He shook his head. “You became confused. I’m willing to overlook that. You’ll have to be punished for it, of course, but I am willing to give you another chance.”
Something inside Natalie snapped further. No. She would not go with him. Ren and the rest of the team would’ve figured out she was gone soon if not already. She had to slow Damien down.
“I pretended I was dead for six years rather than live one more minute with you, Damien. I wasn’t confused.”
That earned her another slap on her abused face. “You’d been shot by those careless bastards at Omega Sector. I saw all the blood. You couldn’t have known what you were doing.”
She reached up and wiped blood from her split lip. “Oh, but I did, Damien. I took the opportunity to run as far and as fast as I could from you. I knew exactly what I was doing when I made sure you would think I was dead and I hoped I would never see you again.”
She saw his fists tighten on the steering wheel but she didn’t care.
“I pretended to die to get away from you, Damien. I’d rather die for real than go back to being married to you. Omega Sector is going to find you and they’re going to stop you.”
Damien pulled over to the side of the back road and slammed on the brakes. He grabbed her hair and yanked her over until she was just inches from his face.
“Your precious Omega agents are going to have way too much on their hands to be worried about you. They’re going to be busy dealing with the fallout from their own ineptitude.”
“With your biological warfare canisters? Yeah, they know all about that.”
He rolled his eyes. “I would hope so. If I’d made it any more obvious that it was me who had them, it would’ve had to be with engraved letterhead. But they don’t know when and they don’t know where, do they?”
He yanked her hair again, before letting go and starting the car once more. She reached up to touch her tender scalp and felt it. The tracker Ren had put at the back of her ear. She’d forgotten about it.
And Damien had no idea it was on her. All she needed to do was keep near him and it would lead the team right to them.
But Damien was never going to let them have her. She knew that. He would kill her before he would let her go, even if he was going to die, too. But at least they would stop him from whatever mad destruction he’d planned.
“The canisters are in the car even as we speak. I hadn’t planned to use them all at one time in one location, but you helped me realize there’s a blot in my past that needs to be erased. From now on, when I think of this place, it won’t be because it was where you legally became mine, but because of what I did here today.”
Natalie looked around more closely. “We’re going back to Grand Junction?”
“Yes, to city hall, where we were married. To love and to honor. A vow you’ve decided to forget.”
Just like he’d somehow forgottencherish and protectwhen he’d broken all her fingers.
But as much as she wanted to stand up to Damien—and for the first time in her life she really did—she needed to lie. To remaindocile. To distract him until Ren and his team could get here and stop him.
They drove in silence, Natalie struggling to figure out what to say, what to do, in order to stop Damien. Cry? Beg? He would love that. Could she do it? Maybe to save lives.
As they passed the city limits sign for Grand Junction, she knew she had to dosomething.
“Part of me missed you,” she whispered, trying not to choke on the words.
“Is that so? Evidently not enough to return to me where you belong, even though you were my wife.”
“You married someone else.” Dissolving their marriage. Thank God.
“She looked like you. I thought she would be a better model, more easily trained. But when she decided to betray me, she had to be eliminated.”
Natalie didn’t even know how to respond to that. To the fact that he’d killed another woman who couldn’t live up to his sick standards.
Damien drove in silence for many minutes.
“Tell me, Natalie. That man you were with out in the woods, the man you were hiking with, Warren Thompson. Were you intimate with him? Did you allow him to touch your body, which should’ve only ever belonged to me?”
“Damien...” Telling him the truth would only bring pain.
He shook his head as if overwhelmed by sadness. “You are not the person I’d hoped you’d be, Natalie.”
