10:32 A.M.
Voices.
She heard voices.
He shouldn’t be here.
Not yet.
It couldn’t be time again already, could it?
And who was he talking to?
That scared her even more.
Her body wanted to fight or run and seek safety that didn't exist, but there was no place to go, and she was too weak to fight.
She prayed unconsciousness came and took her away before the mind-bending pain assaulted her again.
For once her prayers were answered and she slipped back into the comforting darkness.
* * * * *
10:33 A.M.
“I’m not sure we should be doing this,” Detective Matthew Greer told his partner.
“You saw what I saw,” Rylla Franklin returned.
That was true, he had. Didn’t mean he thought they should be here. “We don’t have probable cause to have broken in here,” he reminded Rylla.
“Someone is in here. When we rang the buzzer at the gate you saw her in the window, she called for help.”
That’s what it had looked like. But really, how could they be sure? They hadn’t been able to hear her, but therehadbeen a face in one of the upstairs windows, and ithadlooked like she was banging on the glass and calling for them to help her. They hadn’t been able to hear her though. Was the house soundproofed?
They had been here by chance. There had been a hit-and-run in the street in the early hours of the morning. They suspected the driver was a man they had been looking for for weeks now in connection to a double murder, so they had been here interviewing residents in the street, wanting to ascertain if anyone had seen anything helpful.
It was the fourth house they went to where they’d seen the woman in the window.
It looked like she was begging for help, so they entered the property and then broke down the front door to get inside.
They had cleared the downstairs and were now standing at the top of the stairs. Taking the first door on the left, Matthew eased it open, and immediately his gaze went to the bed.
A woman lay there, facedown and naked.
She wasn't moving.
Quickly, they checked to make sure the rest of the room was empty, then he went to her. He took in the shackle around her ankle and the chain that ran from it to a metal ring in the floor. Her back was covered in large, bright red welts.
Someone had taken a whip to her.
Sliding his fingers beneath her jaw to her neck, he felt for a pulse. Found one.
“Is she alive?” Rylla asked.
“Yes. Just. We need paramedics.”
“She wasn't the woman in the window. There’s someone else here.”