Текст книги "The Other Man"
Автор книги: R. K. Lilley
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Текущая страница: 15 (всего у книги 17 страниц)
CHAPTER
THIRTY-THREE
Mason started cursing.
I started shaking.
“I take it that blade isn’t yours?”
I shook my head, and he cursed some more, then crouched down next to me and bagged up the knife.
“Anything else odd about this drawer?”
I was so shaken up by the knife that I didn’t even feel awkward about the subject matter. I was beyond embarrassment at this point. “A vibrator is missing,” I said dully.
There was a long pause then, “Your favorite?”
I grimaced and nodded.
His slew of curses that time went on for a while.
“Anything else?”
It took me a minute more of staring before I caught it. “A set of handcuffs.”
He didn’t remark on that, and for some reason that made me add, “They were technically Heath’s.”
By then he was searching the room himself. “Start packing a bag,” he told me, standing on my bed to reach my ceiling fan. “You can’t stay here right now. This house has been compromised.”
I started to pack, my mind spinning.
I thought of something. “My son is on his way over. I need to call him to tell him if we’re leaving.”
“You do. But you need to pack first.”
I complied, but inside I balked at that. I was a mother, first and foremost, and I felt that the first thing I should do was call my son and tell him not to come to my house, which was apparently unsafe now.
Mason started cursing again, and I glanced at him just in time to catch him taking something small out of the light fixture attached to the ceiling fan.
I started to freak the hell out. To the point that I had to tell myself to calm down.
“What was that?” I asked him, unable to hide the unsteady cadence of my voice.
“Camera,” he said tersely, getting down from the bed. “This is even more fucked than I thought. I need to call this in, get something out of the car. It will take me exactly five minutes. And you need to pack quick, and I mean quick. We have to be out of here in ten minutes.”
I nodded that I understood him, but the second he was out of the room, I was dashing for my phone and calling Raf.
A mother, first and foremost.
The other end picked up, but Raf didn’t say anything, so I started in. “Sweetie, you shouldn’t come here now. It’s a long story, but you and Gustave need to steer clear of my house for the next few days.”
I was trying to pack one handed while I rattled that off.
“Hello, Lourdes,” a blank voice said in my ear.
I froze, the toothbrush I’d just grabbed fell from my other hand. It was odd; one hand had gone limp, while the other clutched my phone against my ear in a death-grip.
I knew who it was, even while my mind stuttered to a halt at the words.
It was Kevin, I knew his voice, but it was wrong, so off I almost didn’t recognize it.
A few realizations came to me then, all at once.
All of the worrisome things about him shifted into focus, all of the contradictions and quirks gaining enough substance to finally get my full attention, at last overwhelming my distracted mind.
Whoever I’d thought Kevin was, he was not. The man on the other end of the phone was a mystery to me, a terrifying one at that.
Kevin was a lie. A myth created to lure me in.
There was no Kevin. He was a stranger.
A stranger who had known me well enough to feign my same interests, to customize himself into a man I’d fall easily into dating.
And all of it, every last bit, had been a lie.
I didn’t know him from Adam, but he clearly knew me.
He’d studied me well enough to break me with one short sentence.
“I have little Raffi,” said the stranger.
Checkmate.
“Please,” I gasped. “Don’t hurt him. Don’t harm my child. Please.”
“That’s all up to you, Lourdes.”
“What do you want me to do? Whatever you want, Kevin. Just don’t hurt him. Please.” I was begging.
“First of all, I want you to be fast. Drop everything you’re doing, leave your phone behind, and go outside. Use the back door. Now. If your bodyguard stops you, your son will pay. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
It wasn’t even a decision. Decisions require thought and choice.
I didn’t think, and I didn’t have a choice. He had my baby. He won. I’d do anything he asked, if there were even a chance it would keep him from harming my son.
I’m a fast runner, faster in a panic, and I was through my house and out the back in under ten seconds.
It was dark out, and the stranger on the phone had given me no instructions for when I was out.
I had one brief moment to wonder what I should do next when something cracked sharply against the back of my head.
I crumbled with a whimper.
An acrid wet cloth covered my nose and mouth.
The world went black.
I came to with a world-class headache.
I was trussed up, gagged, and in the trunk of a lurching vehicle.
It was pitch-black, but I could feel what was around my ankles and wrists.
Fucking zip ties, the psychopath.
