Scared To Death (Live to Tell #2)(100)
“Just be careful,” she tells Renny, who breaks into a happy run.
“Good job, Mom.” Brett nods his approval.
“What?”
“Letting go.”
“I’m learning,” she says with a smile. “And anyway, look—they see her coming.”
She points toward the gate, where the rest of the family are waiting for Renny to reach them.
Jeremy, Marin, Caroline, Annie.
The Cavalons and the Quinns may not be technically related, but they’ve come to think of one another that way these past few months, with Jeremy as the bridge between them.
Anyway, no one knows better than Elsa that blood doesn’t create a familial bond.
Love does.
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HELL TO PAY
the next book from
New York Times bestselling author
Wendy Corsi Staub
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from Avon Books
Who so sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed.
—Genesis 9:6
Bridgebury Correctional Facility
Massachusetts
Something is wrong.
Lying awake in her bunk, she senses it even before she hears or feels it.
Later, looking back on this moment—something she will do every day for as long as she lives—she’ll acknowledge this flash of prophecy that saved her life. She’ll wish she could share the incredible story with the world.
But she can’t.
This memory, like the others that will continue to haunt and inspire her, will be her secret. No one—other than Chaplain Gideon, of course—will ever know about the premonition that kept her from dying in her bed on a cold winter New England night.
All around her, the others are sound asleep in their cells. They’ll never know what hit them.
For her, though, the awareness strikes out of nowhere, like one of her ferocious headaches.
Yes, something is wrong…
The perception is so strong—so earth-shattering, she’ll wryly think later, with no one to appreciate the clever wordplay—that her eyes fly open and she braces herself for…something terrible.
She fully expects to find someone looming over her bed. It wouldn’t be the first time.
But it isn’t that. It isn’t about her at all.
No, this is bigger—much bigger, rushing at her like a freight train: distant rumbling; the ground begins to shake. Instinctively, she dives off the bed and rolls beneath the steel frame just as the first chunk of mortar lands on the floor beside it.
A bomb?
No—that would be a single explosion; perhaps a series of them. This is an endless detonation, and as the world crumbles all around her, she knows. She knows.
It has come to pass, just as the Bible foretold in the Book of Revelation.
“…and there was a great earthquake, such as was not since men were upon the earth, so mighty an earthquake, and so great.”
Huddled in a fetal position, she stays under the bed as brick and concrete rain down. Metal beams and iron bars groan and collapse, reducing the impenetrable fortress to rubble.
She can hear the others’ terrified screams in the face of God’s fury, but she herself remains calm. Panic would trigger a flight response; were she to budge from under the bed, she’d surely be crushed to death in an instant.
Deep down, she knows she’s meant to be spared. She can’t die. Not here. Not now. Not with Jeremy Cavalon still out there in the world, living his life, while she’s been caged like an animal.
Every time she allows herself to think of him, helpless rage wells up inside of her. There’s nothing to do about it but pray to God that one day Jeremy—and the others, too—will get what they deserve. Yes, justice at the Almighty’s hands, or, by some miracle, at her own.
At last, the shaking subsides.
She opens her eyes to a stinging cloud of dust. She can hear wailing car alarms, sirens, moans and shrieks of the trapped and dying. Dust clogs her lungs so that she can barely breathe, but she’s in one piece. Alive.
She feels her way out from under the bed, squirming through the debris until she’s standing. The cell floor is cracked and littered with wreckage, and there, beside the bed that shielded her, is her precious dog-eared Bible.
Trembling, she picks it up, clasps it to her chest.
The dust has begun to settle, falling strangely cold and wet. She tilts her head back and for the first time in years, sees the wide-open night sky, swirling with snowflakes.
Richard Jollston has been predicting it for decades.
But when it actually happens—when a major earthquake strikes his native New England—he isn’t even there to witness it firsthand. No, he’s a continent away, safe and sound in California of all places, sitting at the hotel bar nursing a stiff bourbon and water after a grueling day of conference presentations.
“Shit,” the young bartender mutters, and Richard looks up from his drink to see the kid gazing at the television screen mounted high above the top shelf liquor—top shelf, in this modest hotel, being Jack Daniel’s.
“What’s going on?” Richard squints at the blurry montage of images and captions. Only one is discernable: the enormous, distinctive BREAKING NEWS graphic.
Back in the old days, before the ubiquitous cable news crawls and headline-generating reality TV-star scandals, a special report might have generated serious notice among the cluster of people seated at the hotel bar. But tonight, after a cursory glance, most go back to their conversations. Only the bartender is watching the TV, and now—because unlike the others, he’s sitting alone—so is Richard.