me begging for mercy back when I used my voice. He was the one who’d buried my voice for good. The night he put out cigarettes on my skin between wrapping a plastic bag over my face. Just long enough for me to think I was going to die. My voice had clogged in my throat and I’d found freedom in taking it away from him at last. He’d had plenty of screams from me since that day, but no more words.
My legs trembled beneath me as I started to slow, wading through the thick snow, my body so numb that I couldn’t feel anything anymore except the pain in my bones.
My teeth chattered, causing an endless rattling in my skull. I hadn’t eaten for two days. My vision was swimming and shadows flitted around in the dark, making me swing my head left and right. I expected them to descend, the monsters who held me, owned me. How could I escape them when they were all I knew? The broken memories of my past were a muddled jigsaw I couldn’t piece together. Where would I go? Who would I run to?
I’d wondered a thousand times whether there were people waiting for me out here, longing for me, missing me. Or maybe I’d always been a girl with nothing and no one to belong to.
I found another inch of resilience in my soul and stretched it out, forcing myself to run once more.
I will not die when I have four deaths left to deliver!
An owl hooted somewhere above me in the trees and my heart lurched as I ran on, near-blind and entirely desperate. My dry tongue scraped the roof of my mouth as I gasped for water, my lungs heaving in ice-cold breaths and forcing them back out again. The cold was an enemy I wasn’t prepared to face. If I’d thought it through, maybe I could have pulled Jax’s coat from his body, but one more second in that place might have cost me my freedom. And I’d rather be battling the freezing wind and the biting ice than still be back there in that cell.
My knees sank into the snow before I realised I’d fallen. I clung to the bark of a pine tree, trying to haul myself upright, just about managing to drag myself to sit against it.
I was soaked through, my skin prickling with needles as the cold drove deeper. I shivered violently, dragging my knees to my chest and tilting my head to the sky. Clouds hung thickly above the trees and I swore on everything I was, I would live long enough to see the stars again and make a wish. Because I needed a little help if I was ever going to get revenge on the men who’d haunted me.
Four more deaths is all I need. Then I’ll be someone. I’ll be the last person they ever see.
“Tyson!”
Where is that damn dog now?
I swear I spent more time combing the woods for that mutt than chopping wood for the fire some days. He’d come back to the cabin on his own if I left him to his business, but no doubt he’d drag in some rotten old bone or roll in bear shit again if I allowed it. Not that he gave a fuck what I allowed most of the time, but I did try to rein in his more beastly qualities. Not least because he hated a bath and I wasn’t going to let him sleep in the cabin reeking of bear shit.
“Tyson!” I called again, stalking up the snow-covered, rocky track through the trees.
The whole world was turning white as the blizzard tightened its hold on the forest and I grunted in frustration as I hunted the hillside for any sign of the damn dog.
My hands were growing numb and the memory of the fire I’d left blazing back in the cabin had me drawing to a halt. If the damn dog had gone walkabouts on his own in this weather then I wasn’t sure it was worth the effort to find him. He’d make his way back sharp enough once he realised the snow wasn’t letting up without me freezing my balls off in the attempt to find him.
I cursed him beneath my breath and turned back to head for the cabin and that fire. I’d get some food cooking and no doubt he’d come running once he caught a sniff of it on the wind.