HOSTAGE (To Love A Killer) Read Free

connection to her past, the farmhouse, and the atrocities of the barn was much closer, much more entangled in darkness than she could have ever imagined.
                  “Tell her, Ash,” he said, while Hunter and the girls continued to wait for the van, succumbing to the inevitability that they would all return to the farmhouse and be submerged, once again, into the sick sexual games her father liked to play.
                  Ash backed away, tucking himself behind Hunter, out of her line of sight. He couldn’t bear for her to see him. He couldn’t bear the eyes on him, large brown, eyes he loved, to turn dark with hatred from hearing the truth.
                  “Go on,” Grizzly barked. “Tell her.”
                  “I killed a girl,” said Ash, lowly under his breath.
                  “Not just any girl,” said Grizzly.
                  Something in Grizzly’s tone indicated the corners of his cracked mouth were curling upwards, smiling at Ash’s history, or so Hunter thought. She didn’t know for sure. She still refused to look at him.
                  “No, not just any girl,” agreed Ash in a whisper. After a long moment, the air grew thick with remorse, and Ash finally said, “I killed my sister.”
                  His voice was nothing more than a thread of regret.              
                  “His own sister,” echoed Grizzly, before kneeling down in front of Hunter, catching her gaze, looking her dead in the eye. “That’s the kind of soldier I need.”
                  Hunter’s mouth twisted downward into a frown as she began to cry. The tears stung as they welled up in her eyes. They felt hot, full of rage and fury as they streamed down her cheeks. She would die before she allowed herself to become one of her father’s soldiers.
                  The worst part about Grizzly was that he had a way of planting sick ideas in her head, tormenting her to the brink of madness, so that when she finally did commit some unthinkable, horrifying crime, she would actually believe it was her fault, when in fact it had been his idea all along. He had manipulated her. His mind was the playing ground of pure evil.
                  “It wasn’t your fault, Ash,” said Hunter through her tears. She had to get Ash on her side. She could tell he was being manipulated. She knew now that there was no way Ash had chosen this.
                  “It was,” he responded quietly.
                  “It wasn’t your fault. I’m telling you, Ash. Listen to me. You’re a good person,” she said with determination, though she was too afraid to look anywhere but at the hardwood floor.
                  “Shut up,” said Grizzly, but Ash was already in the midst of speaking.
                  “I’m not a good person, Hunter,” said Ash. “I killed her before I met any of you, before your father found me. I killed her to get out of my own fucked up past, to get out of my house and away from my horrible father.”
                  Hunter could hear his voice crack, splitting with the pain that was overcoming him.
                  “I don’t care about any of that,” she whispered. “I know who you are. This isn’t you.”
                  “But what if it is?”
                  “Quiet!” Shouted her father.
                  Hunter jumped, startled.
                  Grizzly extracted something from his back pocket, a black object. One side of it glared with a metal edge. He unfolded the metal, and Hunter realized that it was a knife.
                  Grizzly held the knife firmly in his enormous hand.
                  The girls began to whimper at the sight. They clenched each other tighter as best they could, fighting