Page 3

Chapter

Two

TARA

T he thing about driving is that it gives our brains time to think, and like usual, mine loves to think about everything that has happened since that fateful night a year ago—well, a year ago tomorrow.

I don’t like to think about the brutal rape that I had to endure.

Therefore, my mind usually skips to the moment I woke up, disorientated.

Everything hurts. Pain shoots behind my eyes with every breath I take, and I pray that the darkness comes back to take me away from here.

The last thing I remember is a burning pain exploding in my stomach and then nothing but darkness.

How that pain has spread to the rest of my body is a mystery, and I really don’t want to have to solve it.

Slowly, I blink my eyes and move my arms, hoping that the tiny movements won’t cause more pain.

Of course, it does, but I need to figure out where the hell I am and find a way back home.

Reed and Gabe must be going out of their minds with worry.

Well, Reed will be, but I don’t know about Gabe.

Considering the last time I saw him, we were fighting because some random guy flirted with me while we were out.

Gabe accused me of enjoying the attention and bringing it on myself.

Sobs start to build inside my chest at the thought of losing him for good.

“Take it easy. You’ve been through the wringer,” a voice I can only describe as angelic says.

I turn toward the voice and see a woman sitting in a chair beside the twin-size bed I’m currently lying on.

I won’t even try to guess how old she is, but she can’t be much older than me.

Her burnt-red hair is pulled back into a low ponytail.

She has a few laugh lines around her dark brown eyes.

“Where am I?” I ask, my throat dry, making my words come out low and rough.

The stranger gets up and grabs a bottle of water off a nightstand.

I wrap my lips around the straw and take a small drink.

“My house. I guess I should introduce myself. I’m Ava.”

“Tara,” I tell her after laying my head back on the pillow.

“How did I get here?”

“My husband found you four days ago.” Ava pulls the chair closer to the bed before sitting back down.

I look around the room, not that it will help me know exactly where I am.

The walls are a muted blue in color and bare of any pictures.

There is a small three-drawer dresser on the wall in front of me.

That’s it beside the bed, the chair, and a bedside table.

“What is the last thing you remember?” Ava’s question pulls my attention back to her.

“Um…” I swallow, and unwanted tears prick my eyes as images of the assault flood me.

I close my eyes and rub at them, wanting to erase those images from my memory.

My breathing turns labored, and my whole body starts to shake.

The shaking makes the pain worse, but I can’t calm down.

That is until Ava pulls my hand away from my eyes and says in her angelic voice, “It’s okay, you’re safe here. You don’t have to say it. My husband is a doctor, and I’m a nurse, so I can guess what happened to you. I need you to take a deep breath through your nose and out your mouth. Do it slowly and as if you are smelling the flowers then blowing out some birthday candles.”

I follow her directions, and soon, my breathing returns to normal, and the shaking stops.

I open my eyes and find Ava staring at me lovingly.

“Thank you. How did I get here?”

“My husband was out for his morning run when he stumbled across you. He heard a low moan and followed it. You were face down in the middle of the muddy field. He called and told me to get the truck ready and meet him at the field. There were no tire tracks on the road or in the field. We can only guess that you walked from wherever you were.”

Ava’s words trigger a fuzzy memory of me tumbling down a ditch and coming to in the rain.

I remember there was a weird yellow ball of light, and I followed it up the embankment and into a field, where I must have blacked out again.

“You were covered in blood—dried and fresh. We rushed you to the small hospital that my husband runs just in case you needed surgery. Elio, my husband, and his trusted friend looked you over and determined that you didn’t need surgery. However, you needed a blood infusion, which we were able to do.”

“How—”

Ava holds up her hand to stop me.

“Please let me finish. Then if you have any questions after hearing everything, I will answer them. You had a gunshot wound to your side, thankfully it was a through and through and missed anything vital. Also there are a couple of stab wounds to your…” She motions to her crotch.

“I don’t know why someone would do that to someone, but once again, I can guess. To cover up a sexual assault?”

I nod my head, unable to say the words out loud.

Tears are now streaming down my face, but I’m also getting pissed.

I was left for dead in the middle of fucking nowhere by people I thought had become my friends.

“I thought that was the case. I hope you don’t get mad, but we gave you the morning-after pill. You have also had multiple rounds of antibiotics. As I said the gunshot was a through and through. Along with the stab wounds, you had a pretty bad cut on your head. All that means antibiotics was a must. After two days in the hospital, we brought you home. You have been in and out of consciousness,” Ava says as if she is afraid I’m going to be mad at them.

“Thank you for taking care of me ? —”

“There is something else I need to tell you,” Ava says.

I nod for her to continue, not understanding why she looks even more worried now.

What could be worse than what she just told me?

“I already knew your name. You have been all over the news. Your brother reported you missing, and they first aired the report on the news the afternoon Elio found you. We didn’t call the authorities just in case your brother had something to do with your condition. We thought it best to allow you to make that decision yourself. But we have been keeping up with the search efforts. Yesterday, they declared you dead.”

