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CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

SYDNEY

I tug on Roman’s arm. “Did you hear me? Do something.” He just looks at me, then he walks toward the man strapped to the kitchen table.

Robert’s legs hang over the end of the table, each ankle tied to a table leg, and his torso is held down with straps, ones you usually see on lorry. None of that is why I’m struggling not to empty my stomach. No, it’s the contraption over him—the guillotine waiting to fall once the timer on the wall reaches zero.

I hold my breath as Roman reaches over and carefully removes the gag from Robert’s mouth.

“Please help me. You need to stop it. I don’t want to die,” Robert begs, tilting his head back to try and look at us.

“Robert, right?” Roman asks as he shifts to the side, bending to look under the table.

“Yes, but please just get me off here.”

“I need you to keep calm, Robert. Can you do that?” Roman asks.

“How the fuck am I supposed to keep calm when I’m about to lose my head, literally. Just get me off here!”

I step forward, but Blake stops me going too far. “Robert, hey. I’m Syd?—”

“Sydney! Thank god. You can help me.”

I watch as Roman creeps around the table and decide it would be best to keep Robert talking while we try to figure out a way to rescue him.

“We’re going to try, but…do you know who did this?”

“Course I fucking do. Only JC would be sick enough to set this shit up.” He stretches, straining to see me, but his head drops back to the table with a thud.

“Where’s Pa? Do you know?” I ask, and I’m thankful Blake as his arm wrapped around me.

“Ro,” Blake says suddenly.

I look to Roman who has reached the end of the table, and it takes me a second to realise why Blake called out to him. Running from the timer on the wall, which is encased in a clear sealed box, to the top of the guillotine is a rope, but as the next minute ticks by, a small blade slices through one thread and the guillotine drops an inch.

Four minutes.

“Oh my god,” I cry, covering my mouth with my hands. Shock takes a back seat as I realise how little time I have to find out where JC and Pa are. “Robert, do you know where Pa and JC are? If you do, you need to tell me. Please.”

“Free me, and I’ll tell you what I know,” he says.

Blake snarls beside me. “Fuck you. Tell us what you know.”

Blake’s words seem harsh for a man about to die, but the reality is this man knows something and is trying to bargain with it for his life. I have no doubt Robert knows he’s not getting out of this alive, yet he’s still prepared to risk saving Pa to save his own skin. Is that an example of a desperate man or the true nature of the man?

“If I tell you, you’re just going to leave me to die,” Robert argues.

“You’re going to die either way. JC made sure of that,” Roman replies from the other end of the table.

Robert huffs and thrashes about as much as the restraints allow before becoming completely still. He raises his head as another minute ticks past, another thread is severed.

Three minutes.

“I don’t know where they are only that JC has Amos. He told me you’d come looking and to tell you he’d be in touch.”

After all that, the information is worthless. Had we never discovered Robert we would still be in the same position.

“How long have you known Kincaid was alive?” Roman asks, making his way back toward us.

“Since the start. I helped him change his name and get new documents for him and later for Sydney. I told him to leave the country, but he refused, and at the time I wasn’t working at the passport office.”

“And JC, how long have you and Kincaid known he was alive?”

“After Cathy’s murder, Amos came to me with you, Sydney. Cathy and his daughter were the reason he wouldn’t leave the country. I got him a fake birth certificate, changing Summer to Sydney, and I had friend who was able to wipe Amos and any connection to Cathy from existence. But he knew to be careful never to gain the interest of the cops and have them dig too deep. It’s why he became a reverend. Said maybe God would forgive him and protect Sydney. Then when JC contacted him, taunting him with the possibility of saving the girls, Amos was determined to stop him.”

“Cathy was JC’s first victim?” Blake asks, wrapping his arms around me. I appreciate the comfort because this whole conversation while a guillotine hangs like a silent spectre over Robert is so damn hard.

“No, there was another.” He pauses, raising his head to look at the timer as another minute passes.

Two minutes.

Then he continues, “JC had a sister, a couple of years younger than him, called Charlotte.”

“No,” I whisper, and Blake squeezes me a little tighter.

“Charlotte and Amos, then Warren, had been seeing each other in secret, but when JC found out, he… The cops questioned Amos after JC told them that Amos and Charlotte had argued that night and Amos killed Charlotte in a fit of rage when she broke things off with him.”

One minute thirty seconds.

Robert fights, hopelessly, for a couple of seconds, then defeated, he stills again. “The cops had nothing concrete, and before they had a chance to really make the case, Amos and JC were killed in a car crash.”

One minute.

“All he ever wanted was to protect you, Sydney. He came to me a few years ago and asked me to get you a passport under a new name so if anything happened, you could start afresh.”

Thirty seconds.

“Tell him I’m sorry.”

Twenty seconds.

“Blake, get her out of here. Now!” Roman shouts.

Ten seconds.

Blake spins me, pushing me toward the door, and as Roman joins us in the hall, there’s a rattle as the guillotine slices through the air, ending with a loud thud as it meets the wood. My hands cover my ears as a reflex, as if I can eliminate the sound from my memory.

But I’ll never be able to forget that sound.

“Don’t touch anything. Let’s get out of here,” Roman states as we move toward the front door.

Blake has to support me as I begin to sob into his shoulder.

I don’t remember getting into the car, the drive home, or being carried to my room, stripped down then laid on a bed.

My next memory is horror when there’s a loud thud, and I scream as a severed head rolls across the floor, stopping at my feet. Blank, soulless eyes stare up at me.

“Hey, hey, you’re okay. You’re safe, Sydney.” Arms wrap around me as I open my eyes to find Roman holding me.

“Oh my god…his h-head. I saw it, Roman. I-I saw his eyes just staring at me,” I sob, gripping his top, tugging on it like it will save me. But there is nothing that will ever be able to rid the image from my memory.

I’m not sure how long he holds me, but by the time my heaving sobs begin to subside, a headache throbs in its place. I curl into the warm body holding me and fall back to sleep.