Chapter 20

Chapter

Twenty

April 20 th

12:36 P.M.

Finally.

Beth Lindon was going to die.

Sarah had certainly waited long enough for this moment.

Standing there above the mass grave, knowing that she was about to bury her nemesis alive was the most wonderful feeling in the world.

She hadn't felt this good in …

Years.

Not since before she was kidnapped and sold to Leonid Baranov.

Back then, she'd been just a normal girl, not particularly beautiful, but not really ugly either. Just plain. Story of her life. She wasn't the gorgeous, intelligent one like her big sister, and she wasn't the cute, sweet one like her little sister. Sarah had suffered from a major bout of middle-sister-itis.

The forgotten one.

The one stuck in between the lights of the family.

She wasn't going places like her big sister who was so smart she could do anything she wanted. Having modeled as a little girl, her big sister had decided to become a lawyer. But not just a lawyer. Nope her sister was too wonderful for that. She was going to be a lawyer who worked specifically with abused women to help them escape the clutches of their husbands, get custody of the kids, and support from their abusers. She was a hero.

She wasn't going to the same place as her little sister either. While not as pretty and not quite as smart as their oldest sister, the baby of the family was just so cute and sweet that she sucked you right in. While having only just graduated high school at the time Sarah was twenty and abducted, her little sister already knew she wanted to work for a charity when she finished college. She wanted to help kids who had been abused and neglected, or who had grown up in the foster system.

How could you stand out when surrounded on either side by such selflessness?

Ordinary.

Completely plain and ordinary.

That was what Sarah was.

No wonder her parents wouldn't leave behind her sisters, or have them uproot their lives, just because Sarah had been abducted, tortured, and then rescued.

Didn't matter that she had needed a support system while she struggled to rebuild not just her life but herself.

Guess her sisters' charity didn't extend to their own blood.

The only person who had been there for her after she was rescued was Tomas. He'd waited until she was swept off alone into witness protection, taken from the city and shoved in a tiny country town, the complete opposite of the life she'd lived before, then he'd come for her.

It didn't matter what anyone else said, he had been there for her. He had shared with her his plans to destroy Baranov, make him pay for everything he had done to Sarah and the others. Well, not that either of them cared all that much about the others. But Baranov had to pay for what he had done to her.

He had to.

Simple as that.

And since Tomas was the only one who seemed willing to let her help him bring the man down, of course she had said yes. After all, if it wasn't for him interceding on her behalf, then Baranov would have killed her like all the others.

All the others except the woman staring up at her with horrified eyes.

Perfect Beth.

Perfect Beth who had survived a childhood that would have shattered any normal person.

Perfect Beth who hadn't succumb to Baranov's torturous games and managed to remain alive since she wouldn't give the monster the one thing he craved.

Perfect Beth who should have been all alone in the world after being rescued, but had instead wound up with an entire team of people—strangers—who had been there for her.

Perfect Beth who had built herself a family full of warriors prepared to die for her.

Perfect Beth who had married a strong, kind, caring, uber-wealthy man.

Perfect Beth who had everything while Sarah had nothing and no one but a lonely farm in the middle of nowhere and Tomas.

"I hate you, perfect Beth," she shouted down into the hole.

"I'm not perfect, Sarah," Beth said, trying to clamber to her feet. The hole wasn't particularly deep, around ten feet, even short as she was Beth would be able to climb out easily enough by piling up a couple of bodies so she could throw an arm over the edge and pull herself up and out.

Not going to happen.

She'd waited too long for this to allow anything to mess it up.

"Your little band of merry soldiers aren't going to show up to save you this time," she told Beth.

If the idiots at Prey hadn't raided the facility moments before Axe was going to kill himself, Beth would already be dead. She wasn't going to allow Tomas to let Axe go through with that plan. It was Beth she wanted dead, not the leader of Bravo Team.

This time it wasn't going to be anyone else's call but her own .

"Your fate is in my hands now, Beth, and I can assure you that unlike everyone else I'm not falling for your perfect persona."

"I'm not perfect," Beth said again, sounding annoyed as she tried to reach up to the top of the hole, coming up much too short.

"Trust me, I know, I believe that even if everyone else doesn't. This time, Tomas isn't there to keep you alive because he enjoyed taunting Baranov. This time you don't get to go back to your happy little life because Tomas doesn't want to draw attention to himself. Attention has been drawn, Prey found where we were hiding in plain sight. Your hero husband won't be riding in on his white horse, and neither will anyone else from Prey. This. Is. It. The day you finally die."

With a smile of triumph, Sarah ran over to the bulldozer and climbed up onto it. It was time to fill in the mass grave where they had been throwing the bodies of the people who competed in Tomas' games. While he might have different interests than his former boss, Baranov wasn't the only one who liked to play God with people's lives. He just wasn't as hands on about it. He found homeless people and runaways, offered them a job, then brought them to one of their four facilities and pitted them against one another. Winner lived to see another day, loser was disposed of in a mass grave.

"Please, Sarah, you don't have to do this," Beth's voice called out.

"I know I don't have to, but I want to." Didn't the woman get that? Sarah wanted her dead, she was sick of hearing about perfect Beth. With the woman finally out of her hair, maybe she really could move on with her life.

It had been six years since she and Beth and another woman had been rescued from the depths of hell known as Leonid Baranov's house of horrors, but it felt like it had only been six minutes. The terror was still as raw as it had been back then, nightmares still haunted her sleep, she couldn't stomach small, enclosed spaces, she was still prone to burst into tears at the sight of the scars littering her skin.

In short, Sarah was still a mess, and she was sick of it.

"We can get you help," Beth continued. "Maybe being back with your family will?—"

"My family didn't care about me. They abandoned me," she shouted. "I was left all alone with nothing while you got everything. You had a whole team of people there for you, you don't even know what it's like to be all alone in the world."

"You're wrong. I do know what it's like. I'll be there for you, Sarah."

The offer only enraged her further. "Of course, perfect Beth thinks she can do everything, even saving me, her would be murderer. Her will be murderer," Sarah corrected. Because this was happening and it was happening now.

It was time to take back control of her life. For the first twenty years, she had lived in the shadows of her two perfect sisters, lost to their greatness. Then she had been used and abused by a monster. In the aftermath of that ordeal, she had once again been lost to the greatness of another survivor, been forced to live in her shadow for the last six years.

No more living in the shadows.

No more being lost to the perceived greatness of another.

Leonid Baranov was dead.

Tomas was dead.

When she was finished there, maybe Sarah would track down her family and kill them all one by one until they were forced to see her.

And now perfect Beth was going to die.

Turning on the bulldozer's engine, she began to push the first load of dirt into the ten-by-ten hole that would very soon become perfect Beth's tomb.