Tag: suspense

“OMG! I’m so sorry,” Graham said on a gasp when the rock he’d been tossing from hand to hand slipped away from him as he caught sight of a tiny waif of a woman running through the trees. Unfortunately the rock had hit her in the head and she’d fallen to her knees.

Had he hurt her?

Was this her? The sister that the man Dylan had been looking for?

As he took a step closer he took in the woman cowering before him. She had huge golden brown eyes that were almost too big for her thin face, she was thin, and she wasn’t properly dressed to be running around outside. The oversized t-shirt hung off her small frame, and it looked like it was a man’s, her brothers? Beneath that she had on a pair of leggings and nothing on her feet.

What the hell?

“Are you okay?” he asked as he moved cautiously closer, noting how the woman curled in on herself, trying to make herself a smaller target. There were bruises on her pale skin and there was something wrong with one of her arms. “You’re Sasha, right?”

At the sound of her name panic unlike anything he’d seen before crossed her features. Of course working his job he’d seen fear, people trapped in precarious positions, people who thought they were going to die, but this was different, deeper.

“It’s okay,” he soothed, trying to sound reassuring, even as unease prickled his skin.

Dylan had said his sister had suffered a breakdown, that she wasn’t stable, wasn’t rational, that she might make wild claims and fight against him if he found her and tried to take her back to his brother. But something about the man felt off. Still the man was her brother, and it wasn’t his place to interfere in a situation he didn’t understand.

“Come on, let me get you inside, out of the cold, back home to your brother.” When he reached out a hand to her, not only did she look at his hand like it was a snake about to strike, but the whimper that tore from her lips, tore through him, leaving him shaken and more unsure than ever.

Sasha was hyperventilating.

There were two of them.

Was the newcomer one of Dylan’s friends? In the nine months since she’d met him, she’d also met a lot of his friends. They were all the same, charming, funny, good looking, sweet, caring, exactly the kind of guy most women were looking for.

At least until they dropped the mask.

Beneath the mask was every woman’s worst nightmare. She knew. She’d been living that nightmare for almost four months now.

If she’d known that a weekend away at his cabin the mountains was code for keeping her locked away from the rest of the world so nobody would see the marks he left on her body, then she would have run as far and as fast as she could.

Just like she was trying to do now.

But the two men were talking, and since the new guy wasn’t pulling out a weapon and arresting Dylan then she had to assume he was one of her ex’s friends.

Dylan didn’t think of himself as her ex though. He thought of her as his. As a piece of property he owned and could do whatever he wanted with. Out here there was no one to stop him, and he wanted to keep it that way. He knew if she made it to help then it was all over, he’d lose everything, be disowned from his rich family, and spend the next several decades rotting in a jail cell.

Trying her best to sneak away from her hiding spot while the two men were distracted, Sasha took off running again.

She ran and ran, knowing exactly what was waiting for her if she was caught. If Dylan got his hands on her again then she might not survive the “lesson” he was sure to try to teach her.

But her body was weak from malnutrition and the constant beatings, and she slowed much faster than she would have liked. The snap of twigs and the sound of footsteps told her that she was about to be caught.

Which man though? And did it really matter? As something hit her over the head, Sasha found herself wishing for a quick death.

Since there were no calls for rescue, driving into work had been a bust. That was the thing with working search and rescue, sometimes you could go days or weeks without much to do, then you could be on rescues day after day after day.

With what had gone down with Liam, their team was in a bit of tailspin, everyone was worked up, full of nervous energy. But no one was interested in working out with him, so instead Graham had decided to head out on his own.

After the storms there were trees down everywhere, mud slides, and the river he was currently walking alongside was swollen, rushing water over the banks making it dangerous for anyone who might be out here. Anyone who wasn’t trained that was, because today, after seeing his friend and the woman he’d fallen for face death and win, Graham needed to be out here in the wilds of nature.

The wind that whistled through the trees, the rushing sound of water in the flooded river, the stinging cold against the exposed skin of his face all made him feel alive. Nature was all the more beautiful the wilder it was.

At least for him.

Graham had grown up in these woods. His family was poor, but they were full of love. Because his parents didn’t have the money to buy him cell phones and game consoles, instead he and his brother and sister turned to the forest to entertain them. They climbed trees, swam in the river, built forts, and learned about nature. He felt at home out here as he didn’t in his small rented house in town.

