“I know and I trust your judgment on this,” I tell her. “I just…I don’t want you to look at me differently after it’s over.”
“You don’t have to worry about that, Verek. If I had the strength to do it myself, I assure you I would.”
“You’ve thought about this moment for a long time? Ending them?”
“Ever since the moment the first one touched me,” Tessa says. “They made it clear they were going to kill me. I would’ve killed them all in that moment if I had a gun.”
“I’m sorry you couldn’t then. But I’m glad I can do this for you, to keep your hands clean and your conscience clear.”
“I’ve felt…dirty since it happened. Not sure if my hands or any other part of me will ever be clean again,” she says as she gets to her feet. “Do you think I have time to take a quick shower?”
“Yeah, sure,” I reply since I have no clue how to respond to her admission as she heads for the bathroom. “But Tessa,” I say before she closes the door. “I don’t think there’s an inch of you that’s anything but perfect.”
Chapter Five
Tessa
* * *
The sun isn’t even up yet when Verek parks his bike on the side street across from the funeral home after slowly circling around the roads that border it twice. There are no lights on inside and no cars in the lot, which we hope means it’s empty. Now we can wait for the employees to show until we find…well, I don’t even know his name.
“Who are we looking for here?” I whisper to Verek as I keep my hands on his waist. I tell myself I’m just being careful in case he has to take off in a hurry, but the truth is that it’s nice to be able to touch him. The contact soothes my anxiety about what we’re about to do.
“Let me see,” he says, pulling a piece of paper from the inside of his cut. It’s covered with his messy handwriting that’s hard for me to decipher when I lean forward to try and read over his shoulder. “The guy here is Donald Franklin Jr.”
“And this is Franklin’s Funeral Home, so it’s his?” I ask.
“His father, Donald Franklin Sr., has owned it for thirty years according to Reece’s intel. The old man is apparently still hanging on, but his son ‘Donnie’ handles day-to-day operations.”
I gasp when that name triggers a memory of that night.
“What is it?” Verek asks, glancing at me over his shoulder.
“I just…I remembered what one of them said,” I tell him as my pulse races at the reminder.
“Can you tell me?”
“Someone, I don’t know who, but I remember someone saying, ‘Don’t forget to wrap it up, man. We don’t know where this bitch has been and…and we can’t leave any DNA in case someone finds her body before Donnie takes care of it.’”
“You heard them say that?” he whispers.
“Yes. It was right after…right when I was thrown in the van,” I say with a shaky breath.
“So they were going to kill you, all of you, eventually,” he grits out. “And then Donnie here was going to make you disappear so that no one ever found out. Those sick fucking bastards!”
“Shh,” I say when I press my fingers to his lips, getting distracted by how soft and kissable they are before my hand drops away in embarrassment. “Someone could hear us.”
“Sorry,” he says softer, clearing his throat. “Now I know we’re doing the right thing.”
“We are,” I agree. “These men, they’ve probably killed women, no telling how many, but only after they hurt them beyond repair.”
“I’m sorry,” Verek says again, this time meaning for what they did.
“You should probably go ahead and make your lap around the place before the sun comes up.”
“You’re right,” he agrees with a sigh. “I don’t like leaving you here alone.”
“You’ll be close enough that you’ll hear me if I shout your name,” I point out, even though I’m not keen on him leaving me either, even if it’s just for a short while. “Go,” I whisper.
“Okay,” Verek says before he climbs off his bike and removes his helmet. He grabs a black mask from the saddlebag. “I’ll be right back,” he tells me. As he walks toward the large, white, two-story funeral home that takes up the entire corner, he waits to put on the mask until he’s well away from me, as if he’s afraid he’ll scare me. There’s nothing he could ever do to make me afraid of him, although, I think he’s worried that I’ll look at him differently if we go through with our plan. If he can eliminate the monsters from my nightmares, then I’ll be forever grateful to him, more so than I already am for the night he saved me from hell. I know it wasn’t just Verek but Roman and the entire Savage Kings MC working together to find us, but it was Verek’s face I saw first.
After the pain and humiliation I had been through for hours, I thought I was dreaming about him. God knows my first thought when I woke up restrained, alone with four men, was that I wish I had just gone home with Verek. It would’ve made me a horrible person, and I would’ve hurt Paul when I told him, but at least I could’ve lived the rest of my life practically normally, other than losing my fiancé. It was the less evil of the two choices I was unaware that I had earlier in the night. Verek wouldn’t have hurt me. Well, maybe just my heart after he treated me like one of his usual one-night stands. But I would have survived and moved on with my life, not be sitting out here, plotting the murder of several horrible men.
Before that night, I never thought I would be capable of condoning such violence. I guess that’s the strange thing about surviving such a horrendous ordeal – it made my conscience go numb like it’s been injected with a big dose of Novocain. Or maybe I lost my conscience completely…it died in that storage unit even though my body refused to follow. I was a good person before, and bad things still happened to me. Nothing could be worse than what I survived. If there is a hell, it was those hours I was abused, so I’m not scared of a hell in the afterlife.
Another way to think of this, what Verek and I are doing, is that sometimes, even bad deeds can be good. By killing these four men, how many women are we saving in the future? How many have they hurt and then disposed of so that they’re never seen or heard from again?
Death is the only punishment they deserve, and they would never get it from the criminal justice system. The other women and I would have to relive our nightmares over and over again in trials and appeals. No, I couldn’t go through with that or put that burden on Cari, Robin, and Sandy. They barely survived after days and weeks of being held compared to my twenty or so hours.
When we get home, I can’t wait to tell them that the assholes who hurt us are finally dead.
Chapter Six
Verek
* * *
“I didn’t see a single camera,” I tell Tessa quietly when I get back to her, still sitting on my bike. I shoved the mask I had worn into the back pocket of my jeans just in case I need it later.