Chapter 80

Miss you.

It’s just those two words.

I stare at them for hours.

I draft a hundred different replies and delete them all. Because there is no right thing to say to the husband-who-isn’t-my-husband who-is-my-captor/enemy.

If he’s looking at his phone I’m sure he’ll see the three dots that pop up and disappear as I type and then click back to undo.

As night passes into morning, I sleep again.

It’s fitful. Filled with dreams that are more like nightmares, and memories I’ve bottled up since I was a kid.

I cry.

I curl up and try to comfort myself.

Because it’s going to take 48 hours for the results back from my lab tests.

Two days to learn if I’ll live or if I’m right back to counting down the time left with my terminal illness.

I want to live so badly.

It’s some ingrained survival instinct, sure, but when facing my own mortality, I don’t want to d ie.

At some point, I get up and start cleaning. I organize clothes and move boxes and clean up the junk that had been left behind-some of it by teenage me.

A day later, there is another text. This one is also brief. It just says, Special Delivery.

does that mean?

brother shows up

a box. Really big

1

K

4

.

2

first. “That blockhead beta just left these at

he means

is big enough to lug around both of these. The

I feel compelled to ask.

course, we did,” Liam snaps at

a fair question. They’re essentially

is

hand, they’re doing it

that a sshole thinks your own pack won’t feed you,” Liam mutters. Then he opens the box and pulls out packages or protein bars and giant jars of

Adam says to me.

me being locked away and starved

in your box?” I ask him.

drops it and the components

out knife after knife and then an assortment of weapons and magazine clips, my mind

wants to arm you against your own family.”

I say

what is

butter and a box of crackers. I have to be careful. Defending my family’s ‘enemy’ will only reflect poorly on me. But how sad is it that I trust a delivery of food from the man who kept me a virtual prisoner for ten years,

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