Page 94 of Freeing Souls

“I’m so sorry, Richard. So sorry.” She says it like she truly means it as she stares at him with her heart wide open, her bottom lip trembling. Surprisingly, she holds his eyes the entire time. Raising the gun to his forehead, I say nothing as I pull the trigger and blood splatters everywhere.

Tammy silently cries, her head hanging low as her body shakes. “Fuck, another body to deal with,” Ryker groans from behind me.

Walking back over to the counter I put the gun down and wash my hands in the small sink as I respond, “No. He can stay right where he is next to her for now.”

“Are you sure about this?” Ryker asks, running a hand through his hair.

“Yes, Ryker,” I sigh, tired of going over this with them. We finished prepping things for Tammy to finally get what’s coming to her tomorrow, but I told the guys I needed to speak to her alone. Every time we have come to the shed, they have been with me, and I have no regrets about it.

I love and appreciate them sticking with me over the last week, but now, I need a moment alone with her, and they aren’t thrilled about it.

“Twenty minutes, and then we are coming in,” Cade demands, crossing his arms over his chest.

I roll my eyes at him but nod as I turn around and walk the short distance from my dad’s house to the shed. When I getinside, Tammy barely lifts her head to look at me. She’s pale, half dressed, with dried blood all over her face and upper body.

“I’m not like you.” She raises her head to look at me, her brows lower in confusion, but she doesn’t speak. “I didn’t get some sick satisfaction from all of this. There is a tiny part of me that enjoyed knowing you had to experience even a fraction of what I did, but I didn’t feel amazing every time I left this room.”

“I’m sorry,” she rasps.

“But are you?” I ask, moving closer to her. “Because you have never shown any remorse over the years. You sold your own daughter, you burned a place to the ground with people inside of it, you willingly left me in a place you knew I would be raped and beaten over and over again. You humiliated me and abused me for years, not to even include the trauma you gave my mom.”

“She screwed everything up!” Tammy tries to scream, but it comes out scratchy. “I had the perfect life lined up, and she ruined all of it!”

“I don’t get it. She left. She ran away and never came back. You had plenty of time to fix whatever it was you think she ruined.”

“It was supposed to be you. I had months,monthsto find her, to find you before you were born and hand you over to him. But she disappeared and got away, and I was left to deal with the consequences.”

“What are you talking about?” I furrow my brows.

“Killer. He wanted you. When he didn’t get you, he took from me instead. She got all the attention. From my daddy, from Killer, from Gabe—everyone loved her. It should have been me! I wanted you to suffer for what she put me through. I didn’t know it would become this game–I loved it. You became my toy,” she cries.

“You are sick, you know that?” I seethe, stepping away from her.

She shakes her head. “I didn’t want you at first, not until I realized how much joy having a toy brought me. I just wanted you to suffer because of your slutty mother. After I had a buyer for you, I was going to use that money to buy a new toy for Richard and me. But you screwed everything up! Everything! We had plans. We knew what we wanted.”

“Fuck,” I cut her off, “You really will never see any logic will you? It’s like you’re living in some alternate fucked up universe. My mom wasn’t a slut. She wasn’t trying to get all their attention. You cheated on Gabe when he loved you. You fucked that up, not her. You can’t just keep someone as a toy or sell people– why am I evening trying to reason with you? You aren’t going to see the truth.” I shake my head. “I hope you enjoy being buried alive with your dead husband tomorrow. It will bring me great joy to sit on top of your grave and breathe fresh air while you are below, smelling your rotting corpse of a husband while gasping for breath.”

I move forward again, bringing us nose to nose. “I hope you see my face when you are suffocating, I hope you think about me and how your perfect little plans all failed because you didn’t win the game, Tammy. I fucking won.”

Turning around, I leave the room as she sobs and yells at me, begging me not to bury her alive.

When I get back to the club, I am shaking with pent up rage, and I know I need to burn it off.

“Woah, little flame,” Ryker says as I come storming towards them. He grasps my shoulders and examines my face before asking, “Fight, fuck, or run?”

“All of the above?” I question.

Ryker gets a gleam in his eyes as he glances at Grayson and Cade before nodding. “Alright, run, then.”

“What?”

“Run.”

“Not this again,” I whine.

“I don’t remember you whining the last time we chased you through the woods. Just add in a good fight before the fuck this time, and I’m pretty sure you’ll be whining in a different way very soon. Now, run.”

Chapter Twenty-Seven

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