Some Mistakes Are Unforgivable, page 1
Some Mistakes Are Unforgivable
Jane Blythe
Copyright © 2021 Jane Blythe
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, distributed, reverse engineered or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, including photocopying and recording, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented without permission in writing from the publisher.
All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Bear Spots Publications
Melbourne Australia
Cover designed by QDesigns
I’d like to thank everyone who played a part in bringing this story to life. Particularly my mom who is always there to share her thoughts and opinions with me. My awesome cover designer, Amy, who whips up covers for me so quickly and who patiently makes every change I ask for, and there are usually lots of them! And my lovely editor Lisa Edwards for all her encouragement and for all the hard work she puts into polishing my work.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Book List
About the Author
March 20th
8:59 P.M.
She had made a horrific mistake.
A mistake she couldn’t ever take back.
Fifteen-year-old Dahlia Black wished with all her heart that she had listened to her parents.
Instead, she had defied them and been lured into a trap.
A trap she should have seen.
But no, she’d been so stupidly naïve. She had thought it was just her parents being ridiculously overprotective. With three older brothers and two older cousins who were like big brothers in the military, Dahlia was used to stifling protectiveness.
She’d just wanted to do her own thing.
Build her own life.
Make her own choices.
Instead, she and her two best friends were locked in cages like animals. A screen hung on the wall on the other side of the warehouse with three columns on it. One had an R at the top, another a T, and the third a K. Underneath each letter were three ever-changing numbers.
Unfortunately, she knew what the letters and numbers meant.
Her abductors hadn't been shy in telling them exactly what was going to happen to them. They were part of some dark web game where men with more money than morals paid to vote on which of her friends would receive which punishment.
An alarm sounded, and she shrunk further back against the metal bars. She didn’t want to be here, she wanted to be back home. She would gladly take her parents and brothers over-protectiveness for the rest of her life if they would just come running through the door right now.
“Voting for game twenty-two has now closed, and we have our winners,” a man announced to a camera. He was dressed in a tuxedo with a white mask that covered his entire face. A bright red mouth and black circles around the eyes gave it a creepy look. “Our pretty brunette will be killed, the blonde won for being tortured, and the sweet little redhead will be raped. I think I hit the jackpot on that one.”
No.
This couldn’t be happening.
It couldn’t be real.
And yet a second later a gunshot rang out and her best friend since they were two, Alicia Colton, dropped to the floor in her cell beside Dahlia’s, a hole in her forehead, her dark eyes staring sightlessly across the space between them.
Accusingly.
This was all her fault.
She was the one who had decided that she wanted to be a model and had taken the card the supposed modeling agent had given her when she and her friends had been out riding their horses. She was the one who had defied her parents when they told her she couldn’t go to an interview with the agency but had convinced her friends to skip school with her to go anyway.
Alicia’s death was her fault.
Someone was screaming.
Brynn.
Her other best friend was in the cage on Dahlia’s left, her blue eyes locked on Alicia's lifeless body, sobbing and screaming hysterically.
Dahlia wanted to say something to comfort Brynn, but what was there to say?
The voters had chosen Alicia to die, Brynn to be tortured, and her to be raped.
She had never thought she would have to say that word in the same sentence as her name.
They were trapped. They’d been drugged at the interview and woken up naked here in these cells who knows how many days ago. They’d been kept here, given scraps of food and the occasional bottle of water, while the game played out and the votes came in. There was no hope, when the game was over she and Brynn would be killed or sold, they would never be heard from again, and she doubted her family would ever know what happened to her.
Her cell door was unlocked, the man in the tuxedo and scary mask stepped inside. As he walked toward her, Dahlia scampered away from him, desperate to stop the inevitable from happening even as she knew there was no escape. There were a dozen men here, all of them dressed in suits and the same creepy mask as the man advancing on her, all of them armed. Even if she made it out of her cage she wasn’t escaping the warehouse, she wasn’t finding salvation.
Her fate had been sealed the moment she made the decision to defy her parents.
The man reached her and backhanded her hard enough that she saw stars. By the time the pain cleared enough that she could think, he was already violating her.
Tears streamed down her face, she tried to block out what was happening, but the only other thing to focus on was Brynn's screams as two men tied her to a chair. Both of the men were dressed in what she thought looked like those suits that crime scene people wore so they didn’t contaminate crime scenes.
Dahlia felt her stomach drop as she realized what that meant.
They didn’t want Brynn's blood on them when they tortured her.
Her friend’s screams of agony burrowed deep into her soul.
It was her fault Alicia was dead.
It was her fault Brynn was being hurt.
All her fault.
She wished she had been the one who had been killed.
The air suddenly filled with the sound of gunfire.
