Total pages in book: 153
Estimated words: 144571 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 723(@200wpm)___ 578(@250wpm)___ 482(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 144571 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 723(@200wpm)___ 578(@250wpm)___ 482(@300wpm)
At some point her heart had stopped.
She’d come to and the Canadian operative who’d been working with them had been pumping her chest. CPR. He’d given her CPR.
Not today, Maggie. Not fucking today.
Ben Parker was in love with her sister. He’d thought he was saying the words to her, and in that moment she would have done a lot to have him morph into Cooper. To have Cooper staring at her, tears in his eyes, praying she would live.
“Kala,” Lena admonished.
“It’s a very effective torture technique. I would have likely told them anything, except of course I couldn’t stop screaming. He needs to refine it. There’s a happy medium. Also, the paralytic wore off before the torture drug did, and then I couldn’t control my body. I’m pretty sure I have a bunch of nerve damage. All in all, not how I wanted to spend that particular day.”
Lena’s expression went soft. “I’m sure it wasn’t. Kala, I’ve read your file. You’re brave and reckless and still young. You’re already a hell of an operative, but this is the kind of event that can break a person.”
“I’m not that breakable.” She wished the woman in front of her was more like Kai Ferguson. He’d been her therapist after the first kidnapping. God, she had to number them at this point. Kai had taken her to a rage room and given her a baseball bat. And then when she’d destroyed to her heart’s content, tears and screams included, he’d taken her for ice cream and they’d talked. Really talked.
She wasn’t fifteen anymore. She shouldn’t need to beat the crap out of a bunch of stuff to have a breakthrough.
“Everyone breaks, Kala. Everyone.”
Her father had told her the same thing. “Well, I didn’t have to. My team saved me, and now all I want to do is find Emmanuel Huisman and ensure he can’t do it again.” She knew better than to put into words what she was going to do to the doctor.
Make him hurt for days. She would find that drug and see how he liked it. Or she could go old school. There was something pure about putting real physical work behind the torture. The drug seemed like a cheat. She would slowly eviscerate him and feed him his own testicles.
Lena closed her notebook. “I’m not going to get much more out of you, am I?”
“There’s not much more to get.” She certainly wasn’t going to tell the good doctor that when she passed out, she’d had the dream again. The one that followed her since she was fifteen.
In the dream she was always sitting and waiting. It could be on a park bench, the sun warm on her face. At the kitchen table in the house she grew up in. On the bean bag in teenage Cooper’s room where they would make out and she would get so hot she didn’t care about anything but him. And the door would open and she would know it was her mom.
Then Julia Ennis would walk through, the ghost she couldn’t quite shake. She would start walking in as Charlotte Taggart and morph into Julia. A reminder that there were always two sides to every coin. And Kala knew which one she was.
“Tell me one true thing and I’ll close the book on this part of the investigation,” Lena offered. “I still need to profile Captain Reed, but I’ll clear you for duty if you can be honest with me about anything. What were you thinking as you lay there?”
“I thought it hurt. I thought I wanted to die.” Both truths, but not the truth. What the fuck was she so afraid of? Her father did this. Her mom still went to a survivors of domestic abuse group from time to time. She was so tired. “I wished I’d been better. Seen more. Done more. I wished I’d…I wished I’d been in love and had someone love me back.”
Lena nodded. “All right. This is done, but you should know I think you should see someone regularly, and I’m not talking about just for checkups. I won’t force you, but I am recommending it.”
Her father could get her out of it. “Fine. I can sit in a chair and stare a couple of times a week.”
“It takes more than that,” Lena replied. “I’m going to ask you a question and you don’t have to answer. Think about it, and if you come to a conclusion that leads you back here, well, I’m in this office for at least another few weeks.”
“Shoot.” She wouldn’t be coming back.
“Is this how you want to live? I’m not talking about the job. You’re excellent at the job. I’m talking about the walls you have up. I’m talking about the regrets you had as you lay there thinking you would die. Many people find an experience like that can jump-start a change they need in their lives.”