Shiloh had been missing for five days.Fivefucking days.
I felt like I couldn’t breathe.
She was only forty-minutes away, yet I was stuck here on this luxury ranch home twiddling my thumbs waiting for this team of experts to give the green light to go and get her back.
Every single second felt like a lifetime too long to be waiting. I had voiced my opinion as such many times over the last two days, but this team wouldn’t budge.
They said they weren’t going to risk anything until they were sure that they could successfully retrieve Emory. The compound was fucking huge, over two-thousand acres and short of knocking down every damn door, we couldn’t be certain where they were keeping her. Unless we contacted the FBI, and the team that had extracted her, for details, we were going in blind.
The worst fucking part was that they couldn’t figure out how he had found her. I told them about the air show, but when they did a search on the internet looking for her based on the one photo I had of her on my phone, they couldn’t find her.Yet. They were still running a continuous search for her in the background of people’s posts.
And this guy’s financials were squeaky clean.
Bradley told them to look into his father’s financials too and they were, but so far, nothing. Even the church was clean. On paper at least.
They’d been hoping that by continuing to monitor the property with drones, they’d be able to scout Theo coming and going, but so far, we’d not seen any sightings of Theo or Shiloh. And we couldn’t just drive in either. The entire property had a fifteen-foot wall surrounding it and the entrance manned twenty-four hours with gated entry.
Bradley was hopeful that Theo was too obsessed with Shiloh to kill her, but I wasn’t so sure. The man had whipped her back with a belt, indoctrinated her with false teachings from the Bible, had her deathly afraid of taking a damn bath…I thought Bradley was severely underestimating the lengths that man was willing to go to keep Shiloh. And what hell he could be putting her through right now.
Hell, my mind was a constant loop of every worst nightmare I could imagine. Just thinking about him putting his hands on her, raping her, trying to impregnate her again, had the bilesurging up the back of my throat. I made it to a flowerpot just in time to spew the undigested turkey sandwich.
I spat, wiping my mouth with the back of my hand and righted myself to find Bradley holding out a stick of gum. I accepted, shoving it into my mouth, eager to get the taste away.
“They’re serious in there,” he said dryly, dropping into a seat at the large outdoor table. “They’re considering force feeding you. Or making you take some weed to get an appetite.”
I shook my head. “They won’t do that. I’m a year sober.”
He sucked his teeth and nodded. “That sucks. But explains why you’ve not been drinking yourself to sleep every night. I’m sure some liquor would hit hard right about now.”
I groaned a sigh, “Gee. Thanks for the reminder.”
“Fuck, sorry. That was probably not the thing to say to an addict.”
I shook my head with a scoff. “No. Probably not.”
“We’ll get her back.”
“You seem awfully confident for someone who isn’t even doing the work.”
Shit, that was a dick statement, but I didn’t retract it.
He laughed, pointing his finger at me with a grin, “I like you. You’re a lot like Emory, you know? Don’t take shit and certainly don’t filter your thoughts.”
I frowned, not having drawn the same conclusion before. But he wasn’t wrong. We had become more and more alike in the last five years. Sadly, it was likely because I’d finally tasted an ounce of trauma and had lost a little bit of my happy-go-lucky demeanor. Or maybe a lot of it.
Looking back, a lot about her personality could be attributed to the trauma she’d survived. I knew that the knowledge I had about it just barely scratched the surface, but the walls I had to scale to just obtain that information was a feat of warfare.
He chuckled softly to himself, shaking his head. “I spent two months with Emory in a safe house before moving her to Alaska. She was different then. That place, than man, Theo,” he spat the name like it was a curse word, “had really done a number on her. And I don’t mean just physically.”
My stomach threatened to attempt to empty again at the reminder that he had her. He’d had her for five whole days.
“She was reserved. Timid. But slowly, slowly she shed her skin, and I got a glimpse at the real woman inside. I was proud of her, and I just wanted her to be happy. I dunno,” he blew out a breath, swiping his hand over his hair, “maybe it was some misguided sense of fatherly bonding we’d shared while I was nursing her back to health from death’s door, but I let her slip past my defenses, and it cost her. I should have never broken protocol placing her there, should have at least been keeping track of you before she had a chance to meet you again.”
“She mentioned that. That she was sick. What happened?” I slowly dragged myself into the chair across from him.
“The night the FBI grabbed her, she was hemorrhaging. Miscarrying. Poor guys were horrified when they arrived at the hospital with her. It was…well, horrifying. The amount of blood, it was…I couldn’t believe she was even fucking alive. They were going to give her a hysterectomy, but I caused a scene knowing that she shouldn’t have to have that decision taken away from her, and they tried another procedure first. Thankfully it worked, but she got an infection and was in the ICU for a week. She couldn’t even walk for several weeks after she was discharged from the hospital. I had to do everything for her.” He met my eyes with raised brows. “Yes. Including helping her bathe. She wasn’t happy about it either, but I wasn’t about to let her re-injure herself. And I didn’t have any women Marshalls at the safe house with us. It was myself and three other maledeputies. And as much as I trusted their abilities to protect her, I couldn’t stand the thought of them seeing her like that.”
“Fuck. You’ve really done a lot for her.”
