In one fast motion, quicker than I can blink, he lunges for me. I draw my gun, but he somehow slides underneath my stance and knocks my arm to the side, sending it skittering out of my grasp. I try to reach for my phone, but he grabs both wrists with an impossibly tight grip and snaps handcuffs on me.
“Don’t fight me. Don’t make this harder than it has to be. Just come along with me. Everything will be alright. I promise,” he says.
“And let you do to me what you did to Greg? What you did to the men who killed my mother?”
I struggle against his grip, trying to kick out at him with my legs, but he applies pressure to my knees and then binds my ankles together with a zip tie.
“I told you, Emma, I won’t hurt you. I would never hurt you. I’ve waited your entire life to have you, and I’m not letting you go,” he says. “And soon we will bring your brother into our family. You’ll like that.”
“Dean is not my brother,” I say, finally managing to maneuver, so I wrench myself free of his grasp despite being on the floor now. “But you can’t stand that truth, either. Because it means you killed another woman for no reason. Did you even bother to find out her name, or did you just call her Mariya?”
“Her name was Natalia,” he says. “And I didn’t kill her. I wanted nothing to do with her, but she wasn’t worth the energy and effort to kill. I even might have had a fondness for her. She would never be anything like your mother, but she made life bearable for a short time after Ian manipulated your mother away from me again.”
“You mean after my mother got the morning after pill and cut you out of her life,” I say.
Jonah’s jaw twitches. He twists his head slightly, stretching his neck back and forth.
“That’s enough. It’s time to go,” he growls.
“That’s the first true thing you’ve said tonight,” I respond.
He lunges for me again. I throw my momentum to roll out of his way, moving for the front door, but his position gives him the advantage, and he cuts me off before I can get there. His hand goes to his pocket again, and he pulls out a syringe.
“I didn’t want to have to do this, Emma. I didn’t want to think you would resist me so much. I hoped you would be a sweet little girl and cooperate with me,” he says.
I need him to stop saying my name. It sounds slimy and manipulative, and every time he says it, I want to claw it off my skin.
“I’m not a little girl!”
He glances at the syringe in his hand.
“Do you remember Ian sedating you when you were? He would put you to sleep and keep you that way so he could move you around the country, hiding you from me.”
His voice is getting angrier, and I notice his hand shaking just slightly. Tension is winding up inside him like a taut wire, threatening his control. Slowly, without drawing attention to my movements, I reach as well as I can with the handcuffs to the zip ties on my ankles, slowly depressing the tiny switch holding it in place until I feel it give way.
“He wasn’t hiding me from you. We moved because my mother saved other women from people like you. I never even knew you existed. They never said your name. They never even told me my father had a brother. You were erased the second they thought you died.”
As I say it, I realize he hasn’t even mentioned that. Now, he laughs.
“A beautiful ruse if I do say so myself. It convinced everyone.”
“Who was he?” I demand. “Who was the body in the car?”
“No one important.”
“You don’t get to assign value to other human beings.”
“And yet, I do. Every day. He was nothing but a pitiful worshipper. If he knew, he wouldn’t mind what happened to him. He would have been honored to give up his life for his leader. I did what I had to do to protect myself and ensure I would still have the chance to claim you,” he says.
“And more than two decades later, you still haven’t,” I taunt.
“Something I intend to rectify immediately.”
Jonah slashes at me with the syringe. I wrench out of the way enough for him to miss me. I scramble for the front door, but he grabs the back of my shirt and yanks me back away from it. We hit the floor hard, my handcuffed hands around his wrist, struggling to hold the needle away from me. I pull my knee up and bury it in his ribcage. The shock of pain is enough to loosen his grip, and I yank the syringe out of his hand. I press the plunger to release the liquid inside and throw the needle across the room before surging up to get out of his hands.
He grabs me by the ankle and pulls hard enough to yank me down to the ground. I land hard on my handcuffed wrists and cry out as the metal cuts into my skin.
“I’m sorry that happened to you,” he says. “I don’t want to hurt you. But you have to learn.”
He wipes a small amount of blood from his mouth and stares down at me. I glare back, directly into his eyes. Eyes that are the same as my father’s.
The same as mine.
“What did you do to Ron Murdock?” I growl.
Jonah makes a sound, almost like a laugh and stoops low, pulling me up to my feet.
“He got what he deserved. He should have protected your mother that night. If he had done his job, it wouldn’t have been her in that house.”
“You were in Feathered Nest,” I say.
“No. I sent a hunter after him. It took years to track him down. It
