But no. In the long, empty hours, when sleep should have been a welcome escape, she instead found herself at the mercy of relentless memory. Just like in her conscious times, the images haunted her.
"No, please," she mumbled, twisting in the bed. Lost in that place between asleep and awake, she knew she was falling into the familiar nightmare and tried to swim out of it, to the light of consciousness. But she couldn't pull herself from it.
She could never pull herself from it. Not this night. Not any night.
The dream that was not a dream.
Not a dream at all. Pure, dark reality filled the places in her brain that had once been reserved for dreamlike fantasy. Each moment, each tense, terrifying second, of that cold January night played like a movie on an endless loop in the dark theater of her mind.
Help me, Wyatt. I'm here. Please find me.
She was there again, on that deserted Virginia beach. Alone. Dying.
Reliving every second…
Help me. Find me. The words repeated in Lily's brain, lapping over and over like the hard, rolling waves hitting the shore just across the windswept dunes from where she lay dying. Strong at first, each syllable underscored her certainty that he would come for her, would find her before it was too late. That possibility of rescue was a glimmer of weak light in the black void into which she had been thrust.
But as time went on, as the cold night grew more deep and bitter, and numbness spread from her limbs throughout her entire body, those hopes faded. The pleas quieted. She could barely hear her own mental voice anymore. Her heartbeat weakened, top, her breaths growing shallow, her pulse slow and sluggish.
Her body was fading along with her hope of rescue.
Help me.
She did not have the strength to send the words across her lips in even the faintest of whispers. Not again. Once had to be enough.
Even if she could find some inner reserve of strength. her only means of communication was gone. She had found her cellular phone tangled in a pile of bloody clothes on the floor of the decrepit, abandoned beach shack where she'd been imprisoned. Miracle enough that she'd located the thing at all. An even greater miracle that the battery had lasted long enough for one call. Just one Hail Mary cry for help to the only person in the world she knew would be there for her. The one who had cautioned her against going down the path of personal vengeance that had eventually left her here, broken and dying, and alone.
Should have listened to you, Wyatt. Shouldn't have gotten involved. In over my head. Sorry. So sorry.
At least she had heard him one more time, strong and reassuring. There was some justice in the world that the voice of the vicious monster who'd attacked her would not be the last one she would ever hear. Wyatt Black-stone's would.
I'm coming. Hold on.
Did he say that? Had the call really gone through? Or had it merely been a fantasy, a final desperate wish disguised as a lifeline? Was she fooling herself before giving in to the pain and the blood loss? Maybe the physical torment and emotional torture she had endured since that awful night when the FBI sting had gone so horribly wrong, and she'd been taken by a monster wearing a human face, had finally broken her, cracked her mind into a thousand splintered pieces.
You heard him. He heard you.
She had to believe that. Yet the hours that must have passed since her desperate attempt to save her own life made her doubt.
Breathing deeply, she struggled to remain conscious, trying not to give in to the dazed, confused helplessness that had clouded her head for the past week.
A week? More? Less? How long since she'd been shot, captured by a sociopathic monster who killed another agent right before her eyes? Time had meant nothing from the moment she'd awakened to the ruthless ministrations of a man who wanted to keep her alive only so he could hurt her some more.
The murderous pedophile blamed her for his losses and he wanted retribution. Badly.
The night lengthened. Cold. So damn cold. She had weakly pulled clothes on over her naked body before making her escape, risking the few precious extra seconds to do it. She'd had no way of knowing how long he would be gone. He had believed her unconscious, incapable of movement, but that didn't mean he would take his time on whatever fiendish errand he was running. Still, escaping naked from the hellhole would have given her probably thirty minutes tops before she lost consciousness to hypothermia. So while her clothes were tattered and bloodstained, she was thankful for them.
They wouldn't keep her alive for much longer, though. Even if she had not reopened one of her roughly stitched wounds with her desperate, lurching crawl, foot by foot up the beach, she'd eventually freeze to death.
Laura. Zach.
The faces of her sister and nephew filled her mind. Her death wouldn't be as anguished as theirs had been. She'd just go to sleep. Close her eyes on this frigid, windswept dune. Never wake up. It wasn't so bad, really. Just sleep, perhaps even with no nightmares to torment her the way they had since everyone she cared about had been so brutally taken from her.
"Lily!"
Coming, Laura.
"Can you hear me?
Yes. She heard. It wasn't the first time she'd heard Laura. Somehow the echoes of her voice had rung in Lily's ears back at the shack earlier this evening before she'd escaped.
"Missed you," she whispered. She forced her eyes to open, certain she'd see the faces of her beloved twin sister and the little boy they had both loved more than life. But they weren't there. Above her she saw nothing but dark sky, filled with a glowing white moon shimmering against a backdrop of black, endless nothingness. Eternity.
"Lily, we're here!"
Laura? No. A male voice.
Wyatt.
Then he was there, lifting her, holding her close, offering warmth and protection. He whispered soft, comforting things against her hair and her cheek, telling her she was safe. His handsome face was bathed in emotion, tenderness evident in every gentle stroke of his hand on her skin.
Impossible. Wyatt Blackstone was never emotional. Never tender. Her boss never showed weakness.
"I've got you. It's okay. Brandon's right up the beach, too. We're getting you out of here."
She swallowed, trying to process everything. His warmth, his smell, the throaty voice.
"Wyatt?" she whispered, starting to believe. "You heard me?"
His footsteps crunched on the sand and he kept his grip tight around her. "I heard you. I can't believe it- you were like a voice from a grave. Jesus, Lily, we held a memorial service for you one day ago!"
True. Here. That voice at the other end of the telephone call had been real, not a figment of her imagination. Tears filled her eyes and erupted from them, freezing onto her cheeks before they could travel down her face. "You found me."
"We found you. You're safe. We'll catch him and he will never hurt you again."
Her blood, already cold, turned to ice. They hadn't caught him. Hadn't captured the man who'd done this to her. She began to shake, and to whimper, thinking of the fists and the wicked needles used to stitch her wounds, with no anesthetic, nothing to prevent her from feeling every rough, agonizing thrust.
"Not safe." Not as long as the psychopath who'd held her was out there. She couldn't even help them find him- she'd been blindfolded until the minute she escaped. She'd never laid eyes on the man; she knew only his voice. And his hateful, brutal touch that had taught her lessons about pain no person should ever have to learn.