Total pages in book: 110
Estimated words: 105506 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 528(@200wpm)___ 422(@250wpm)___ 352(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 105506 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 528(@200wpm)___ 422(@250wpm)___ 352(@300wpm)
Macy had also been a club girl, before my time, before she was married to Hansen. Though he was slightly more levelheaded than Hades, I knew my president made sure Macy never went anywhere alone.
“He’s got her,” I repeated, averting my eyes from the car, unable to look at it anymore. I feared I was going to lose my lunch.
Jagger just looked at me. This fuck was smart. He’d been through shit. He had the same sense I had. He was just doing the job of a good VP and trying to keep a possible liability—me—calm.
“Yeah,” he agreed after a beat. “He’s got her.” He clapped me on the shoulder. “But we’ll find her.”
I nodded. Of that, I was fucking certain.
But the sick feeling in my stomach did not go away.
We’d find her. But something dark and twisted inside of me knew we wouldn’t find the Sariah who’d laid her head on my shoulder. Who danced with abandon. Who smiled easily and threw attitude even easier.
Something horrible told me the Sariah we’d find would be someone else entirely.
SARIAH
I woke up chained.
On a cement floor.
In what looked like a warehouse.
I had a killer fucking headache.
The asshole must’ve brained me with the butt of his gun or something hard enough to knock me out.
Apparently, he wasn’t just a cop.
He was something else.
Something else that did not mean good things for me.
The warehouse I was in looked broken down and abandoned. Crying out for help was my first instinct, but my gut told me the sheriff was smart enough to take me somewhere no one would hear me scream. In addition to that, I didn’t want to alert him to the fact that I was awake if he was nearby.
The chain on my ankle jingled as I struggled to get up off the floor. It was quite a struggle since my hands were cuffed behind my back. My center of gravity was off thanks to my pounding head and general terror.
My stomach lurched at the various shaped, large stains on the cement floor. They weren’t bright red. They were dark maroon.
Dried blood.
Panic constricted my throat as I frantically yanked my ankle, looking for a give in the chain, searching around the sparse area for something to use to pick a lock.
Nothing.
Not a single thing nearby I could use for a weapon or some kind of wrench.
And, upon closer inspection, the chain at my ankle didn’t have a lock. It looked like it had been … welded on?
But that couldn’t be right. Getting hit in the head might’ve knocked me out for a few minutes, tops, but no way would it have left me unconscious for the time it took for him to get me here and chained up like this. That shit only happened in the movies. I’d done enough research into true crime to know that knockouts didn’t give the killer countless minutes or hours to do what they needed to. They had five minutes, max.
My tongue was thick in my mouth, and I felt discombobulated.
The fucker must’ve drugged me.
I struggled to think of the police files I’d read on his previous victims, how long he kept them alive, how long they’d had. But it was never said. Not only because most of the investigations were half-assed but because he purposefully took women who had fluctuating schedules. Sex workers.
His last victim had been Jenna at the club. He’d killed her quickly and brutally, not taking the time to torture her like he had the others. He hadn’t killed anyone since then. That meant whatever depraved need inside of him was hungry for torture.
I was in deep shit.
As horrible as it sounded, it was good he brought me to his obvious torture location, telling me he planned to spend some time on me.
My mouth went dry at the very thought.
“Get it together, Sariah” I scolded myself.
Since I obviously couldn’t escape, I would have to do my best to either outsmart him into unlocking me or delay him from doing whatever he was going to do in order to give the club time to find me.
And hopefully, they’d be looking for me.
I wasn’t known to stick to any kind of schedule, but I also wasn’t known for leaving my car, or my purse—a brand new YSL, thank you very much—on the side of the road.
Someone would find my car, the club would know something was up and they’d start looking into me.
Then they’d likely find out the truth about how I made my money, where I came from. Whether or not the sheriff knew about my cam business remained to be seen. But the Sons had a hacker, so they would be digging into every corner of my life, trying to find me. I hadn’t gone to a bunch of effort to cover my tracks digitally. If someone wanted to find out about me, they would.