I’m shaking my head the whole time. “No!” I scream. “No!”
The big man pulls the cloth covering his face down so I can see him. And then he smiles. “I’m gonna leave you here, Sydney. I’m gonna leave you here with Garrett. He’s gonna do things to you that only the traitors of the world have the pleasure of knowing.”
“Please,” I whisper.
“Tell me what the plan is tonight.”
I hear a helicopter off in the distance and look towards the sky. “They’re not here for you, bitch,” the dark man says. “They’re here for me.”
“Kill him,” I say. “If you kill him so he can’t get me again, I’ll tell you.”
He punches me in the face so hard I feel the pain in my neck as my head snaps to the side. The shock vibrates up into my skull, temporarily knocking me out of the game, but I can still hear. The dark man is yelling to Garrett.
They are making a deal that involves handing me over to Garrett in exchange for information.
“No,” I squeak out. “Please.” I don’t even think this guy hears me, because he never stops talking to Garrett. “I’ll tell you,” I say. “I’ll tell you who the target is, if you just keep me away from him.”
This gets his attention. “Who?”
“The little girl.”
And that’s when I see pure evil.
Garrett might be sadistic and mean, but this guy is in a whole other category of fucked up.
He leans down into my face and whispers as he talks. “I will come back for you, bitch. When you least expect it. When your life goes back to normal and all this is nothing but a nightmare. Just when you think it’s over. I will come back for you.” And then he leans in close to my ear. “I own you.”
Present Day
Somewhere outside Jackson, Wyoming
“I call it adjusting. It’s a cross between concession and acquiescence. Not quite a surrender, not quite a win.”
– Sydney
Now I stare out the window, remembering that night back when I was sixteen. He left me there, just like he said he would. Garrett got me back, and that was how my adult life started. Terrified, alone, and helpless. Subjugated and beaten into submission. I lost myself that year. Probably even before that, now that I think about it. It was not my first encounter with Garrett, but it was my last stand. He took me in, remade me into what he wanted, and then he—like everyone else in my life—disappeared.
We’d bought a bar in Cheyenne after all the shit from the cabin incident died down and been in business about eight months when my father was killed in a freak airplane accident flying into Jackson Hole for a ski weekend. His body was never found and it was a big deal. My father was the US Senator from Wyoming for more than a decade. He was fully expected to win a third term in the next election when all this happened. I can’t say I was too broken up about it when I saw it on the news. Or surprised. He had a lot of enemies.
Enemies that included officials with powers in the most influential nations on the planet. Of course, he had friends in those positions too. But the Company—the secret shadow government he was born into—was split up a decade ago when almost a hundred members were killed in what the nation’s largest newspapers wrongly called a ‘turf war’.
Garrett is part of them somehow. I am too, since my father is. But they never wanted me for anything, so Garrett’s request for ownership was settled without much protest.
There was a party in the bar the night my father died and we celebrated my successful implantation—Garrett’s words—into his… well, what to call it? A cult? Not quite. A militia? Yeah, but they are more than that. I guess, if forced, I’d call it his family. I became his family.
And even though my family life was pretty messed up, I really don’t think this is what a family is. I really don’t.
At least I was free of the Company’s expectations. I lost all my support. And I got Garrett full-time instead of the Company handlers. But even a drugged-up, stupid sixteen-year-old knew that being cut out of that shit was good.
My father wasn’t such a popular guy in my circles. Of course, the crash was ruled an accident. Pilot error. That’s not how people die in my world. It’s never an accident. And for a little while I thought Garrett was the killer. Or at least I wanted to believe that, because the alternative was that He was the killer.
Two months later Garrett disappeared. He left the bar one night with some buddies and just never came home. None of them did. And if you’re me, attached to him, you don’t look luck in the eye and start asking questions. But this was when I knew for sure it was Case.
He owned me, he said. His eyes are burned into my memory. Cold eyes. Dark eyes. The eyes of a killer who takes no prisoners and never forgets a debt.
But it’s been six years since Garrett disappeared and I’ve been on my own. Six long years of waiting for Him to come for me. Except he never did. In fact, I never saw or heard from him again after the cabin incident.
So I ran the bar. It’s a big country bar in Old Town Cheyenne. We have specials every night. Ladies free on Wednesdays and ninety-nine cent microbrew Mondays. Things like that. I was only eighteen when I took it over, not even old enough for a liquor license, but since Garrett wasn’t officially dead—only missing—it all stayed in his name. I moved on.
No one stopped me.
No one.
And this, more than anything that has happened to me in my short, fucked-up life, is what bothers me most.
Because he said he’d be back. And Merric Case doesn’t look like a guy who goes back on his word.
So where the fuck is he?
My phone buzzes on the nightstand and I roll over on the bed to check the screen. I smile and pick it up, tabbing the accept button as I bring it to my ear. “Hey,” I say in a low whisper that is appropriate when you’re laying down in the dark in the middle of the night.
“Hey,” Brett says back. “I miss you.”
He makes me smile. He really does. “Miss you too,” I say back. Brett Setton is a good guy. He’s tall, blond, blue-eyed and has a body an eighteen-year-old football player would die for. He’s mature, smart, and runs the bar like he’s running Wall Street. He’s perfect. And tomorrow we are getting married.
How did I ever get so lucky?
“I can’t wait to see you in your dress.”
I look over at the dress hanging from a hook. It’s sparkling with the glint of pearls in the moonlight. The train is long, the bodice tight, and the shoulders strapless. It’s almost shimmering silver instead of white.
“I can’t wait to see you out of your tux,” I say back playfully.
He laughs at that and I smile. “OK, well, I’ll let you get some rest. See you in the morning, Mrs. Setton.”
“Love you,” I whisper back.
We hang up and I place the phone on my belly. His sisters gave me a whole bunch of lingerie as a present. I know Brett likes the sexy look, but I’m a country bar girl at heart and I mostly wear shorts and tank tops to bed. So this little nightie I’m in right now is not me at all. But it is Brett.
That makes me smile again.
His sisters bought me a nightie for each night of our honeymoon in Fiji, plus the night before the wedding. Sarah, his oldest sister, said it’s bad luck not to look pretty when you go to bed on the night before your wedding. I’ve never heard of that, but my experience in weddings starts and stops with my own, which hasn’t even happened yet.
And wedding nights. I’m nervous about that too. My nights with Garrett were filled with confusion and shame. I dreaded being next to him in his bed. Brett will have something planned. He’ll have expectations. And since I’ve never slept with him even though we’ve been dating for over a year, it scares me. I have this very irrational fear of sleeping with people. I can’t explain it, it just… overwhelms me.