Lead Me Home (Fight for Me #3)(101)

“I’m always here for you, Sammie. No matter what is happening in my life, I will always be here for you.”

“I know that,” she mumbled, hugging her knees tighter, her attention darting all over the living room as if she was searching for ghosts among the shadows.

Finally, she turned her tortured gaze back on me, the words forced from her mouth. “He’s back.”

Confused, I sat forward more as I tried to decipher what she was trying to say. “Who?”

She swiped the back of her hand under her nose. “Uncle Todd.”

“What?”

The name rocked me back.

Shocked.

Stunned.

Horrified by the look on Sammie’s face.

Sickness turned in my guts, and I was sure I was gonna throw up.

She blinked a bunch of times, as if she were seeing things she didn’t want to see. “I . . . I thought I was okay, Nikki. For all these years, I’d convinced myself it was okay because he was gone. All my prayers had been answered because he’d just . . . moved. Was gone. So, I shoved it down and pretended like it didn’t exist, and then he came back to help Grandma and . . . and . . . it was all right back there again.”

Dread.

It chained and bound.

Everything felt too heavy.

Crushing.

I tried to breathe around it. To convince my heart it was okay to still beat.

I needed to be strong for my sister.

She needed me. She needed me, and I needed to be there for her.

“What exactly are you sayin’?” I tried to keep the question soft. Frame it like I would to anyone who came to me for help.

But it felt impossible when my baby sister was the one sitting there looking at me.

“Didn’t you think Uncle Todd was a creep?” she almost begged.

Leading me. Trying to get me to a point without her having to say it.

I swallowed hard, my mind reeling through a million memories.

Had I missed it?

Because it hit me.

The way he’d been too attentive.

Too interested in what we were doing.

Always asking me questions.

Where I was going and who I was with.

But at the time, it’d barely blipped on my radar.

“He was . . . odd.”

More tears streaked from her eyes, soaking her face. “He wasn’t odd, Nikki. He was a monster.”

Horror locked up my throat, and my hands went to my chest as if it might shield me from her words.

“He was a creep and a monster, Nikki. Of the worst kind. A vile, disgusting creep who stole my childhood. My innocence. He made me believe I could never trust a man until Lyle came into my life. And . . . and . . . and I just have this sick feeling . . .”

Her grief spun through the room. Hanging on the dense air. Clinging to the walls.

I swore I could feel it crawling across the floor and climbing into me.

My spirit shook, so heavy I could feel the weight of it sagging in the middle of me.

Regret and confusion and anger.

Who knew hate could be such an instant thing?

But I did.

I hated him.

Hated that he could hurt my sister.

“Sammie.” Tears flooded down my face. “I’m so sorry I didn’t know.”

She swiped at the wetness on her face and released a brittle, frustrated sound. “How could you know when I kept it a secret? It was my darkest secret, Nikki, because I couldn’t stand the thought of someone knowing. Of someone knowing what he’d done to me.”

My eyes squeezed, and I forced out the words, praying she hadn’t gone through this alone her whole life. “But Lyle knows?”

She barely nodded. “He knows what happened to me. He doesn’t know who. He thinks it was a stranger. I didn’t know how to tell him if I didn’t want my family to know. God knows what he’d do.”

Oh, that made two of us.

Fury bristled through my being, and I thought maybe I could relate to the things Ollie had said. To the way he’d wanted to hunt down whoever had hurt his sister.

The overwhelming need to make something right when you had absolutely no control over it.

But at least in this circumstance, we could still do something.

Sammie suddenly gasped for a breath. “I didn’t . . . I didn’t want to burden you with this when you were dealing with so much, but I couldn’t keep it in any longer. Not with him out there. Not with my baby girl in her room . . . not with other little girls out there. Not after all these years of hiding it. I . . . I—”

A shadow of grief clouded her face. “What if he’s hurt someone else? What if I never told anyone, and he did it to someone else? I’m responsible for that.”

Dropping onto my knees on the carpeted floor, I inched her direction, took her by both of the wrists, and lifted her arms in between us.

They’d been hanging so helplessly at her sides.

I needed her to know she wasn’t weak. That she had strength.

“No. You can’t blame yourself. You were just a little girl.”

Conflict pinched her face. “It was still happening when I was fifteen.” Her voice clogged with a ragged cry.

“Fifteen, Nikki,” she begged, as if it changed things, and she was all of a sudden somehow responsible.

But that’s what predators did. They made their victims believe they were somehow to blame. That they should be the ones ashamed, manipulating and filling them with fear.