“Where is she?” Honor’s mother said hoarsely, tears streaming down her cheeks.
“Is she all right?” her father demanded. “Why isn’t she here? Why are you here and not her? What aren’t you telling us? Is she hurt?”
“Why the hell weren’t we informed before now?” Brad bit out angrily, his eyes ablaze with relief but also suspicion.
Kyle held his hands up to silence the torrent of conversation.
“I need you to listen to everything I have to tell you. It’s very important and it’s why I arrived first. She’s on her way here now. She’s not very far out, but I needed to come ahead to . . . prepare you.”
“Prepare us?” Honor’s mother whispered, her voice thick with tears, and now fear.
Sensing the importance of what Kyle had to say, everyone went silent and leaned forward, concern etched into their every feature.
Kyle gave them the details—most of them—of Honor’s escape and recapture. He gave an accounting of everything that had happened. Except anything relating to Hancock. Hancock was Honor’s to either reveal or not, but he’d not take that choice from her.
“I had to force an IV on her while we waited until it was safe to reunite you with her. She gave up,” Kyle said in a pained voice. “She was fierce. Brave. Courageous. I’ve never met her equal. But in the end, it was simply too much. Too much pain and torture and worse, the final loss of hope that had kept her sustained for so long. She doesn’t believe I’m telling her the truth, that she’s free. She believes me to be taunting her—psychological torture—delaying her eventual physical torture and death that she’d come to accept. She’s broken, ma’am,” he said to her mother.
In a quiet voice, he told them what they had already deciphered for themselves. “Your daughter is not the same young woman she was when she left here, and I want to prepare you for that. She’s retreated deep inside herself. She’s starved. Refuses to eat. I had to force the IV or she would have already died. She’s wounded in multiple areas, in multiple fashions. She’s going to need your love, support and, above all, your patience. She needs medical care. But most of all, she needs a reason to live.”
“Oh my God. Oh my God,” her sister said, her sobs echoing through the room.
“She’s alive!” one of her brothers exclaimed. “She’s coming home!”
“We’ll help her,” her father vowed. “Whatever she needs. Whatever it takes. I will not have the miracle of my daughter back only to lose her again. I won’t let it happen.”
“There is nothing I won’t do for my baby,” her mother said fiercely. “Nothing.”
Kyle nodded. Yes, he thought. Her family would bring her back. He could see the love and resolve in their eyes. They were fierce. He could well see where Honor got it from.
But who would save Hancock?
? ? ?
HONOR cautiously opened her eyes and then slammed them shut again, fear shuddering through her fractured mind. Hope—something she’d been denied time and time again until she’d refused to allow herself to even entertain it—was insidiously creeping through her veins, accelerating her pulse until she was nearly breathless. She shook her head. No. Not again. Never again. She’d given in to hope one last time and it had destroyed her completely. Some lessons were learned the hard way.
When the SUV turned onto Oakwood Street, she lost any and all of her carefully constructed control and burst into tears. Her hands flew to her face, covering the guttural sobs tearing from her throat. She rocked back and forth as they drew closer and closer to . . . home.
“Stop!” she cried. “Oh God, please stop!”
The driver immediately slammed on the brakes and Honor bent over, putting her head between her knees as she struggled for breath, panic scraping her insides raw.