Page 49 of Accepting Fate
It’s three in the morning and she’s probably sleeping, but I need to explain what happened before she shuts me out for good.
Before pulling off the side of the road, I send her a text.
Grayson: I’m so fucking sorry Angel. I had an emergency and I texted you but it never sent. I just got back to my phone. Call me when you see this.
The drive to The Hideout is torture. I want to blow off my brothers and go to Logan. But showing up this late when it’s still dark out would freak her out.
I have no idea why she locks her house up the way she does, but I think waking up to a knock on your door at this time of night would send her into a straight panic.
The only thing I can do is wait to hear from her. I already know it’s going to be a fight because she’s stubborn as hell. It’s going to take a lot of convincing but she’s insane if she thinks we are done. Logan is fucking mine and I won’t give her any other choice but to accept it.
Walking into The Hideout, Noah is passed out on the couch while Landon types away on his computer. Wes is probably fucking with the asshole guy we brought in tonight.
Landon looks up from his computer. “Wes is downstairs. I have to email a few people and prep them for calls about Carly’s funeral. Her dad has nothing and isn’t believing we are taking care of it.”
I stop in front of the fridge and pull out a bottle of water then go sit at the other end of the table across from Landon.
He goes on about something concerning our rescue that turned into a body recovery. I tune him out and stare at the speck of paint on the wooden table. Normally, I’d help him out but right now, I don’t care.
That sounds awful since we just wrapped an innocent woman in a blanket and delivered her to her father.
I try to listen but it’s hopeless. My mind is on Logan. My sweet and sassy guarded girl thinks I left her high and dry.
My thoughts are interrupted by a loud bang. I jump out of my seat and see Wesley walking into the room from the door that leads to the basement.
When we started the missions, we found out some of the victims’ parents wanted the captors/abusers to suffer. We couldn’t exactly bring them here and fuck them up in the living room, so we built an underground room.
Landon insisted we not build it directly underneath The Hideout, in case someone outside our circle ever found out about this place.
Noah dubbed the name of the underground torture chamber, The Playhouse. It’s one giant concrete room with old-fashioned metal jail cells on one side and countless means of torture items for Wes to play with.
To get to The Playhouse you have to go downstairs. To the ones who don’t know what we do, it looks like a basement that is used as an extra storage room. But to us, there is a door that looks like a built-in shelf. It opens with fingerprint access. My brothers and I are the only ones that can get in.
Once you get past the door, a barely lit quarter-mile walkway leads you to The Playhouse. A metal door acts as a barrier and is also fingerprint access only. The door is bulletproof, heatproof, anything you can think of proof. Anyone that tries to escape has no chance.
When someone is down there, multiple cameras that connect to everyone’s laptops and phones, provide constant surveillance.
Judging by Wes’s face, the asshole who killed Carly said or did something that got under his thick skin.
Noah pops up off the couch in a panic. “What happened? Whose ass do I need to kick?”
Everyone is staring at Wes who stands in the kitchen, chugging a bottle of water. His shoulders are tight against his neck and the grip he has on the bottle is so tight that he crushes it.
When the bottle is empty, he throws it across the room. It bounces off a wall and falls to the ground.
Wes is the least reactive out of all of us so whatever happened must have been fucking bad.
Turning around, he sees all of us staring. His shoulders rise and fall rapidly, and his face looks like he could kill someone just by looking at them.
His light gray shirt is soaked in what I assume is a mixture of blood and sweat.
No one speaks as we all stand there watching Wes. He will have the first word, or we won’t know what set him off. That’s if he doesn’t just walk off. He is very unpredictable in everything he does, so there is no telling how this is going to go.
I’m about to sit back down when he speaks up.
He doesn’t make eye contact with any of us. Scrubbing his hands down his face, he clears his throat and comes right out with it. “Carly was raped five times after she died. The asshole laughed the entire time and went into explicit detail about how much he enjoyed it.” He pauses again, trying to formulate how to tell us whatever fucked up statement came out of the abuser’s mouth. He balls his hands into a fist so tightly, his knuckles turn white. “I’m going to spare you most of it because, frankly, I don’t want to say it out loud. She died when he violated her over the railing of the stairs. She fell and landed on her head.”
“Enough. I can’t hear anymore. Please stop, Wes,” Noah begs. Wes looks relieved and in the moment his mask isn’t up and I can tell he is feeling what the rest of us are.