I knew it was futile, with no way to maneuver properly, and no sharp objects to aid, but I couldn’t seem to help myself. It was instinct. I struggled. Hard and long, until my wrists were bruised and raw, then bloody and torn. Fear kept goading me on, and so I kept struggling.
I wanted out of that damn trunk. I felt that anything would have been better.
But then I was out, moved from the car to a house, and it was not an improvement.
Kevin, or whatever the hell his name was, carried me in through a dark garage, slung over his shoulder like baggage.
He set me on the ground, propped upright against a wall. He wasn’t rough about it, was in fact careful, but even that didn’t make me feel better, not when I looked at his face.
When he wasn’t in character, it inspired the kind of horror that made your hair stand on end, bile rising in your throat.
It wasn’t even that he was sinister. It was the lack of anything at all that frightened me. The blankness of him now that he didn’t have to act for me.
I didn’t know how to deal with him, what to try to get out of this.
Reasoning with him seemed out of the question. Nothing could touch someone so clean of any feeling.
He left the room briefly.
The lights weren’t on, but it wasn’t completely dark. I could make out a few shapes in the space, enough to see that it was some sort of a den with a TV, a sofa, and a recliner.
I didn’t realize I wasn’t the only occupant in the room until I heard a low groan several feet in front of me.
I whimpered through my gag.
Rafael. And he was in pain.
The light switched on, and I saw him, a crumbled, beaten mess on the floor.
My glaring, wet gaze flew to the stranger formerly known as Kevin.
He smiled at me.
I wanted to murder him with my bare hands.
“If you scream, your boy will pay,” Kevin said, then bent down and tore off my gag.
“You said you wouldn’t hurt him,” left my mouth the second the cloth was ripped free.
He waved a negligent hand at Raf’s limp form. “That was from before. He didn’t come with me easily. Your kid’s a fighter.”
I shut my eyes and whispered dejectedly, “Why? Why are you doing this?”
“I’m sure you’ve guessed. This is about Heath. I’m flushing him out.”
“But why?”
“For one, I was hired. He has some very powerful enemies. But that’s a new development, and this is an old beef. I’ve wanted him for a very long time. You can’t imagine how pleased I was to find out that he finally had a weakness, one that he wasn’t keeping particularly well protected.”
He studied me like he was looking for a response, but I didn’t give him one.
“Do you ever look around and think you’re the only one who’s really there?” he asked me. “Everyone else is a shell. Just empty. So many people, a sea of bodies, full of nothing but organs and guts and blood. They’re all shapeless and colorless. The only time I see them is when I make them bleed, when I slice them up and feel their entrails with my bare hands. Did you know most people’s insides have more depth than their so called souls?”
I shook my head that I did not, eyes wide on his dead ones, wondering if I was going to throw up all over him.
“And even then,” he continued, “the color only lasts for a short bit of time, gone before a body even cools, and then I’m alone in the world again, the only one that’s really here, it seems. That’s how I feel almost all of the time. Alone.
But every so often, I see somebody else. For one reason or another, they stand out to me. They aren’t empty. Heath is one of those. We used to work together, did I tell you? Co-oped some jobs for the government a few years back. He’s a rare talent. I’ve always respected his work, but on a personal note, we don’t get along. We don’t see eye to eye on the particulars, if that makes any sense. I won’t bore you with the details, but the last time we worked together, it ended badly. Would you believe he tried to kill me? He nearly did. Needless to say, I couldn’t forget a thing like that. He took a shot at me and missed. It’s time I got a chance to shoot back. I’ll almost be sad when I kill him. It’s a pity to kill one of the real people, but in his case, it has to be done.
And there’s a silver lining here.”
I shuddered at the thought. It boggled the mind what he’d consider as an upside.
“Do you want to know what it is?” he asked.
I nodded, because when the crazy man asks you a question, you damn well try to play along.
He smiled his sick smile. “I found you. And you know, you aren’t empty, either, Lourdes.”
Just my fucking luck.
What was I, like, psychopath catnip?
But as I thought about it, I realized that it might be something I could work with.
CHAPTER
THIRTY-FOUR
My eyes darted to Raf. He hadn’t moved or made a noise since psycho-Kevin had turned on the light.
“Please, Kevin—”
“Call me Earl.”
“Please, Earl, let me check on my son. I need to make sure he’s okay and tend to him.”
