Page 67 of Protecting Bree
“Smiley, you couldn’t have known they were waiting for a moment to make their move. It was acoincidencethat you were even out front, taking that call. If you were inside, you could’ve gotten hurt.”
Smiley snorted. She was being very magnanimous. Those men did what they did,whenthey did it, one hundred percent because he was distracted. Of that, he had no doubt.
“He was talking to me,” Cookie told his wife. “I was pissed that my team and I hadn’t been told that the man after Bree had connections to your own abduction, years ago. I was chewing him a new asshole.”
Fiona straightened to look at her husband. “Bree told us about that. About how the man after her had worked for the same organization responsible for holding us in Mexico.”
“And?”
“And what?” Fiona asked.
“Did you have any flashbacks? Panic attacks?”
“No,” Fiona said. “I won’t deny it was a shock. But I was more pissed than anything else. Bree was the one who was having the hardest time with what was happening.”
Smiley’s heart ached at hearing those words.
“So what happened next? Bree made the knife…?” Kevlar asked.
“I cut off some of my slip, since I’m the shortest and it was the longest on me. Bree used the piece of plastic to cut some of her hair, to secure the cloth to the handle. Then we waited.”
“It seemed to take forever,” Fiona said, the womengoing back and forth, telling the story. “We stopped, and for some reason it felt different that time. As if we’d made it to wherever we were going.”
“There was this red light inside the truck, and when the door finally opened, it was dark outside. The light from some kind of streetlamps hurt our eyes. A man got into the truck and walked through the cages of chickens, who were squawking up a storm, not happy to be disturbed. Or maybe they just knew evil was walking amongst them. Who knows.”
“Our plan was to somehow get someone to open our cages, to give us a chance to get away. It wasn’tmuchof a plan, but Bree said she’d fake being sick or something. I wasn’t sure it would do much good, it wasn’t as if anyone gave a shit about our well-being up until that point as it was.”
Smiley’s gaze went back and forth between Fiona and Julie as they recounted their ordeal. Hatred welled inside him, and it took all his training to tamp it down. He couldn’t afford to be emotional right now. He needed to be impassive, take in every scrap of info he could.
“He told Bree that Fiona and I had been sold to men in Russia and North Korea, but that she was being taken to their boss’s compound in Ecuador. She was a gift to the employees to use however they wanted.” Julie shuddered.
“She begged for water. Pretended to be terrified, although she probably wasn’t really faking it, now that I think about it. But she acted submissive, as if she was already broken. It made the guy drop his guard, I think. He unlocked her cage and dragged her out. He touched her…squeezed her breast…and that’s when she made her move.”
The pride and awe in Fiona’s voice couldn’t remove the fury coursing through Smiley’s body at the thought of someone touching Bree without her consent.
“She stabbed him. Right in the neck,” Julie said, sounding bloodthirsty and not at all traumatized by what had happened right in front of her eyes.
“And then she kneed him in the balls,” Fiona added.
“He dropped his keys, and she threw them to Fiona. Then she stabbed the guy in the neck again while he was down. Blood went everywhere but she kept doing it. Making sure he wasn’t going to get up or call for help.”
“I unlocked the padlock on my cage, crawled out, and freed Julie.”
“Then we heard another guy calling for the one who was lying at our feet, bloody and dying. Bree told us she was going to distract them. That we should run,” Julie said, her voice breaking for the first time.
“We refused. But she insisted,” Fiona added.
“She told us to tell you…” Julie paused, as if she couldn’t get the words out.
“That she loves you,” Fiona finished quietly for her friend. “And that you’re the best thing that ever happened to her.”
Smiley’s first thought was happiness. It hit him hard and fast. But terror overrode it in an instant. He could see his Bree standing there, in that same damn slip the others had worn, holding her makeshift weapon, probably splattered with her victim’s blood. Looking like a Valkyrie. Willing to sacrifice herself so her new friends could get away.
Hehatedthat she’d sacrificed herself…but he was also never as proud of anyone as he was of her in that moment.
“She ran out of the truck, jumped right on top of one of the men outside the door, screamed like a banshee, then ran away as fast as she could,” Julie said.
“And everyone followed her,” Fiona said with a sad nod. “Just as she hoped. Her actions allowed us to sneak out of that truck and hide.”
