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I don’t know how long I’d been unconscious, but when I came to, I knew I was no longer standing in the hospital’s side parking lot. I kept my eyes closed, trying to figure out what was going on around me without alerting anyone there to my state of consciousness. The floor beneath me vibrated gently; I was in a vehicle of some sort, but I wasn’t laying on a seat. The ground beneath my cheek was fabric, but it was scratchy, like the carpeted floor of a van.
I listened, but aside from the quiet hum of the engine, I could hear nothing else. No sounds of traffic, no voices. Nothing. Maybe they’d thought I’d be unconscious longer and had tossed me in the back of a van. It was possible I was all alone there and no one would notice if I slipped out the back while the vehicle was still moving. Yes, it was possible!
I tried to test my limbs, making sure they were ready, but my hopes for escape plummeted quickly when I realized my hands were bound behind my back. Was it even possible to get up onto my feet without my arms? Yes, it was. If I could roll onto my back, I could push myself upward, and from a sitting position, I could easily stand…open the doors with my bound hands…turn around and make a jump for it.
Hopefully the vehicle wasn’t moving too quickly. If it was, I could try to hold off until it slowed, but that was risky. It wouldn’t give me much time before they noticed I was gone. Then again, if I broke my legs or hit my head jumping out of a fast-moving vehicle with my hands bound behind my back, I wasn’t going to get any farther.
First things first—get up and get the door open. Then I’d worry about the next step. But as I opened my eyes, my breath caught in my throat. A man was sitting not three feet away, the same man who’d held a knife to my throat. His leering smile turned my spine to ice.
“It’s nice of you to join us,” the same calm voice spoke from somewhere outside my line of vision. “I do apologize for this, but you understand I couldn’t have you causing a scene at the hospital, don’t you?”
“Why are you doing this? I didn’t do anything to you.”
The leering man scoffed at the same time the eerily calm man moved into my view. There was a striking resemblance between the two men, the calm man—obviously the ringleader—looked at least two decades older than the other. Father and son? Great, I had multiple generations of psychos wanting to kill me, and I still had no idea why.
“I’m sorry, Sarah, it’s true you didn’t do anything,” he spoke as if he regretted what he was about to do, but there was no sincerity in his tone. “But I’m afraid when your father took away everything that was valuable in my life, I vowed to return the favor.”
How could my father have possibly done anything so horrid as what the man was suggesting? The only possibility that came to mind… “Are you…are you my real father?”
“You think that I would kill my own flesh and blood? Well, perhaps that is not so far from the truth. But I assure you I am no such thing to you, my dear. I eliminated that vile traitor who was your ‘real father’ many years ago.”
“I don’t understand.” I really didn’t. But inch by inch, the cloud of panic that had settled over me at the hospital was beginning to recede, and in its place was the terrifying certainty that I was going to die.
This man was going to kill me. And yet, I couldn’t make the smallest sliver of sense of what he was saying.
“They really have kept you in the dark all these years, haven’t they?”
“Who is ‘they’? I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t understand any of this. You must be mistaken.”
He heaved a heavy sigh. “I suppose it’s only fair, isn’t it?”
Fair? This man wanted to talk about fair? What was fair about this?
“Your father was not the man you believed him to be, Sarah. All that time he spent away on ‘business’? Your father was not a businessman; more like a man who couldn’t keep his nose out of other people’s business. He killed my brothers…my cousins…and the family of mine he did not kill, he had taken away.”
“No! You’re lying.”
“It’s difficult to accept, I know. And the man you think so fondly of now, Declan Ross…”
What did he know about Declan? Nothing! The man was a liar.
“Just shut up. You don’t know a goddamned…” The sting of the younger man’s hand across my cheek cut off my words, causing the tears that had been brimming in my eyes to flow over.
“You’ll have to forgive my son, Sarah. He’s grown rather…fond of you.”
The van came to a halt then, and I couldn’t stop my body from rolling hard against the leering man’s legs. I skittered away as quickly as I could, feeling like a wriggling worm, using my hips and shoulders to move myself.
“Ah! We’re here. Bring her along, Vincent,” the older man called back as the door opened and he stepped outside.
In that moment, my body shook so hard my cheek vibrated off the van’s floor. I tried to kick out at the younger man as he reached down to pick me up, but it was no use. He lifted me up and tossed me over his shoulder, one hand on my ass and the other subduing my legs. He leapt down from the van and I was forced to squint against the bright light. For some reason, I thought it would be dark. Murder happened in the dark…in shadows and alleys…not in the light of day.
He didn’t put me down right away, and I craned my neck to look around, trying to get my bearings, as if that could somehow help me. I recognized my surroundings right away. We hadn’t traveled far, which meant I hadn’t been unconscious for very long at all. We were just outside of town in a remote area of a nearby state park. That time of year, with the leaves already beginning to morph from their vivid greens to mottled hues of yellow, orange and red, there weren’t many visitors around, unfortunately.
The man holding me suddenly slid me to the ground and swung me around, pressing me against his chest. Before I could kick back at him, he’d shoved a thigh between my legs, hampering my efforts and making every attempt I made futile.
“Your father really did try to keep you safe, Sarah, and that boyfriend of yours, caught between protecting you and hunting me…you were fortunate to have such dedicated men in your life. It’s a pity it has to end now, isn’t it?”
“Who are you?” I whispered, not that it mattered. What difference did it make what his name was? He was the man who was going to kill me…
“My name is Dominic Cane.”
The name meant nothing to me. I’d never heard it before. How could a man who I’d never heard of want to kill me?
“Please…” I shut my mouth and forced back the tears threatening to spill over. I wouldn’t finish that sentence. I wouldn’t beg. And I damn well wouldn’t let that son of a bitch see me cry.
“Let’s get on with it, shall we?”