Earl straightened and moved away, leaving the room. I thought he was just ignoring my request, but he was back a few minutes later, a black leather bag in his hand.
I tensed when he got near Raf, but he didn’t hurt him, at least not more than he was already hurt.
Instead, he began to tend to him.
“I used to be a doctor, you know,” he told me.
His back was to me, and I couldn’t see what exactly he was doing. Both of their faces were hidden from me, but I could vaguely make out his movements.
“Is he okay?” I asked, holding my breath as I waited for the answer.
“He’s fine. Bruises and superficial cuts, nothing more. And, Lourdes, he’ll stay fine, just as long as you cooperate with me.”
“I’ll cooperate,” I assured him, meaning it. “Just don’t hurt him again.”
He was silent for a long time, and I barely blinked as I watched him. If he’d tried to further harm Raf, there was nothing I could have done about it, but he didn’t. Instead, he cleaned and bandaged his cuts, even going so far as to hold an icepack to his head.
When he finished, he came and crouched in front of me again, studying my face with detached curiosity.
“We need to travel again,” he told me, like we were discussing it, and I had some kind of say in the matter.
I just stared at him.
“Do you have any more questions for me before I put this back on?” he asked, holding up the cloth he’d used to gag me.
He was using just a touch of his Kevin persona to coax me, I thought, though I didn’t see the point. He could obviously do whatever the hell he wanted, whether I agreed or not.
“You killed Eduard, didn’t you?” I asked.
“Yes. For you. He was bothersome, wasn’t he? And now he won’t bother you. And besides that, I didn’t like his attitude.”
“You didn’t have to do that,” I said, voice trembling with rage. It was just so senseless.
“No, I didn’t, but I wanted to. And he wasn’t the only one I killed for you.”
My life had turned into a nightmare, and so when he said that, my mind flew to the most horrifying possibility.
God, no. Please, no. Not that. Anything but that.
“Gustave?” I managed to sob out. I couldn’t handle even the thought.
“No, no, nothing so drastic. Your sons aren’t bothersome to you, at least not that I’ve noticed, though I was a bit perturbed that you never wanted to introduce me. That almost made me lose my temper, which would have caused you a little grief, but lucky for you, I am a man of restraint.”
Thank you, God, thank you, God, thank you, God, chanted in my head.
“Who then?” I finally asked.
“Lisa. She was an old colleague of mine, but I must say, I never had much use for her. Another empty vessel. Soulless to her core.”
“Why?”
“She was planning something. They’d taken her off her detail. She wasn’t supposed to be watching you anymore, but she was, and she was acting erratic, clearly upset. To be honest, I don’t know what she was going to do, but it seemed likely she might try to hurt you. So I took care of her. I killed her for you.”
It wasn’t lost on me, the horrible irony of this man who was going to hurt me, had done worse already by hurting my son, killing someone because they might harm me.
I didn’t have much time to wonder over it. I thought he was moving to gag me, but instead he covered my nose and mouth again with a cloth that reeked with that same acrid stench.
I lost consciousness.
I don’t know if he’d dosed me harder or what, but I must have been out a lot longer that time, because when I came to it was light out, and I was already ensconced in another house, in another room with Raf, who was conscious now, his eyes steady on me.
I took in every bruise and cut I could see, his blackened eyes, his split lip, feeling every bit of it.
I had no clue why, but Dr. Earl the psychopath had gone to the trouble to make us both comfortable, sitting us up, tied, but in recliners placed about six feet apart, facing each other.
And so began our strange captivity.
For the most part, it was tedious. A lot of awful waiting and anxious worrying.
Raf was bound up tight and treated like someone dangerous. The psycho even fed him by hand, not trusting him with so much as a fork and spoon.
He knew that Rafael was a testosterone fueled young man who was extremely overprotective of his mother, just waiting for a chance to break free.
Me, Earl treated drastically different, though it took me some time to catch it. He kept me tied, but he had no caution with me, no thought that I’d try to attack him. He treated me only as a risk for flight.
Because he’d been watching me, stalking me for God only knew how long, and he knew some things about me.
He knew I wasn’t violent.
He knew this from watching me and felt confident in his assessment.
He hadn’t done enough research.
He might have been a perfect killer, but in this instance, he was an utter fool.
Because I was not violent. In general, no, I did not have the urge to hurt inside of me. For the most part, I did have a pacifist’s soul.
