He shrugged and I could tell he didn’t think he’d done enough.
“I should’ve forced her to move. That little brat just knew what to do.” He scoffed with a laugh. “She spent three days reviewing the orientation paperwork before she signed it. She knew exactly what she was doing when she told me she was going to kill herself if I moved her. We had no problems forcing people to move and then, bam, now we gotta listen to fucking legal tape whenever anyone cries wolf about mental health shit.”
I cocked my head to the side, studying him. “You’re wrong. She was genuinely considering it. If anyone’s to blame here for her getting kidnapped, it’s me. I was the one who asked her to stay in Anchorage. I didn’t even know that she’d left Witness Protection until it was too late for her to change her mind. I mean, I thought it was fucking strange that you’d allow her to stay there, but…I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised though. She’s selfless to a fault. She has little regard for her own well-being.”
Bradley removed an imaginary hat from his head and tipped his head in a bow. “She really digs in there doesn’t she? Hits your soft spot and makes you do stupid shit.”
I sighed.
“We’re going to get her back. And that fucker is going to get a bullet to the brain. I already talked to those guys you hired, by the way. I also told them I’m splitting the bill.”
I blinked in shock, making sure I heard him right. “You mean, you told them to kill him?”
“Yep.” His lip twitched with a sneer. “Wish I was going in there with them so I could do it myself, but,” he licked his lips, “yeah. That fucker will die. They assured me.”
I nodded, leaning back in the chair, letting my head drop as I closed my eyes.
He’ll be dead.
He’ll never be able to hurt her again.
And Shiloh, she’ll come home and I’ll make sure she’s neverunsafe again.
August 21, Friday
Emory
A grating sound made me wince. The yellow halo burning behind my eyelids made my head pulse. The headache hadn’t left since that first day without food. I slowly blinked my eyes open at the grating sound. A silhouette across the room filled my vision. Along with a burning brightness and gritty sensation that had me closing my eyes again. It felt like someone had scrubbed my eyeballs with sandpaper.
I waited for unconsciousness to hit me, for the next wave of sleep to take over, but as hard I tried to drift away into the nothingness, into the black void of my hazy mind, sleep evaded me.
I finally worked up the courage to open my eyes again. I wanted to know who was watching me. I knew it couldn’t be Theo. He’d been absent since his dad came over and discovered I was back. Since we’d completed our punishment and had to move onto the next portion: fasting. In order to abstain from any intimacy, we’d been physically separated.
I discovered that fact when I woke up, hooked up to an IV drip in one of the guest bedrooms in our house, laying flat on my stomach with nothing but a sheet covering the bottom half of my body.
I thought maybe Father had talked some sense into Theo about his alleged vision from God. Unfortunately, I was wrong. I realized as much when a doctor from the clinic had come in to remove my IV, Elder Mark standing watch in the room. He said he’d be back in two days to give me another bag of fluids, to prevent me from dying of dehydration while I was fasting from food and water for the next month.
I didn’t know how long ago that had been. The hunger had long since passed. Even the pain in my stomach, my insides consuming themselves had subsided. The only constant had been the pain in my back and the throbbing in my head. I’d given up begging for food after a while, knowing they would just ignore me. I’d lost my voice anyways, a dryness in my throat that hurt as if I wasn’t in enough pain.
As I sifted through the most recent events in my mind, I winced. Dr. Loshquin and his wife Mary had held me up on the toilet after administering me an enema that I thought was surely going to kill me, be it from shame or from the stomach cramping. Who knew that fasting would cause you to stop shitting so badly that you would be forced to be the unwilling victim of an involuntary enema.
I blotted out the memory. Focusing on the task I had forgotten I was doing—opening my eyes. It took me a minute, but at last my vision cleared and I could see the man in the chair. The sight of him had me squeezing my eyes shut.
It couldn’t be him. It couldn’t. He was dead.
I cracked one eye open.
He tilted his head, eyes meeting mine as a slow smile spread across his tanned. “Hello, Shiloh.”
I watched with rapture as he picked up the fork from the plate on his lap, slicing into an ungodly portion of lasagna, fork scraping against the ceramic plate, and slowly brought it to his open mouth.
Food.
I didn’t know what was worse, the way every cell in my body was screaming at me to put food in my body, or the intense nausea that overwhelmed my senses. My mouth flooded with saliva so thick I choked trying to swallow it down my raw throat. My entire body seized as the hacking caused the lashes on my back to stretch and set fire.
I wheezed, trying to breathe without passing out from the literal fire it felt like was ablaze on my back.
Adrian chuckled, chewing and swallowing the large bite before going back for another. “I’d offer you some,” he muttered through a mouthful of food, “but you just choked on your own saliva. Death by lasagna doesn’t have a very good ring to it.”
