Page 7 of His Witness To Have

"It's fine Brie, take your time. If you decide to help, I'll be here. Thank you, and I'm sorry," he finally said.

Bryan was sorry? Her return to Chicago has been filled with a lot of surprises.

"What are you sorry for exactly?" she decided to ask.

"Everything," he answered sincerely. "Every single thing I've ever done to hurt you."

Brie had to pinch herself to make sure she wasn't dreaming. She cast a look at Rachel, and she gave a nonchalant shrug of her shoulders in response.

"Oh well, that's alright. I guess we just have to let bygones be bygones at the very end.”

"Yeah, I guess so. Bye then."

"Yeah, bye," and the line went dead.

As soon as the call ended, Brie dropped her phone on the counter and held her head in her palms.Why did he have to apologize now?

Rachel pulled her chair closer to her and sat down with a plop. "Did he want to get back together with you? After abandoning and abusing you?" The look on her face was emotionless.

"Woah! Calm down, Rachel. Nobody mentioned that." But she still retained that look on her face.

"He just said he needed my help. His sister has been kidnapped. Probably in the clutches of those bastards, too."

"His sister?"

"Yeah, and her friend. Up Mount Olive."

"Then why did he just end up sounding desperate for whatever he wanted from you?"

Brie had no idea. She wanted to believe that Bryan had truly repented from the way he was. His current attitude made Brie sympathetic, and she really wished that at the end of it all, she wouldn't regret considering helping him.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Mack had never been the type of guy to play by the rules. He hated when people looked down on him for that, especially when his plan unexpectedly went south.

He was in the former hideout of the Brotherhood of Blood. He hated it there because the horrible memories came flooding back as though they had just happened yesterday.

He was drawn to one of the rooms by an unusual sound, and he mustered every courage within him to kick down the door, and what he saw behind the door was shocking.

It looked like a shrine. It had pictures of women – lots of women who were either bruised, badly swollen, or bleeding froma part of their body. They looked like the victims of his kidnapping spree. He recognized a few of them, specifically the ones that were dead, a few others he hadn't seen before. Were there more women still captured and locked up somewhere by this psychopath?

There were candles arranged around the pictures, which were placed directly under the window, and they burned very dimly but had this strange crackling sound. It looked like they had something burning in the flame of the candle, but he couldn't tell what it was.

He moved closer to the shrine and drew back when he saw and recognized a picture of a badly hurt Rachel, and the image of how he found her flashed in his head. He tried shaking the thought off, but he was immediately terrified when he noticed a picture of Brie sitting somewhere in the middle of all the others.

She wasn't really hurt compared to the other women – except for a few noticeable bruises here and there in her face. Why the hell was she the only one not really hurt or killed by Kamal? Something didn't feel right.

He wanted to take out his phone to take a picture of the disturbing sight in front of him, but he realized he had left it at the office. He took one last look at the shrine and left the room immediately without looking back. That definitely shook him. There was more to this serial killer than meets the eye.

As soon as Mack left the room, he couldn’t shake this feeling of being watched, but he ignored it and proceeded to look around the building, searching the ground floor, this time for any other clues. After combing through every corner of the ground floor, satisfied that there wasn't anything else apart from the creepy shrine he had seen upstairs, he went to leave.

There was a part of him that told him to go back to the room with the shrine. The sight of that thing disturbed him so much, especially when it looked as though Brie could potentially be in danger again. He constantly brought up different questions in his head he couldn't seem to answer.Why Brie? Why wasn't she hurt like the others?

He made his way up the creaky stairs again and skillfully maneuvered his way through the semi-dark corridor into the now open room. He took one last look at it and decided that he needed to get extra hands, especially the forensics team, on board for this. Something needed to be done about this.

He swiftly left the building with the image of that shine burned into his memory. He had told himself that he was going to avoid Brie to reduce her risk of danger, but he realized that she was in even more danger if he didn't do anything about it.

He made his way back to the FBI headquarters and went straight to the deputy chief's room in a rush, panting heavily as he burst through his office door.

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