To a point. We all have that breaking point. Everyone probably has a few of them, but hands down, my children were the quickest way to snap mine.
How dare this sicko drag Raf into this?
I’d kill him with my bare hands. I was just waiting for my chance.
Earl did keep his word about not hurting Raf anymore, as long as I cooperated, and I did, but the same could not be said for me.
It could have been worse. That was an absolute fact. There were a dozen things just off the top of my head that would have been less tolerable to me.
Still, there was some pain to be had. Some torment to be suffered.
Some burdens to be borne that could not be taken back.
I’d carry them forever.
It began, around noon on the first day in that second house and stuck to a rigid pattern.
He started by gagging Raf, then turned to me.
He untied me and took me, without a word, into another room.
I didn’t fight him. I knew that this was what he’d meant about me cooperating.
That didn’t make it easy.
Raf could be heard screaming helplessly into his gag from the second we left until he saw me again.
When I said that Earl hadn’t hurt my son again, I was only referring to physical pain.
The other room was a bedroom, and that first day was the worst with what I thought and feared he’d do when he sat me on that bed.
But he didn’t rape me. Thank God at least for that.
“I don’t have what you’d call ‘normal wiring,’” he explained to me at one point. “I don’t get off on sex.”
I didn’t ask. I sincerely did not want to know, but he seemed to feel, as he often did, that he owed me an explanation.
“I’d show you how I do, but I can’t, not while you’re pregnant. It’s not safe. I wouldn’t want you to lose the baby. After, though, we’ll have some fun, I promise.”
I didn’t ask him what he planned to do with the baby. I didn’t want to draw his attention to it. He was too strange when it came to my baby. Obsessed. Like it was his.
He stripped me, pushed me down, and tied my arms above my head.
I stayed meek as a lamb, knowing that any fight I put up on my part would cause some type of harm to Raf.
It was hard to stay quiet when he took out a blade. It was a small thing, but I didn’t let that fool me. Little knives could cut just as surely as big ones, if they were sharp enough. And this one was honed with precision.
I lay there, shaking, while I waited for him to start on me.
I had no notion what he planned, but I knew it wouldn’t be pleasant.
“I’d like you to gain some weight,” he told me, as he bent down to touch high up on my leg. “And lose some muscle tone. You’ll be more fun to play with when you aren’t so firm. I like soft flesh.”
I shut my eyes and shuddered.
He brushed his free hand over my inner thigh. “Your skin is like velvet, though. I do like that.”
And he started to cut, carving at my skin with determined skill.
The pain wasn’t unbearable. Pain wasn’t what made it so awful. It was the helplessness of it, and the look on his face while he had me at his mercy.
He was quick, though and didn’t cut even all that deep. I bled, but he was efficient, and he stopped the bleeding and cleaned the cut in short order.
When he was done, he took pictures. Lots of them.
After that, he untied me and told me to look.
I sat up and studied the spot he’d been working on.
High up on my inner thigh, carved into my flesh, it read: SOFT.
After that, he let me dress, tied me back to my chair, took out Raf’s gag, then left the house for a few hours.
This also was a part of the daily pattern.
As soon as Raf and I were alone, our matching eyes would meet, the same desperate, searching fear in each pair.
“You okay?” I mouthed at him.
My son nodded jerkily. “Did he hurt you?” he mouthed back.
I shook my head, the first of many lies I’d be telling him to shelter him from the pain of this.
“Did he—?” Raf couldn’t even finish the sentence.
I made solid eye contact and shook my head. “No. That’s not his thing.”
When Earl returned that first time, he was so full of restless energy that he couldn’t stop moving, twitching. He was hyper, excited about something.
“Would you like to take a walk, Lourdes?” he asked me, casually gagging Raf again.
He didn’t even look at my son as he did it. In fact, he rarely looked at him. That worried me—that he didn’t seem to notice him.
I knew it made him more expendable to the sicko.
Of course it wasn’t a real question. I didn’t have a choice here, but I had to answer, anyway. “Yes, Earl.”
“I changed my mind about you calling me Earl. I’d like for you to call me Doctor.”
“Yes, of course, Doctor.”
He smiled like he was pleased, then untied me, tugged me to my feet, and pulled me outside.
CHAPTER
THIRTY-FIVE
It was a bright sunny day out, not a cloud in the sky, but I barely noticed, instead intent on studying my surroundings.
