Knox glared down at the face of the human monster. “You sick fuck. I should’ve killed you that first night. I should have killed all of you that night.”
Dwight snarled, his voice throttled under the pressure of Knox’s grip. “Go to hell!”
“You first,” Knox said.
He reached for Parrish’s dropped pistol and put it under the bastard’s chin. Then he pulled the trigger, blowing away Dwight’s final words and taking half his skull along with them.
In the lumberyard outside, the semi’s engine fired up.
Knox rose and calmly headed out to deal with the last of the Parrishes.
Enoch sat behind the wheel of the tractor trailer, exhaust spewing in a gray cloud as the old man revved the engine. Knox was there before the truck lurched into gear.
He ripped off the driver’s side door and yanked Enoch out of the seat, throwing him to the ground. The old man had a gun too. Knox batted it out of his feeble grasp like he was swatting a fly.
He didn’t have to guess at Enoch Parrish’s guilt. That he had participated in the decision to send the Hunter out to kill Leni and him in order to take Riley was not a question. But Knox couldn’t kill the son of a bitch without being certain of everything he’d done.
The old man made a frantic attempt at escape, crab-walking backward while Knox loomed over him. Knox brought his boot down on Enoch’s chest, savoring the brittle pop of aged ribs giving way beneath his heel.
“Get up.” He backed off slightly, glowering at the man. When Parrish only wheezed and sputtered, refusing to comply, Knox reached down for a fistful of his flannel shirt and hauled him up to his feet.
Parrish howled in agony.
The scream cut short under the punishing crush of Knox’s fingers, now wrapped around the old man’s throat.
“Holy hell,” he hissed through his teeth and fangs as the floodgates opened on Enoch Parrish’s nearly eighty years of corruption, criminality, and unspeakable cruelty.
If Dwight and Travis had committed hideous acts, their father’s sins made them pale in comparison.
A lifelong abuser, Enoch’s brutality had known no bounds. His wife and children. Local girls in Parrish Falls and elsewhere. And it hadn’t stopped there.
Christ, not even close.
Enoch Parrish was the leader of a twisted ring of fellow offenders, who, like him, got off on preying upon young females who lacked the power or resources to stop them. Indigent women. Runaways. Vulnerable girls with no one to turn to, no one to help them.
Parrish had been trafficking and trading in human flesh most of his adult life, but had stepped up his operation once the family logging business had begun to decline.
He and his sons, along with a secret cabal of repugnant cronies, were still enslaving helpless young women to serve their sick pleasures.
Knox slammed the old man’s spine against the rough timber logs stacked on the trailer behind him. “Where are they? The girls you’re currently holding. Goddamn it, tell me where you’re keeping them.”
The blare of sirens screamed in the distance. Swirling lights broke through the trees as what appeared to be an army of law enforcement vehicles sped along the two-lane toward the Parrish property.
Enoch struggled against Knox’s grasp, but his craggy old face remained shuttered, his thin mouth stubbornly silent.
Knox wanted to kill the bastard. God knew he did.
But he needed the information first.
He needed to be able to save Enoch Parrish’s victims.
“Where are they, you miserable fuck?”
Then he heard it. A soft, muffled cry coming from within the outbuilding. He heard pounding. The sound would have been undetectable to human ears, but Knox’s Breed senses latched on to it at once.
Behind him now, half the county’s sheriff department swarmed onto the property. Snow and ice kicked up as the fleet of vehicles poured in to block any escape. Officers leapt out with guns in hand, all of them trained on Knox.
A voice came over a bullhorn—Amos Barstow, demanding Knox’s surrender. “Turn around, and put your hands where we can see them.”
