Total pages in book: 44
Estimated words: 40811 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 204(@200wpm)___ 163(@250wpm)___ 136(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 40811 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 204(@200wpm)___ 163(@250wpm)___ 136(@300wpm)
When I’d first laid eyes on her, I’d thought it might have taken months to make her ready, but there was no way I could have known what was lurking beneath the surface. And just four weeks in, she would be ready in a few more weeks at most.
The problem was, the last thing I wanted to do was give her away—a problem I’d never encountered before. Even back when Marcos had introduced me to training slaves, I was always anxious to be rid of them, at first out of guilt, and then eventually, out of boredom.
But I wasn’t bored, not yet. I was curious though. Sexy, beautiful…and wound up way too tight. She seemed to have genuine difficulties with her sexuality, and that could prove to be a bit of a stumbling block if she held onto it too tight.
But why? Where had they come from? A thought occurred to me, and then it enraged me. I imagined her reluctance had something to do with being forced earlier in life—like by a father. The white, hot rage that coursed through my veins surprised me. To think that her father had used her like that…I already wanted Donovan dead, but right then, death wasn’t good enough.
I scoffed at myself—I’d kidnapped her, was in the process of turning her into a slave, and I was filled with rage over the thought of her father touching her, or making her touch him? That was a new kind of fucked up thinking, even for this monster. But since I couldn’t quite get it to calm down enough to bring her dinner, I decided to do a little research, digging up what I could find about how she’d spent the time since being taken from the foster home.
Not much, it turned out—because there wasn’t much to tell. I’d located a storage unit in her name before I’d had her abducted, and had the contents brought to me, and that had her apartment inspected after her disappearance. Three boxes. That’s all there was. The sum of her life.
I looked through the books at the top of the stack—high school yearbooks. She was there but never smiling. Her eyes were sad, lost like she’d seemed the day I’d watched her. And no one ever wrote in her yearbook. The comments pages were blank.
There was a picture of a woman beneath the yearbooks in the box—a woman who looked very much like her. Her mother, I presumed by the physical similarities. Thinking about it now, the girl looked nothing like James Donovan.
There was only one photo of the woman who had to be her mother, and the picture was worn like it had been handled over and over again for years. I imagined her holding it to her chest every night when she went to bed as a little girl, hiding it underneath her pillow come morning to keep her father from finding it.
There were books—a lot of books. Apparently, she liked to read—a lot. How I knew they weren’t her father’s, I didn’t know, but somehow it fit. With so few friends that her yearbook pages were empty, I imagined she spent a lot of time on her own, reading.
At the bottom of the third box, I found a journal—a locked journal—and it had me curious. So, of course, I broke the lock and looked inside.
A quick scan through showed that it covered several years—from a few months after she’d been taken up until the end of high school.
I felt like I was violating her somehow—ha!—but I looked at the first entry, which was messier than the later ones. She wrote about moving again—the third time since her daddy came to get her. That meant she couldn’t have been more than nine or ten years old when she’d written it. She wrote that she didn’t like moving so much, but at least it was sometimes better than being in the foster home. Her daddy didn’t come into her room at night. In fact, her daddy didn’t touch her at all, not like Mr. Vaughan did.
Fuck! I knew that name. I knew it because it was my father’s name.
She’d lived with my family for nearly a year. My parents had been good people—I’d thought they’d been good people—taking in foster children as far back as I could remember, and she’d been one of those children.
I re-read the journal entry and then read it again. I couldn’t believe what she’d written. It had to be a lie. But what reason did she have to lie in a locked journal that I was quite certain no one else had ever seen? My father had gone into her room at night. He’d touched her—an eight-year-old girl. And I’d had no fucking idea. How many times? What had he done to her? And how the hell had I never noticed what was going on?