Page 44 of What I Should Have Felt (Anchors and Eagles #4)

FORD

M y head spun as if I were experiencing the worst hangover of my life. With ringing ears, I groaned and attempted to pry my eyelids open. Like Velcro held them together, my lashes ripped and tore as I attempted to gather myself and figure out what was going on.

Through grated metal that made my teeth ring, a voice brought all of my senses alive at once. “This is taking too fucking long,” O’Connor grumbled, and a sharp burn split through my cheek.

I lurched backwards instinctively attempting to get away from the blade slicing through my skin, and cold chains clamped down tight around my wrists.

The binds ripped my arms high above my head.

My shoulders groaned against the weight of my body, but not enough force pulled me from kneeling on the dirty floor as I rocked forward to relieve some of the pressure.

“What’d—” I attempted to choke out and rolled my neck again as O’Connor squatted down in front of me.

I scanned the room I was in. Surrounded by a few boxes and crates that looked empty and long since abandoned, the chain wrapped around my wrists ran through a hook lodged in a wooden beam running across the ceiling.

It was secured at the other end of the room to four cinder blocks.

Empty. Alone. Dust that had settled from years of abandonment in this grimy warehouse left my fate in the hands of the man in front of me.

“What happened?” I groaned. But I remembered. It flashed through my mind as quickly as I noted the lack of any windows and a single door over my shoulder in this small warehouse.

O’Connor slid the metal blade beneath my chin, and I looked up at his eyes that gleamed as if he’d already won. A single flickering yellow light bulb swung a few feet from a hook in a separate wooden beam, glinting off the knife tinged in my blood.

“What happened is exactly what I planned, just a few days early. You really think I needed to leave for business? You may have…put a dent in the amount of men I had brought with me here, but I quickly filled those empty slots without much necessary change.” He stood up and walked across the room.

I studied him but remained silent.

He patted the stack of cinder blocks keeping me hostage. “Honestly, I thought it would’ve been harder to get to this point, considering I had anticipated a lot more guns. What happened to you hillbillies and your love of weapons? Doesn’t everyone own one?”

Cotton coated my throat as I attempted to swallow and ignore the pounding in my head. “Take the damn restaurant,” I spat. This wasn’t worth it .

O’Connor chuckled. “Doctor Brandt told me you weren’t that bright, but come on. Have you really not figured it out yet?” He tucked his hands behind his navy blue suit and walked to my left. Eyeing him, he approached a stack of boxes with a laptop opened on top, but the screen was blank.

“Private First Class Maria Santiago,” he said and tapped the keyboard.

Time froze, and the blood in my veins stilled. It’d been years since I’d heard that name spoken out loud, yet the guilt that bubbled up in my throat was as pungent and sour now as it had been then.

“Since her mother and I didn’t marry until she was sixteen, she kept her mother’s last name,” O’Connor continued as he bent over in front of the screen of the laptop and typed something.

“You really think I went through all of those men, paid off how many hit men and teams all for two fucking restaurants?” he asked with a calmness in his voice I recognized. It was the same tone I’d get right before unleashing mayhem and death.

He spun around. His face twisted, contorting with tension that pushed the veins in his neck and forehead to pop and pulse with rage. “I am going to make you feel EXACTLY what I felt. You should have answered the fucking phone and she would still be here!” He stepped out of the way of the screen.

Horror split the ice in my veins as the two people I loved most appeared in front of me. “Don’t hurt them!” I screeched as fear slid like lightning down my skin.

A hand clamped down around Colette’s hair and jerked her head back.

Her eyes were wide, and tears stained her cheeks, turning two spots on her gag a dark grey.

Azelie was positioned next to Colette in the same kneeling position with hands bound behind her back.

Except the muzzle of a gun pushed her head down further toward the floor.

“I won’t,” O’Connor said and strolled away from the computer. “Not yet anyway.”

I lunged forward against the chains as dirt dug into my knees through my pants. “You fucking monster,” I spat.

He grinned maliciously. “How hypocritical of you, when you’re the reason my daughter is dead.”

With a shake of my head, I leaned back against my heels. “I didn’t kill her, O’Connor. We both made it back from that tour, but not everyone with us did.”

He darted forward as the grin twisted to hate.

“You just needed to answer the phone call! If you’d answered her phone call I wouldn’t have found her hanging from her fucking fan in her room after you decided to put in for an interservice transfer!

YOU LEFT HER! YOU QUIT!” All calm left the building as he darted toward me and thrust the knife beneath my neck.

My Adam’s apple dipped against the cold blade. “I was—I was—”

His chin trembled as he stared at the blade in his hand. “Why couldn’t you have saved her?” he whispered, and a tear slid down his cheek.

I closed my eyes as that same burdening guilt washed over my body. “I’m sorry, O’Connor. She saved my life out on that tour, and I wasn’t there when she needed me most.”

“She was your battle buddy or whatever shit you guys call it.” The cold blade slipped away from my neck, and I cracked my eyes open .

I nodded as he pushed himself up from his squatted position. “She was home. I didn’t think…She’d received an honorary discharge and…”

“AND WHAT?” he roared, lunging toward me again.

“You think just because she was home, she was safe? She needed you. She called you.” He pointed at the screen where Colette and Azelie were both hunched over and shaking with guns to the back of their heads.

“I’m going to take your daughter just as you’re the reason I lost mine.

Yes, I know about Azelie and who she is to you.

Though I guess that’s no longer a secret, is it?

