Page 159 of Cruel Abandon (Fallen Royals 5)

Those words, this night, was a pressure valve unlocking. Like my mind said, you survived this. I think you can survive that, too.

I was thirteen and walking home. Both parents were working late, and I had missed the bus. Liam’s dad pulled up beside me in his nice new work truck and offered to give me a ride home. Said I could call him Alan, then said we needed to make a quick stop.

He helped me out of the truck and held my hand. We went into a storage facility, down a long row of garage doors, to one all the way in the back. The front of it seemed normal, but there was a door to another room.

A bed, a toilet.

He guided me in and then left me there.

No drugs. No sedative.

That, it turned out, was a figment of my wild imagination.

Every day he brought me food, listened to my pleas to be released. He didn’t force himself on me like I once feared my captor might’ve. I was desperate to be freed, almost out of my mind with the thought of it.

I did try to escape, and my small space got smaller. A rope around my wrist, tying me to the wall. It almost rubbed my skin off. I scratched at the walls, broke all my fingernails in another attempt to leave.

It was then that he broke my will. A man I had trusted. He lost his temper and beat me. Cracked three ribs, broke my nose. He yelled that he had dug too deep of a hole to climb out of, that I might be better off dead.

Something changed his mind, though.

After his rampage, he quietly set my nose back into place. Gave me ice for my injuries.

He didn’t apologize. He was a man on a mission, and I was just a bargaining chip. As soon as they give me the money, you can go. I remember those words clear as a bell. The agony that losing his job drove him to this.

I stopped being able to look at him after a while.

And finally, a payment. I can recall now the gleam in his eyes. Greed. Anger that it took so long. The idea that he should’ve asked for more.

I told Detective McAdams everything from a hospital bed, with her captain hovering behind her. I had no lawyer, no parents, no Liam.

Alone, I grappled with the idea that someone else had thought to take me for money and failed. Or rather—I survived it.

McAdams couldn’t tell me why the ex-detective abducted Whitney and me, not with certainty… but she did let slip that he had a massive debt. He had taken out a second mortgage on his home before he lost his job. His home was filled with empty liquor bottles and illegal weapons.

Under someone’s thumb, McAdams guessed aloud.

Mom and Dad both came to see me. I was, once again, stuck in the hospital after serious trauma. This time, though, I was refusing to let go of the memories.

The nurses were friendly, the doctors brisk. They treated frostbite on my feet and stitched my nose. I didn’t have any lasting impact from the fall, just a cut on my palm that they taped and a sprained ankle. I was hooked up to an IV to flush out any remaining traces of the sedative Masters injected, and I only had to wait on the discharge papers in order to leave.

They kept me overnight, and I wake to my parents both in my room.

Mom hovers by my bed.

Dad stands guard at the door.

I haven’t seen Liam since I was brought in. One nurse, my secret favorite, let slip that he was okay and had been discharged the day before.

But still no visit.

Tell your dad I say hello. Then—bang.

Dead.

Maybe that’s the most shocking part: that someone would go through all the trouble, kill multiple girls, only to give up in the end. But what sort of life did he have to go back to?

They found Whitney alive in the building at the top of the hill. It was the shut down water treatment addition to the water tower that he kept us in.