Page 74 of Worth the Ruin
I’m sittingin Yvonne’s office, going through some supply requests with the leader of The Farm. I like Yvonne. She’s tough but fair, firm but kind. She doesn’t take bullshit but she isn’t an asshole just to be an asshole. She’d been running this place for years before the end of the world, and keeping a farm of this size going back then was no easy feat.
“So, if your people come across anything like this?—”
A knock on the door sounds through the room, but before either of us can say anything, the door bursts open. Yvonne bolts to her feet.
“Jenna? What’s wrong?”
“I’m sorry to barge in, ma’am,” she shifts her gaze to me, cheeks heating and looking downright terrified, “sir,” she adds inclining her head. “But…something’s happened.”
“What’s wrong?” Yvonne asks, coming around the desk towards Jenna, and I rise from my own chair.
“We were working on knife throwing and Pete came up, frantic, saying that Sarah had falling down through some old storm cellar or something out in the woods.”
“Sarah is the daughter of one of our nurse’s,” Yvonne explains quickly.
“Right. She’s only ten. Anyway, Mel ran off with him and told me to get more help. So, I did, but when we got to the spot…” She bites her lip and her eyes water. Something cold and uncomfortable unfurls in my stomach. Had Melody been hurt? Had she fallen down into the cellar too and gotten injured or…or worse? The thought steals the air from my lungs but I shove it away as forcefully as I can. I won’t go there. Not until…No. Just fucking no.
“What?” I ask, trying to keep from snapping at the girl.
“Craig was there waiting but no one else was there. No Sarah, no Pete, no Mel. He said that we needed to get Traeger and bring him there…” She swallows hard and twists her hands together in front of her. “And fast if you ever wanted to see Mel alive again.”
Yvonne sucks in a harsh breath and everything around me seems to tilt for a long moment. Someone has Melody. Someone is threatening her life, possibly hurting her…because of me. I easily—and happily—slip fully into Traeger, the ruthless, merciless, cold-blooded killer. My chest feels like it’s on fire, hot, burning claws of rage slashing and scraping, desperate to escape.
“We’ll take one of the ATVs,” Yvonne says. I nod and we rush down the hallway.
“Landry, Johnson, with me,” I snap. “Mendoza, I want this entire fucking farm locked downnow.”
Yvonne barks orders to her own people as we move out of the big farm house and to the waiting vehicles in the makeshift parking lot to the left of the house. We load into something that looks like a golf cart on steroids, one made for rough terrain, and take off. Yvonne is tense beside me, and I can tell she’s upset about Melody, pissed at her own people, and terrified that I’llretaliate against all of the The Farm for this. I might. I haven’t fucking decided yet and I can’t think straight right now.
The drive doesn’t take long, but it feels like an eternity. I try to stop my mind from flashing a thousand different scenarios behind my eyes, like a horrific, morbid flipbook of torture. She’s been tortured before, I know. The stories she’s shared with me…I shudder just thinking about them, bile rising in my throat and my fury spiking so high that it makes it hard to breath.
So I know she can handle far more than she should ever have to but so help me if they lay a single fucking hand on her…
Yvonne slams the ATV to a few yards away from a guy leaning against the hood of an old truck. Craig, I’m assuming. I see a gaping hole in the ground to the right of the truck, broken boards sticking up around the edges like rotten teeth. Guess they hadn’t been lying about the old storm cellar or whatever the hell this thing was. Craig has a shit eating smirk on his face and that red haze starts to creep into my vision, filling everything with the need to punish. I jump out of the cart and stride towards him.
“You kill me, and she dies,” he warns, a triumphant look in his eyes, that smirk growing. I nod and keep coming at him. His smirk falters when he realizes that I’m not stopping, that his threat didn’t work the way he thought it would. He straightens and pushes himself away from the truck, taking a small step backwards. “I mean it. If I don’t check in, they’ll?—”
I’m on him then, hand around his throat as I force him backwards. His eyes fly wide in terror and he tries to push me away, shoving at my arm. It’s no use. Nothing on this earth could stop me right now. I slam his back against a tree and lift, holding him a few feet above the ground so that the toes of his boots barely scrap the leaves. He gasps and claws at my wrist, but I barely feel it. I only feel the cold fury filling every inch of my body, so cold it burns. I bare my teeth at him, feeling more animal than man. I lean in close.
“Where the fuck is my wife?” I growl.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
MELODY
Pete stalks towards me.
“I’m really sorry about this,” he says, still slowly twirling that knife, but that unmistakable gleam in his says otherwise. I’ve seen that look too many times in my life. It’s the kind of look I’d expected to see in Austin’s all those months ago when he’d been about to kill Kevin. No, that look doesn’t sayI’m really sorry about this.That look saysI can’t fucking wait. So, yeah, Pete is full of shit.
“Not as sorry as you’re gonna be in about two minutes,” I tell him. He smirks and turns back to look at Manny and Dominic. Manny grins, shoulders shaking with quiet laughter, and Dominic looks like he might throw up, refusing to look at anything but his shoes. I take one quick breath, bite the inside of my cheek, and yank my left thumb upward with my right hand, dislocating the joint. White hot pain spears through me and I swallow my scream, clamping my lips firmly closed. I take a few quick, quiet breaths through my nose to steady myself, and force the pain into a little box inside my mind, closing it tightly tobe dealt with later. I slip my left hand from the cuff and wait, keeping them both behind me as if I’m still shackled.
Pete turns back to me, still smiling, and takes the last few steps to stand just in front of the chair. He leans down.
“I think I’ll take my chances.”
“I was hoping you’d say that.” I slam the heel of my right hand up into his nose. I feel bone and cartilage crack and the sound is so grotesquely satisfying that I grin.
“Fuck!” he roars, one hand flying to his face as blood spurts. Manny yells something about me being a crazy bitch, but I’ll deal with him in a second. I spring up from the chair and arch backward as Pete slashes out wildly with the knife, still trying to staunch the blood from his nose with his other hand. On his next swipe I grab his wrist and twist it at an unnatural angle, squeezing to put pressure on his radial nerve. He cries out in pain and the knife falls from his useless fingers. He yanks savagely at my hair with his other hand, so hard that my eyes water, but I jam my elbow into his already broken nose and he releases me as he howls in pain again.