” He chuckled to himself and exhaled deeply, then continued.

“Then, I’m going to destroy the woman you love just as you’re the reason my wife left me. ”

“I was at BUD/S when Maria called me. I didn’t have my phone, or I would’ve answered. Her voicemail nearly destroyed me. I nearly—” I stopped talking as O’Connor threw the knife into a box off to the side of the laptop with a resounding thwunk .

“YOU THINK I FUCKING CARE WHY YOU DIDN’T ANSWER?

Your friend needed your help, and because you weren’t there, she’s dead.

” He stood upright and dusted off his suit coat.

“You killed her. And because of what happened to Maria, my wife left me. So, I’m going to kill your daughter and the woman you love so you know exactly how I felt. How I still feel.”

“No! Please,” I begged. “They’re innocent. It’s me you want. Take me. Torture me. Kill me. Do whatever you want to me, but let them go.”

He shook his head. “I won’t kill you. That’s too easy of a way out.

Torture you, though…” He paused and grinned.

“That I can do without a second thought. Maria stopped you both from being blown up by that da mn IED, but after that, she was never the same. Any little…sound set her off. The survivor’s guilt… ”

O’Connor strutted toward the laptop and hovered a finger over a key. “I will take great pleasure in causing the same pain to you, and then killing your daughter and love. You’ll never forget Maria’s name again.”

He tapped the key, and whimpers pierced the speakers. “Colette? Azelie?” I gasped as rage boiled in my blood.

“Ford!” Colette cried out. “Don’t do it! We’ll be fine. Just—“

“Shut her up!” O’Connor inserted, and the gun bumped against the back of Colette’s head with the click of a safety flicking off.

“Thank you. Now, obviously this laptop screen isn’t that big.” O’Connor walked over to the knife he’d thrown into the box and paused in front of it. “But just know, I also have your parents and mawmaw held actually just outside this little warehouse. I wanted them to hear all of this, too.”

“You kidnapped them, too?” I asked.

“And your, well…” O’Connor paused and tipped his head with a furrowed brow. “I guess what would’ve eventually become your in-laws, except there won’t be a daughter for you to marry and no granddaughter left for you to have any connection to them.”

No words. There was not a single word in any language that would encompass the rage and simultaneous failure that coursed thick through my veins.

All hope, that blissful peace I’d been temporarily dancing in, became a restless dream I walked alone.

A halo of darkness settled over the light that had once blazed endlessly within my mind as I imagined just what life was going to be like now that I had Colette left .

“Please, no,” I quietly begged and glanced back at the screen.

Colette’s shoulders trembled as her body crumpled a little more forward. Tears slipped off Azelie’s cheeks, and she raised her head briefly. The muzzle of a gun shoved her back down, and a soft whimper of desperation left her lips.

The fear that had held me in a daze shot away as quickly as the silence that clouded my mind with nothing but the grim reaper barking at the cage. I tipped my head back and studied the hook in the beam above me.

“And how do you expect to get away with this?” I asked as a guttural chuckle full of what little self-control I had left bubbled in my throat.

“What?” O’Connor asked, and I shot a steely gaze in his direction.

“Two dead bodies with me, my parents, my mawmaw, and yes, those people that call themselves Colette’s parents as witness to your torture and murders? How do you expect to get away?” I tugged at the thick, metal links looped around my wrist, and the hook in the ceiling groaned softly.

O’Connor closed his eyes and smiled to himself.

“There was a point to buying up all the things I had. Money buys. And with all the money and power I have, I’ve chartered myself a cushy little flight to one of those beautiful countries that don’t have any extradition treaties with the United States.

” His shoulders dropped as he looked back at me.

“You know, it just dawned on me,” he added.

“What’s that?” I asked as my heart raced in my chest. With a tingle along my elbows, the familiar sign of adrenaline finally made its appearance.

I only lost myself for a moment, but the real Ford, the one who’d spent fifteen years honing the skill of dealing death at a moment’s notice, had never truly left .

“You don’t have that luxury, do you?” He ripped the knife from the box and stepped toward me. “I truly am a lucky man. It’ll be so easy to pin this on a Navy SEAL who got rejected by the woman he loves, and went into a fit of rage where he murdered the woman who turned him down and their daughter.”

O’Connor squatted down in front of me and dragged the flat end of the blade across my cheek. Blood from the wound painted the knife as he pulled it away and stood up. Pacing back across the room, he stopped beside the stack of cinder blocks and leaned against the concrete.

“Well, I better get started since the State Police will be here in the morning.” O’Connor leaned his head back and laughed a maniacal laugh that shook some dust on the floor his fancy dress shoes left footprints on.

“That’s right, another win for those of us with power and money.

Your little local sheriff’s department that I paid off warned me.

Which is why I had to bump up the plans to tonight and ruin your little daddy/daughter date.

” He set the bloodied knife down on the top cinder block and gave me a petulant sigh.

“Oh, and sorry about your family’s restaurant.

But you know, I had to get you guys separated somehow.

Plus, that was and still is my first cover story.

It’s like the cherry on top of ruining you and your family. ”

His eyes narrowed as he stood upright and brushed the concrete dust from his suit coat sleeve.

“You’re awfully quiet for someone who is about to watch the woman he loves and his daughter get murdered.

” O’Connor pursed his lips and in a baby voice said, “Too much for a big, bad, traumatized Navy SEAL to handle?”

A crackle in my ear sent a shiver down my spine.

And I grinned.

Fina-fucking-ly.