A wave of despair washed over me at what I saw.
We were in the desert. In the middle of freaking nowhere. The small house he had us in had no neighbors to speak of. The only road was a small dirt one, a private road, and it trailed so far off in the distance that I couldn’t see where it ended, or where any other roads might intercept it.
We were stranded out here. Even if we managed to get free of our bonds, which was a stretch in itself, there was nowhere for us to go.
“There’s no escape here, Lourdes,” Earl said quietly, as though he’d read my thoughts and smiled his dead smile right into my soul.
I tried not to glare at him, but a hate the likes of which I’d never known was blossoming inside of me.
It was almost a comfort, how powerful that hate was.
Hatred can become sustenance. This one was growing so huge it felt like it was giving me energy, an energy I could live off, if need be.
He was tormenting my child and torturing me, but it didn’t touch him.
None of this touched him. Hurting me, terrorizing my family.
How did you reach a man that couldn’t be touched? I needed to reach him.
“If this was all just to hurt Heath, you’ve made a mistake,” I said quietly.
That had him looking at me with something akin to interest at last.
“He’s like you,” I told him. “Nothing that happens to me will hurt him. I was a job to him, just like I am to you. He only acted territorial because that’s who he is, not because the territory meant anything to him.”
He frowned and shook his head at me, “You’re so wrong, Lourdes. I’ve already won. He agreed to everything I asked, gave in without a fight the first chance he got. He wants to do a trade. Him for you and Raf. He didn’t hesitate. You wouldn’t believe how he begged me. It was beautiful. You broke my perfect soldier.”
I wanted to wretch. Instead, I looked away from him to hide my loathing. It was getting harder and harder to act serene with him.
Something had set him off, a brief glimpse of my unguarded expression, perhaps. He was suddenly angry, gripping my chin and staring into my face.
“That was a ploy?” he taunted softly. “You were trying to play me? Why, you little liar, you’ll pay for that.”
That was the first time he beat me, right out in the open, because who would see him out here?
Not a soul.
We’d walked far enough away from the house that the sound of the blows wouldn’t carry to Raf. At least he was spared that.
I didn’t cry out. I tried to take it quietly, grateful in a way, because he seemed to be avoiding my midsection.
He knocked my legs out from under me and brought me to my knees, scraping them against the jagged ground. Gripping my hair with one hand, he began to hit me with the other, right across the face, small slaps that graduated into open palmed thwacks that progressed into heavy backhanded blows.
He worked me over in a way that was painful enough, but almost superficial, blackening my face, bloodying my knees.
When he was finished he pushed me onto my back, pulled out his camera, and began to snap pictures.
“Pull your knees up to your chin,” he instructed me coldly, no anger present, and that’s when I realized that he’d done this, not from loss of temper, but as a calculated move.
He was trying to get a rise out of Heath, and I had no doubts it would work.
Sometimes the words he chose to carve into my skin were odd. Random. Words like MOTHER, CALM, PLIANT. Once, randomly, I even received a LOVELY right under my right breast.
But other times, the words weren’t random at all. The day after that conversation was one of those.
I received a LIAR in my left underarm, high up into my armpit, right on the most sensitive skin. It hurt like a bitch.
I didn’t get a word every time, but words or not, he always carved something on me.
It made it easy, at least, to count the days as they passed.
We were ten days in when he cut a neat little OBEDIENT right on the inside of my wrist.
He was calculated enough to put me in a long sleeved shirt after that one. He was at least trying to hide all of the cutting from Raf. I appreciated that.
He was gone from the house right after, leaving us alone for the usual two-hour stretch.
We were careful when we spoke, I figured he had the room at least bugged, but those two hours were still the highlight of every day.
“Are you okay?” I asked Raf, first thing when we were by ourselves.
His raw eyes hit mine, and I could see that this was taking its toll on him. My poor, sensitive boy. If it wouldn’t have done more harm to him, I’d have wept.
“Did he hurt you?” he asked, voice scratchy with the effort to hold everything in.
“No, sweetie. I’m fine.”
Raf’s bloodshot eyes moved down to a spot on my arm, just below the sleeve of my shirt.
I looked down. Dammit. A bit of blood showed, peeking out through the hem.
I turned my arm, hiding it, but it was too late.
“What’s that?” he asked.