“Dead?” I ask, that single word coming out high and shrill, hurting my own ears.

“Yes. The dogs the police used in the search picked up your trail in the woods outside of Clearwater. Which is a good two-hour drive from here. The dogs led them to an abandoned shed where they found a good bit of your blood. After doing whatever they did, the police determined that there was no way you could have survived whatever took place and declared you dead.” Somewhere in the house, a door opens, and Ava turns to the door behind her.

“No need to worry, that’s just Elio.”

Boots hitting the floor make it easy to tell he is heading straight toward us.

With everything that has happened to me, I probably should be scared of a man, but I’m not.

If he was going to do something to me, he would have left me in that field to die, but instead, he saved me.

He and Ava protected me by not reporting me to the police.

The door opens, and Elio walks in.

I tried to picture him when Ava spoke about him but couldn’t.

I don’t think I would have gotten it right anyway.

The first thing I notice is that he is handsome.

Feeling a little cheeky, I wink at Ava and wiggle my brows at her.

She giggles and smiles up at her husband.

Elio looks like he just came from a business meeting.

He is wearing a full three-piece dark blue suit, looking very proper.

His dark blond hair is shaved close on the sides, and the longer top is braided into cornrows.

His dark skin makes his blue eyes pop.

When he sees me sitting up and fully alert, he lets out a long sigh.

He raises his hands and tips his head back as if he is giving thanks to some god that I survived.

“It’s so good to see you like this.” His low voice reminds me of the actor Morgan Freeman.

“I was just catching her up on everything that she had missed,” Ava says, standing up and waving her hand to offer him her seat.

He walks forward, sits in the chair, and pulls Ava to sit on his lap.

She places a kiss on his cheek and turns once again to me.

“Do you have any questions for us?”

The sound of my phone ringing pulls me out of my memory and startles me so much that I jerk the wheel to the right, making the tires run over the grooves in the road meant to wake people up who fall asleep.

My phone is attached to my dash, making it easy to see who is calling.

I swipe the green arrow to answer.

“I was just thinking about you,” I say.

“Hopefully, it was all good.” Hearing Elio’s voice does what it always does to me, it calms and centers me.

I’ve come to see him as a father figure, and Ava has slipped into the mother role.

“Always. I’m headed home. I have about a two-and-a-half-hour drive. The lead turned out to be a dead end, but I had something I had to handle before I could leave.”

After waking up in their house, I told them my whole life story until the night that led me to them.

They listened, not judging who I was, and offered to take me back to Reed, but I refused.

Instead, I asked if I could stay a while.

I needed time to plan.

I knew that if I went running back to my brother, he wouldn’t stop until he got justice for me, but that was something I needed to do myself.

I was the one that was hurt and left for dead.

I wanted to be the one to end the people responsible for what happened to me.

Later that night, when Ava was cooking dinner for us, Elio flat-out asked me if I was planning on getting revenge.

I didn’t blink and told him yes.

Then he told me his life story, and man was it a story.

Yes, he is a doctor, but he is also a member of a family who could help me, as he put it.

He told me that he didn’t have to give me the details of what he did but would be willing to put his assets to use for me.

Without a second thought, I held out my hand and accepted his offer.

“We have a problem,” Elio’s voice has turned cold and businesslike.

I know that I have Capo Elio now, not Father Elio.

“Yes, sir,” I answer automatically.

“We already know that Dean was reported missing six months ago, but we finally found his body. Ricco found it late last night. He was buried beside the shed he took you to. Ricco stumbled across it when he went to change the camera’s batteries. There were more flowers there as well.”

Someone has been leaving flowers there but I asked Elio to get rid of them.

When he put the cameras up out there I told him I never wanted to know who it was unless it helped me.

“Okay.”

“There is one other thing. Someone is looking for you. Of course, we have picked up small alerts of people looking for you over the months you’ve been here, but this one is bigger. It might be time for you to come back from the dead.”

My mind is stuck on the fact that Dean, the guy I’ve spent countless days looking for, was found dead.

Who the fuck got to him first?

By the time I was trained enough to handle my own, Dean had disappeared, just fallen off the face of the earth.

Also, who the hell is looking for me?

Everyone believes I’m dead.

It will do me no good to ask questions when I’m driving down a highway and unable to get any answers.

“Tara.” Elio’s worried voice pierces my spiral.

“I understand,” I say, pulling my shoulders back and pushing all my questions away.

I need to focus on one thing at a time.

Right now, it’s getting home without an incident.

“Good. Oh, that’s Ricco beeping in. I have to take it. Be safe, my girl.” Elio hangs up, and I press the accelerator down a little harder.

Someone is trying to take my revenge from me, and I think I know who it is.

Gabe fucking Mariano.

How he knows what happened to me or who did it, I have no clue, but in my gut, I know he is responsible for Dean’s death.

The bigger question is whether he knows about the others.