“You’re not going to tell Mom, right?”
My dad sighed, turning to look out the slider. “No. At least not right now.”
I nodded, another small weight lifting off my chest. But the urgency, the panic, it hadn’t let up.
I needed to get to hernow.
I couldn’t shake the feeling that she might have already given up hope. That the will to live I’d been cultivating in her since we met had been snuffed out already. Because I knew that wherever she was, it was worse than hell. And I couldn’t hold it against her if she’d chosen to just give up.
I prayed for the millionth time that God would keep her alive long enough for me to save her.
Forty-Five
August 19, Wednesday
Enoch
The turkey sandwich was taunting me. I glowered at it, nose wrinkling at the smell that shouldn’t have been so offensive but was making me even more nauseated.
“Eat it,” my dad demanded.
I turned my gaze towards where he was sitting at the head of the table three chairs away from me.
I unlocked my clenched jaw and picked up the sandwich, forcing myself to breathe through my mouth so I wouldn’t gag as I took a small bite. Everything about the act of eating felt wrong. I wasn’t hungry, nothing tasted good, and knowing I’d likely vomit it up at some point turned me off even more.
I forced myself to chew and swallow, willing myself not to gag as the food went down the back of my throat.
I gave my dad a sarcastic thumbs up, but my mood didn’t seem to affect him as he plowed through his own meal of a sandwich, salad and chips. You’d have thought the man was prepping for a marathon with the amount of calories he was able to consume.
I turned my attention back to the sleek, black piano in the corner of the room, placed directly in front of one of the large windows that overlooked the outdoor space.
Was it a grand piano? A baby grand?
What the hell was the difference?
When the team agreed to let my dad and I join them in Texas, I had expected some shitty hotel room and eating drive-thru hamburgers for maybe two days max. I hadn’t been prepared to be staying on over one hundred acres of land in a massive ranch estate with a fucking private chef. Well, maybe he wasn’t a private chef, his name was fucking Cheeseman, but he was definitely the resident food supplier who was currently standing with his arms crossed over his chest as he stared at me. It looked like Cheeseman was contemplating coming over, tying me to this chair, and force feeding me.
He'd have to get in line behind my father.
The team my dad had managed to hire with the help of one of his military buddies was a ten-man team of ex-special forces monsters. And I meant that in the nicest way possible, but they were freaking scary. It wasn’t even that they were giant, walls of muscles. It was how they carried themselves with such confidence, how they radiated this energy of‘don’t ask me what I did last summer unless you want to join the bodies I fed to the pigs’. Apparently, there were even more of them. They were just one team from a private security organization that the team leader had started a decade ago after getting out of the Green Berets.
I think I would have been a little more intimidated if they didn’t have names like Cheeseman, Cash and Cow, or my personal favorite Big Bird. One of their many rules in the contract we signed was that they didn’t use their legal names during work.
I managed to take three more bites of food before my stomach cramped painfully, and I excused myself from the table.
Cheeseman didn’t look very impressed when I brought my plate into the kitchen and disposed of the half-eaten sandwich. But I ignored him and his tattooed hands that grabbed the plate from me. He shoved the entire untouched half of my sandwich into his mouth. It looked like a threat, and I shuddered as I backed out of the kitchen.
I stepped out onto the covered patio that overlooked the pristine pool and rolling hills surrounding the property.
I didn’t believe half the shit these guys told me, not after they flew us in a private plane and told us this property just happened to be up for auction, and they bought it the day we flew out here.
It was insane.
I was beginning to wonder if these guys weren’t killers for hire. They were certainly not hurting for an income with how little they’d asked us to pay for their services.
I was skeptical they were up for the job until they produced a detailed background on her ex-husband, his financials, and a deep dive into the financial records from the church within the first six hours of landing in Texas.
And yet it’d been two days since we landed, and I was going in-fucking-sane.
