Total pages in book: 168
Estimated words: 159420 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 797(@200wpm)___ 638(@250wpm)___ 531(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 159420 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 797(@200wpm)___ 638(@250wpm)___ 531(@300wpm)
So all I say is, “Yeah, she is.”
“I haven’t seen her, of course,” Lynnie continues. “But I can tell.”
I clench my jaw, my heart pounding in my chest, my gut roiling at the fact that she’s with her brother, the lowlife who wasn’t ready to believe the fact that his father could be involved in all this. Arsen had to waste precious minutes convincing him of the fact. I had to fucking intervene, call him up and tell him the truth about his father—about how dangerous and harmful he already had been to her and their mother—before he agreed to track down his old man.
To be honest, though, it should’ve occurred to me earlier too. It should’ve occurred to me the moment she told me about him, about what kind of a monster he is. But I was so focused on destroying him for all the damage he’d done in the past that I forgot to consider the havoc he may be wreaking in the present. Probably because moving on from the past hasn’t been a strong habit of mine.
Taking a deep breath, I admit, “You don’t need to see her to know she’s got a light shinin’ outta her.”
Light and warmth. Love. So much of it that I don’t know how I ever let her go, even thought about letting her go. How I walked out of that barn, rode away from her after she told me she loved me; after she gave me her heart, that sweet little thing full of hopes and dreams and wishes. Things she said she never had, not until me. Things I never had, not until her.
We’re fate, she and I, and I still walked away from her like the bastard I am. Scarred and ugly with a past so bloody that the red will never wash off. But mostly, I’m a bastard who simply has been terrified of life. Something I only learned in the past forty-eight hours that I spent looking for the girl I love.
“Only my brother would pick an angel like her,” Lynnie says, breaking into my thoughts.
Yeah, that’s what she is. An angel. But only I would find her, steal her, and fall in love with her, only to break that angel’s heart and send her into a beast’s belly unprotected. Before I can say anything, Lynnie continues, “And before you all came for us, she made me promise something.”
I go alert then. If it wasn’t her words that put me on edge, it would be her expression. She’s scared. Plain and simple. If she knows my moods, I know hers, and fuck, I missed that. I missed being able to simply read my sister, another human being so close to me, based on her expressions. But that’s not here or there. What’s more important is that she’s chewing on her lip and her eyes are darting this way and that. And I guess the time has come to talk about it. To talk about our history, about what I’ve done.
“To tell you th-the truth,” she finishes.
My jaw pulses and I sit up straight. “It’s my fault. All of it. I—”
She leans forward, one arm reaching out toward me. “No, it’s not. It’s—”
Unable to stop myself, I take her hand in mine and interrupt, “Lynnie, I shouldn’t—”
“No, listen,” she says, silencing me once again, her fingers squeezing around mine. “Rad, listen, it’s really not. There’s a reason why I went away, and… it’s not you. It’s him. H-Hank Turner.”
And then, my sister talks.
As I listen to her every word, my first thought is that I’ve already lived through the worst of my life—and I’m not talking about what happened sixteen years ago or when I got the text about Lynnie being taken. Or even when I realized the girl I loved was going to get shot. I’m talking about the last forty-eight hours of my life, the hours that changed so much for me. That changed me. Made me look at myself, really look at myself and the life I’d built. The consequences of it.
It was death, the last two days that I spent looking for my Princess, and then rebirth.
When we figured out it was, indeed, Hank Turner who was involved and he’d acquired a new friend along the way—fucking Anderson; the man from California who’s been after Rawhide for a fucking year—and together, they’d come up with this whole twisted scheme where they were keeping Lynnie and her hostage for land, we started looking into all possible locations where they might be keeping them. And when we started to run out of options, including all the secret hideouts and cabins that Hank Turner owned, I decided to torture myself by watching and rewatching that video footage. The clip of her being taken right under from my nose. Because I wanted the pain. The torture, the punishment. The fucking agony of my mistakes, of letting her go, of letting the past get in the way. And then, we found her—we found Lynnie, too, in the same room—and I could breathe again. It felt like I’d finally—fucking finally—crawled out of that burning car from sixteen years ago.