As he walked, Graham worked on shoving away the lingering sense of jealousy that Liam had found someone to love him. He’d checked on the couple before he’d headed out. Cara was in surgery, having skin grafts on the worst of her wounds. Liam sounded anxious being away from her side, but he’d been treated as well, and both of them were doing okay. They were safe, they were receiving medical care, and their bond seemed to have solidified itself.

Being jealous was pointless, and it wasn’t how he wanted to feel about his best friend. If he was feeling lonely then maybe he needed to get out there, make more of an effort to meet women.

Noticing movement up ahead, the unmistakable flash of dark blue that looked like a person walking about, Graham changed direction and headed for them. If it was someone out here just enjoying the day like he was, then he’d say hello and move on, but if it was someone that needed help then he’d offer it in a heartbeat, still in need of a distraction.

“Hello?” he called out as he approached and saw it was a man who looked to be in his early twenties, who seemed to be searching for something. “Everything okay?”

For a moment the man looked at him intently, like he was making a decision. Then he shook his head. “Actually it’s not. My sister is staying with me as she recovers from a breakdown, and she’s disappeared. I’m worried about her out here alone.”

“You’re in luck, I happen to work for the search and rescue team. I’ll put in a call and we can get an entire team out here within the hour.”

“No!” the man yelled as Graham was reaching for his phone, causing him to startle, because this got intense pretty quickly.

“It might be best,” he said as gently as he could, wondering what had caused the man to go from zero to one hundred in half a second, but knowing whatever it was left him feeling deeply uncomfortable.

“No,” the man said again, calmer this time. “No. But I’d appreciate if you could help me look for her. I don’t want to scare her with too many people all at once.”

“Sure,” Graham agreed, that edgy feeling growing, something was wrong, he just didn’t know what it was yet.

Looking over her shoulder, Sasha ran.

Didn’t matter how scared she was, she had to do this. If she didn’t … then she wasn’t sure she’d be around all that much longer.

And she didn’t mean in the area.

She meant in this world.

When nothing moved, no footsteps to indicate she was being followed, nothing to indicate he was even awake, she yanked open the front door and ran across the sagging porch and down the muddy driveway.

How long had it been since she felt fresh air on her skin?

Two months? Was that how long it had been since she made her last escape attempt? It felt like it had been years, but she was pretty sure it was the hundred and eleventh mark she’d made on the wall of her room this morning, and sixty-four days ago the marks became wobbly as she struggled to make them with the broken arm he’d given her that day.

Broken arms, broken ribs, broken nose, the constant bruises littering most of her body, the marks from the whip, the little found burns running in a line down her chest and stomach, she couldn’t live like this anymore.

Meeting him had been the worst thing to ever happen to her, and Sasha absolutely hated that she’d fallen for the nice guy act.

And it was an act.

Because the man she was running from was evil.

Pure evil.

As she ran she couldn’t shake that uncomfortable feeling that someone was watching her, so she ran even faster, because she couldn’t go back to that house.

It felt stupid to be jealous of his friend, given what Liam and the woman he’d fallen hard and fast for had just been through.

Of course he wasn’t jealous that they’d had to hike through a storm, been chased by a madman, that Liam had been knocked unconscious, and Cara had been abducted. He wasn’t jealous of the long recovery time Cara was facing, it would take months of skin grafts to repair the damage that had been done to her, and he had no doubt that Liam would be by her side through all of it.

And that was why he was jealous.

Because his best friend had found love, and he was all alone. Not that he didn’t want Liam to find happiness, he absolutely did, Liam deserved it after having the woman he’d been contemplating proposing to cheating on him.

But as he walked out of the hospital, leaving Liam and Cara in the doctors’ care, a heavy cloud of loneliness hung over him. Graham had been alone too long. He wanted someone to come home to, someone to share his life with. Too bad his parents’ volatile marriage while he was growing up had turned him off relationships for good.

Sighing as he climbed back into his car, he deliberately shoved away all thoughts of marriage, relationships, and loneliness. Love wasn’t on the cards for everyone, and he’d already determined years ago that it wasn’t for him, so there was no point in complaining about it now.

He might have spent the last twenty-four hours at his best friend’s side, running interference for him with the cops, supporting him, helping him track down his missing girl, but he didn’t want to go back to an empty house. So he turned the engine on and headed into work.

Someone somewhere out there needed him, that was what he had to focus on. Not the fact that loneliness was crushing him, making him doubt everything he’d always thought he wanted.