Total pages in book: 119
Estimated words: 113056 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 565(@200wpm)___ 452(@250wpm)___ 377(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 113056 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 565(@200wpm)___ 452(@250wpm)___ 377(@300wpm)
But, my thoughts were all over the place where my sister was concerned. The day after our wedding, my first official day as Mrs. Dario Ferrano, wasn’t easy. My new husband told me, in our honeymoon suite, that my little sister Holly was missing.
I couldn’t stop thinking about the news that my sister was gone. Had I broken for nothing if it never even saved her? No, not nothing. If I hadn’t broken, I wouldn’t have lived to become Dare’s.
Dare said, at first, that they had a lead on where she might be. But then he started backtracking with me and said he wasn’t 100% sure if Kruna had let Holly go and she’d run away or if they’d kept her or sold her. He tried to talk calmly, asking me to not jump to conclusions. He was still working on figuring out what happened.
I tried not to tell myself that his backpedaling was that he was sparing my feelings until we knew for sure, but then I decided that he knew best. I was trusting him to handle things. I had no choice; I didn’t have the strength to process this in the natural way.
He promised to find out what happened to her. When he said he thought his private eye might know where she was, he asked me if I wanted to be kept abreast of things as discoveries were made.
“Would it be terrible if I just left that up to you?” I had asked him.
He looked thoughtful for a minute. When he kept watching me, mulling it over, so I explained.
“All this time I wanted to believe that what I’d done, going along with them and not fighting, was keeping her safe. Now to find out that she’s missing? That she’s been missing all this time? I don’t know if I can process that. If I try…”
My whole body started to shake.
He took me into his arms. “I’ve got you,” he said and cupped my face. And he admitted he didn’t know for sure whether his lead was solid. I had a feeling he was backpedaling to settle me down, but maybe I needed to live in that state of denial, or maybe a state of hope.
Before Dare, I’d had no hope. He gave it to me when he rescued me from Kruna.
Hope. Yeah, I’d hope. He taught me it was okay to hope. Even just a little.
“Maybe they don’t have her, Dare. Maybe she ran away. Maybe she ran away to Uncle Charlie and Aunt Betsy’s and is living on my farm.”
“Maybe,” he said but he said it guardedly. “But baby, even if you hadn’t cooperated, nothing would be different. Except maybe they wouldn’t have let you live. Whatever has happened, you did the only thing you could do.”
I nodded but deflated. “I don’t know if she’s been raped and murdered, is living as a sex slave, or if she’s living with my horses, trying to find out what happened to me and living thinking I’m dead. I don’t know if I can handle this. Dare. Master, I…” I started to feel the panic rise. “But if she did escape, she would’ve looked for me and your private eye would’ve found that out by now, right?”
“Stop.” His hand gripped the back of my neck tighter, not painfully but with surety; it was reassuring.
I let out a breath and felt my body calm. It was becoming an unwritten rule for us that when I called him Master, he knew that’s who I needed him to be. I’d been doing it less and less often and usually only in the middle of the night when I had a nightmare.
But now? With the knowledge that my sister, who would now be seventeen years old if she was alive, had been missing for two years? That she might not have been seen after I’d seen footage of her bound and gagged in a cargo plane, naked penises surrounding her?
She was turning 18 the day after Christmas, and I prayed to God that she would see that birthday somewhere on this planet and that she would see it free. Safe. Whole. Not raped. Not ruined. Not like me.
I hoped with all my heart and soul that she was with Charlie and Betsy. In her final year of high school. A cheerleader. Dating some sweet jock who looked at her like she made the sun rise every day. Because even in my darkest days back in Alaska and the even darker days in Kruna, Holly was such light, such purity, that I held onto the fact that the sun would want to rise, even if it was just for her.
“I’ve got this, okay? I’ll find out what’s happened and when I know, I’ll tell you.”
“Maybe that’s better,” I agreed.
“If you decide you want to know where things are at, at any time, you just ask me, my baby, and I’ll tell you. You are in control. If that means you give that control to me, I’ll hang onto it because you want me to. If that means you want it back, you tell me. Okay?”