Death screamed, echoing shrilly through Rachel Maxwell’s brain as Roy Sales’s large, meaty hands tightened around her throat. His powerful body was stretched on top of hers, pinning her to her bed.
Her chest burned. She couldn’t breathe. She was losing consciousness as fear clawed at her insides, tearing her apart bit by bloody bit. Even as life slipped away, her heart persisted, throbbing erratically.
“Don’t worry, sweet Rachel. I won’t let you die if you do what I say.”
His maniacal laugh crawled inside her as his grip on her throat slowly eased. She coughed, choking as oxygen fought its way back into her lungs.
“Bucking against me is futile, sweetheart. I’ll never let you go. You belong to me. You always will. You know you want it that way.”
“Let me go,” she pleaded, her voice dry and scratchy, little more than a whisper. “Please, let me go.”
“That’s the way, baby. Keep begging.”
She closed her eyes tight so that she didn’t have to see the evil that darkened his eyes. Pleading wouldn’t help. He was heartless, devoid of compassion, his deranged soul as black as the depths of the deepest cave.
She writhed and twisted beneath him, finally getting her right arm free. She fisted her hand and swung wildly.
Blunt pain met her knuckles. There was a crash. She cried out in pain as blood splattered her face and dripped through her fingers.
She managed a scream. Loud. Shrill.
Her body stiffened and she kicked wildly, her feet tangling in the sheets as she escaped his grasping hands. Still screaming, she jerked into wakefulness—not to the sound of her cries, but to her cell phone’s alarm.
Rachel gulped scratchy clumps of air. It was only a nightmare. She was in her own apartment. Alone. Safe.
She fumbled to turn off the alarm. Her phone was wet. Her hands were damp and clammy, but with water, not the blood she’d imagined in the clutches of the terrifying nightmare.
She’d evidently knocked over the glass of water she’d left on the bedside table. The dizziness and cold, hard terror began to subside as she dried her phone on the corner of the sheet.
She stretched her feet out in front of her, staring at the shadows that crawled across the wall in the faint glow of sunrise. She was safe and yet the horror of being kidnapped and held in captivity by the psychopath persisted along with anxiety attacks and sudden bouts of panic.
Something as routine as a strange man walking too close behind her in downtown Houston in broad daylight could set her off. Or a man approaching in the office parking lot. Or even the creepy feeling that someone was watching her when she got out of her car at night.
She had to get her act together and move past her own trauma. But even fully awake and in the safety of her own bedroom, she could feel killing fingers at her throat, choking the life from her.
She could sense danger deep in her soul.
Three months later
“Good morning, Miss Maxwell.”
The firm’s receptionist smiled as Rachel walked through the double glass doors of their fifteenth-floor office.
“You’re here early this morning, Carrie,” Rachel said.
“Yes, but it may be the first time I’ve ever arrived before you. Sometimes I think you sleep here.”
“I’ve been tempted.”
“Mr. Fitch Sr. beat you in this morning, too. He said to have you stop by his office when you arrived.”
“Did he say why?”
“No, but I got the
