vision she saw the person who was softly snoring—a large figure slumped in a chair beside the bed.
It appeared the person was asleep. Slowly, she moved her legs and arms. The bed sheets rustled softly. She froze. The man’s breathing changed.
The figure shifted in the chair and then soft snoring resumed. She went a little further this time and lifted her head, swiveling her neck to look around.
Again, the person shifted, making a small sound.
By lifting her head, she could see that the bed was up against a wall. A door was opposite. The only way out was through that door which meant walking past the sleeping figure. A man, she could now see. His head was thrown back and his mouth hung open. Quickly, and making as little noise as possible, Rose sat up, using her core to pull herself up silently. She held her breath and watched the figure in the chair.
Nothing.
She swung one leg over the side of the bed. The man didn’t move.
Then the other leg. Still nothing. Placing both palms on the bed beside her thighs, she got ready to spring up and race toward the door.
Slowly, very slowly, she eased herself off the bed. The bed gave a terrible squeak, but the man’s breathing remained the same. Rose exhaled in relief and counted to ten. Then she took her first step. Nothing. Then another. She was right in front of the man now. She took another step. She was almost past him. She took another. And then she felt an iron grip on her wrist and heard a low voice that sent terror through her.
“Nice try.”
30
Present Day
Australia
Smith was furious that the Sultan had changed his plans. Now the man wanted to show up at his house, come in through his front door, and get the girl.
It was unthinkable.
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How dare he invade Smith’s personal haven—his sanctuary, the compound he’d lovingly created. Nobody, nobody was allowed in except people in the Family.
It was utter bullshit.
If he weren’t so terrified of the man, he’d arrange to have Bryce kill him when he arrived. But something dark and evil seemed to surround this man and the girls he had under his control. A small part of him was actually afraid that an army of girls would come to his compound and destroy everything if he laid a hand on the Sultan.
Ridiculous. But it was a real fear.
So, he’d open the doors, hand over this pain-in-the-ass girl, and then make sure that he never had dealings with the Sultan again.
He told the Sultan’s girl this over the phone when she called to tell him about the change in plans.
“I will do this, but you tell your master that if I do, he has to agree to never bother me or my family members again.”
“The Sultan does as he pleases,” the girl had responded in a singsong voice full of nonchalance.
It had made Smith’s blood boil.
“When will he arrive.”
“He is already there. At your door.”
Terror ripped through Smith. Then the door swung open.
Smith blinked. There was a man standing there, but it didn’t look like a man. The man seemed too long and elongated—an eerily tall figure with a robe and hood on.
Smith shook off his fear. Smith worshipped Satan. He was in league with the devil. The devil and the dark arts made him powerful. So powerful that he had been able to create this family where people flocked to him and wanted to serve him. So unless this was Satan himself, Smith thought, he had nothing to fear.
“Come in,” he said and then was dismayed at the fear that made his voice sound more like a squeak than a command.
The man did not answer.
Instead, from behind him, at least a dozen young girls appeared. They were also all dressed in robes with hoods.
“Where is she?” one of the girls said in a tiny, high voice.
Blood & Fire (Vigilante Crime Series Book 2) Page 11
