Consolation Prize (Forbidden Men #9)(121)

I whimpered and my bottom lip trembled.

There was so much I wanted to say to him: Two wrongs didn’t make a right. I hadn’t been the one to kill his mother, so revenge really wouldn’t be served if he hurt me. There would be no justice in this.

Besides, making this about race was just plain stupid. Adolf Hitler had been white. Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, Jr., the Green River Killer. All white and all brutal murderers. But I didn’t think white people were evil. Well, aside from this creep, and even then, I was smart enough to see he might’ve started off as a normal, average guy without any kind of hatred in him; his grief had f*cked him over majorly.

I bet the man who’d murdered his mother had been mistreated by white people before he’d gone evil too. It was a vicious ugly cycle that needed to stop. I wanted to tell this guy he needed to let the pain and hatred go or he was going to end up somewhere he couldn’t return from, except…I think he’d just arrived there.

I almost felt bad for him. He could no longer understand logical reason or right from wrong. The man he might’ve once been was long gone. His demons had consumed him completely. But then, yeah, the f*cker had just kidnapped me and said he was going to rape and kill me, so…my sympathy never quite made it to the surface.

Full of anger and fear, I didn’t waste my breath. I just tried to keep myself from having a panic attack and stared mutinously at him as he closed his knife and tucked it into his pocket before grabbing something and dropping it down into the cellar with me.

It clanged loudly, echoing around my concrete prison, making me wince and cover my ears before I realized he’d just gifted me a metal ladder.

I blinked at it, my chest growing tight with anticipation and my head spinning with the hope of freedom. When my muscles tightened, not sure if I could trust this olive branch or not, he said, “So here’s how this is going to go. You can either climb up out here and die in the sunlight, or I can crawl down there and kill you in the dark. Make your choice.”

My vision grayed and pulse quickened. Fear raced through my bloodstream. My hands and knees and probably even my hair trembled out of control.

I wanted to choose C, none of the above. But Psycho Kidnapper was already tugging his knife from his pocket again and looked like he was going to start climbing down, so I clambered for the ladder, my bloody hands gripping the rungs and knees knocking together so hard I could barely move.

I was so weak; it was a miracle I could pull myself up one step after another. My body was stiff from hovering in the fetal position for days, my blood sugar felt incredibly low and my eyes couldn’t seem to adjust to the brightness outside, though the more I climbed the more I realized it was later in the day than I had initially thought. It was probably about time I should be heading into work. I tried to remember if I’d been scheduled today or not, but my brain wouldn’t function right.

Why the hell was I even worrying about missing work while I was climbing out of a concrete pit to meet my death?

I think I was going into shock.

I looked up, my hopes sinking. My kidnapper wasn’t small, dammit. He probably stood over six feet and weighed over two hundred pounds. There was no way I was in any kind of position to enter hand-to-hand combat right now, especially with someone this big. I’d taken a total of one self-defense class in my entire life and at the moment, I couldn’t remember a single technique I’d learned. The chances of me coming out the victor were pretty much zero-point-five.

But as I gingerly pulled myself up from the hole in the ground, Colton’s voice echoed through my head.

You’re not the type to go down after one punch. You always pop right back up, swinging and snarling.

You’re a fighter

And I was.

I was a fighter, so I was going to fight.





BRANDT’S CHAPTER | 34





I wiped down the counter of the bar and glanced at the time. Twenty minutes until opening. I’m not sure why I was so obsessed with checking the time these past few days, but I did it constantly.

Obsessively.

It’d just passed the fifty-seven-hour mark since Julianna had gone missing. Twelve minutes since I’d called in to check on my brother. And about twenty-five seconds since I’d fought the urge to ditch work and drive the streets again, searching for my lost coworker.

Colton was a f*cking mess. I’d never seen him this out of sorts before. He’d wept this morning, losing his shit all over Aspen, and none of us had known what to do to help him.

I didn’t like this powerless feeling. I had no idea what to do to ease my brother. None of us did.

They said he wasn’t eating or sleeping. When he wasn’t out looking for Juli, or hanging around her apartment in the hopes she’d show up, he was agitated and short-tempered. Not that I could blame him. If Sarah had disappeared into thin air, I’d freak the f*ck out too. It was just so strange to see Colton like this and realize he really had gotten that close to Juli.

It had been so weird for me to think of them together. But in the last fifty-seven hours, my coworker had swiftly moved from one of my what-ifs and strictly to Colton’s one-and-only, which was bizarre in its own right. But whatever.

I was scared as hell for him. He was running himself into the ground and was going to be no good to anyone soon. I wanted to smack some sense into him and hug him all at the same time.