“Just a scratch,” I assured him.
He shut his eyes, and I could see his lips were quivering.
My poor, sensitive boy.
I’d given up on working at my ropes by then. Earl had noticed the condition of my wrists early on, and calmly threatened to hurt Raf if I continued.
Our situation felt more hopeless than ever. By taking both of us, he had all the leverage he needed to keep us obedient forever.
Just thinking the word had me glancing down at my bloody wrist. The cuts had leaked just enough to make out the neat OBEDIENT through my white sleeve.
That was the day something wonderful happened.
Earl didn’t come back.
Not that day, or the next, or the one after that.
The third day was the day when I began to gain the certainty that we were going to die like this, tied up to soiled chairs and starving.
Each time he’d left, Earl had given us each a large bottle of water, set between our legs. It was tricky, but we’d both picked up swiftly how to drink that way, twisting the cap off with our teeth, and taking small sips.
We each rationed our water as much as we could; taking the tiniest sips when we began to get an inkling that he wasn’t coming back anytime soon.
On day three, it was looking dire. Even with the rationing, we were down to the last drops, and soon, sucking at air.
How long could a person live without water? I thought three days. Raf swore it was five, since we were indoors.
I badly did not want to find out which one of us was right.
Another day passed, the water completely gone now.
I had the popcorn ceilings memorized, and I didn’t even notice the stench anymore.
We played games, quizzed each other with random trivia to pass the time, but I began to feel my mind getting more sluggish, and we slept longer and longer with each passing day.
Raf was sleeping when I got a sudden desperate burst of energy and began to struggle against my bonds.
I rubbed my wrists and ankles bloody, nearly knocked over my chair, and accomplished nothing at all. Earl’d known what he was doing. He left no weaknesses for us to exploit.
I cried, but no tears came. I was too dehydrated for that.
I woke with a start, and I didn’t know why. I sat still for a moment, thinking, listening intently, before I heard it, breaking the great, vast silence of the desert.
A car. A loud one or possibly a few cars.
My eyes met Raf’s. We stared at each other, both of us afraid to hope that this might be some improvement in our situation.
Perhaps it was Earl, and he’d just been using a new means to torture us.
His car had never been loud, though. But then it was possible he’d just brought a different one. The man was a stone cold murderer. I doubted he’d have any qualms about stealing a new car.
But no, as the sound grew, getting louder and louder until it felt like it was shaking the house, I became more certain that it wasn’t just one car or even a few. It was a lot of cars.
I jumped in my seat when I heard a loud bang on the door, not like a knock, but like a battering ram, accompanied by shouts of, “FBI! Open up!” and more loud bangs, followed by the unmistakable sound of the front door being smashed open.
I thought I might pass out cold, I was so relieved.
Heath was the first one in.
He looked insane. Deranged. He was covered in blood, from his neck to his feet, and his eyes were more animal than human.
I didn’t care. I’d take him like that. I’d take him any way at all.
He brought me water, eyes wary on me, but I refused to drink, telling him to get it to Raf first. He moved slightly, letting me see that Raf was being tended to just as quickly as I.
He held the bottle to my lips and as I drank, he bent to kiss the top of my head tenderly, letting me know that he wasn’t too far gone. My Heath was still inside there somewhere.
“Are you bleeding?” I asked him as he cut me loose, my eyes running over his bloody form. All of it was dry or nearly so.
“No. None of this is mine.”
“Earl’s?”
“Yes,” he bit out, tone savage. “He’s dead.”
“Good,” I said, just as savagely.
He picked me up and took me out of there.
I couldn’t help it, when the outside sun hit my face, I started to cry.
He was holding me to his bloody chest, stroking my hair, over and over, murmuring, “That’s my girl. You’re good now. Everyone is okay.”
His tone was reassuring, but his arms around me were shaking badly. He was trying to convince himself as much as me.
I wasn’t the only one that’d been damaged by this ordeal.
I got a few details out of him when we started to drive.
He’d surrendered himself to Earl days ago, but he’d managed to turn the tables. For days, he’d been torturing Earl, trying to get him to give up our whereabouts.
It had taken some time, but he’d broken the doctor. The second Heath laid eyes on me in the house, Mason had been informed, and Earl had been put out of his misery.
Somehow, we’d survived. We were alive. All of us. And Earl, the fucking psychopath doctor, was dead.
