Page 74 of Blood Revealed

That’s when we hit a big, fucking problem. All the stalls inside the stable are empty and there’s a huge motherfucker on the ground, naked and very much dead with a pink shirt twisted around his neck. Unless these dudes are progressive and enjoy wearing what appears to be small enough to be a woman’s size T-shirt, I think some woman got the jump on him.

Chaos looks at me, “Ready?” he asks.

“You got a wife, man. You’re my sister’s world. Go home to her. I got a bad feeling.”

“Your sister is the love of my goddamn life, but when haven’t I had your back? We go in, we go in together.”

From the time we met on the playground before school on the first day of kindergarten, he’s never faltered in his loyalty to me. “Now,” I whisper, and we go in ready to take these assholes by surprise. As I run, I raise my gun, aim, and fire. The soldier drops.

“To your left,” Chaos barks, taking a shot of his own as I pivot to the left, popping off another round. The closer we get to the waterfront, the more bullets fly around us.

The danger rises when all we can see are the flashes of light from the guns being fired. They can’t see us, either.

Someone got ahold of a rocket launcher and uses the chopper for target practice. When the rocket hits, it lights up the property and we get a glimpse of the carnage. Spotlights from the water hit the shore and it looks like we’re about to die until we see the lettersFBI. They might have come late, but they’ve come to party.

While the bureau occupies Escalante’s soldiers, the brothers check every stable. The only empty one was the one closest to the house. It’s so fucking hard seeing these women behind glass, telling them they’re safe and then having to leave them to keep looking.

My Lords brothers enter the mansion with me and we scour the place. From basement to attic. And at the end of a very long day, I’m forced to accept one undeniable fact.

She’s gone.

17.

Hannah

Escalante’s men have so much firepower that it sounds like we’re in a warzone even with the waves crashing against the rocks. The cracking and popping go on for what feels like forever. It’s night. We’re on the water—most of us are soaked to the bone and freezing from the wind chilling our barely clothed bodies. My negligée clings to me. I’m barefoot. The rocks are slippery with slime and water. Still, we wait it out.

When the worst of the gun fire appears to be dying down, we climb out of our hiding place in a single file, each woman holding on to the one in front of her for support. With it being black as death out here, death is a real possibility if one of us slips.

Twenty-eight women escaped. I bring up the tail end in order to keep anyone from being left behind. I climb my way to the top. Nicola whispers that she has her arm outstretched to help pull me up, but in the dark, it takes us several tries for our hands to connect.

“We need to find a phone, drinking water, and shelter.” She fills me in on the plans as we heft me up over the edge of the cliff. “I’m not good with direction when it’s this dark,” she says. “But if we head up the coastline for a while, I might get a bearing on the safehouse.”

“Okay,” I whisper. My voice won’t come back for a while. I’ll be lucky if I ever get it back to full functionality again.

“Celeste,” Nicola calls to the woman who helped us kill the monster. “We’re taking the coast for a while.”

“Got it,” Celeste calls back as she takes her spot in the middle of the group with Nicola leading and once again, I bring up the rear. Somehow, we’ve fashioned ourselves into the leaders of this troupe. Maybe because we rescued the rest, but these women are looking to us to get them to safety and I damn well plan to do it.

We march for hours, first taking the coast until we reach a stretch of road that Nicola recognizes. From there, we bend to head back to the west because we’ve walked too far east, and we’re headed inland now.

My feet are a bloody mess by the time we reach the small, nowhere town of Halfway.

“The safehouse is another two miles back off the main road access,” Nicola calls to us.

Nothing but dirt and rocks down the bumpy path. When I think of a safehouse, I always think of an actual house. These are singlewide trailers. Four of them grouped in a square—dirt, dust and nothing to the outside but in the middle, a green courtyard. They get their water from a cistern and have a septic tank for waste. Both are aboveground. I’ve never seen a setup like it before.

The women, although tired, injured and dehydrated, begin the final leg of the journey by picking up the pace to a run and I don’t want to lose sight of them or be left behind, which means even though I have no energy to spare and leave disgusting, bloody footprints in the dirt, I run, willing myself to cross that finish line.

It’s a miracle when I finally make it to the first trailer, but after everything I’ve survived, I simply have nothing left and collapse to the ground before I make it to the steps. Carmen and Nicola each take a side to help me stand, and together the three of us heave my deadweight body up each of the three burning-from-the-Texas-sun metal steps, which sear the bottoms of my feet.

I’d seen them do the same for Celeste as I was running. Neither she nor I have shoes.

“We’ll get you cleaned up,” Nicola offers. “We have supplies to clean and bandage your feet.” She walks through the kitchen and disappears for a moment from my view. When she pops back into sight, she’s carrying two mop buckets, which she stops at the sink to fill with water. Heavier now, she lumbers to carry one out—the red one—which she carries two-handed, water sloshing over the sides, to set down in front of Celeste. Then she goes back for the blue bucket, water sloshing over the sides the same as the other. “Bring me the vinegar, please,” she calls to Carmen. “It’s in the cupboard next to the refrigerator.”

Carmen reaches up into the cupboard and pulls out an almost-full, plastic gallon jug of white vinegar that she lugs back into the sitting room over to us, handing the large container over to Nicola, who pops the top and pours probably a cup of vinegar into each of our buckets.

“Now put your feet in the bucket to soak,” she orders.

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