What was going on?
To be honest, at this point Dahlia didn’t really care. When the tuxedo man climbed off her, she simply curled herself into a small ball, tucked her knees to her chest, buried her face in her hands, and sobbed.
How could one mistake cause this much destruction?
She hadn't meant for any of this to happen. She’d just wanted a way to get out of her small town, out from under the strict rules her parents enforced, out from under the pressures of having basically five over-protective big brothers.
She’d just wanted to find herself.
In the end, what she had found out about herself she didn’t like at all. She was a selfish, spoiled brat who had gotten her friends abducted, hurt, and killed.
Hands closed around her shoulders, but she ignored them, she didn’t want to look up, didn’t want to see the tuxedo man or any of the others.
“Dahlia.”
Startled at hearing the familiar masculine voice say her name, she lifted her tear-streaked face to see a man dressed in tactical gear on his knees beside her.
She knew that face.
Those eyes.
It was her brother Theo’s best friend, Fletcher. She’d had a crush on him since she was ten, but he just saw her as Theo’s baby sister.
What was he doing here?
“It's okay, sweetheart,” he murmured, “you’re safe now. We’ll get you out of here.”
We?
Were her brothers here too?
As much as she longed to see them, longed to know that she and Brynn—if her friend was still alive—were safe, she was so ashamed for anyone to see her.
Fletcher stripped off his Kevlar vest and pulled his t-shirt over his head, slipping it on her, dressing her as though she were a child.
“There you go, honey,” he said, cupping one of her cheeks in his large hand, his thumb brushing lightly across the skin just under where her face throbbed from tuxedo man’s blow.
His blue eyes were kind, his smile reassuring, his touch comforting, and she thought that maybe everything could somehow be okay.
But then he grunted, his eyes widening as blood bloomed on his chest.
He’d been shot.
Because he’d taken his bullet proof vest off to give her his t-shirt so she wouldn’t be naked.
Dahlia lost it. She sobbed and screamed as Fletcher’s large body slumped against her, pinning her against the metal bars. He was dead because of her, this was all her fault. How would she face Theo after getting his best friend killed? How would she face Brynn if her friend was still alive? How would she face Alicia's family? How would she face her own?
How would she face herself?
The weight of Fletcher’s body was pulled off her and then a hand smoothed her hair. “It's okay, Dahlia, Fletcher isn’t dead. Just hold on, sweetie, and we’ll get you out of h ere,” Theo said as he continued to stroke her hair in an effort to soothe her.
“I’m okay, Dahlia,” Fletcher grunted, voice tight with pain.
No.
He wasn’t.
He’d been shot.
Nothing about this was okay.
“Theo, is she all right?” Levi asked, appearing beside them as he knelt next to Fletcher.
Theo’s hand moved to her neck to check her pulse. “I see blood on her face, and …” he swore, “and blood between her legs.”
Levi swore too. “Let’s get her out of here and then I’ll check her out.”
Shame burned hot inside her, and then as Theo gently scooped her into his arms, icy cold shock took over. She trembled violently. Tears streamed down her face, she had a headache and an ache between her legs that reminded her of what she had lost in this warehouse.
Theo carried her away, and she was aware of Levi helping Fletcher walk beside them. The shooting had stopped, and she saw bodies everywhere she looked.
So much death.
So much pain.
So much suffering.
Everything hit her like a ton of bricks, the realization that she would never be the same, her life would never be the same, overwhelmed, Dahlia didn’t fight it when the world spiraled around her and black dots danced in front of her eyes, she let shock pull her under and fainted dead away.
Three Years Later
June 26th
9:00 A.M.
It was finally here.
The day she had been counting down to for three years, three months, and six days had finally arrived, and for the first time in all those years, Dahlia felt like she could breathe again.
She was free.
Looking back, Dahlia wasn’t even sure how she had made it through the aftermath of her ordeal. She’d been carried out of the warehouse in her brother Theo’s arms, examined by her doctor brother Levi because he was the only medical professional there that she would allow to touch her, and then came the questions.
So many questions.
While no one outright said the words, she could feel the recrimination in each law enforcement officer who spoke to her. A silent question hung between them. How could she have been so stupid?
Three years later, Dahlia still didn’t have an answer to that.
But now she was free, she could finally leave River’s End, and she wasn’t ever coming back here. Not for anything.
Not even her family.
They hadn't abandoned her even with the unforgivable mistake she’d made, but she felt their disappointment in her every time she saw them, and the weight of it was crushing her.
She had to leave.
For her sanity it was the only option.
With a last look around her bedroom, Dahlia picked up the suitcase that contained all she intended to take with her and walked out into the hall. It felt sad closing the door behind her, that room had been her little sanctuary from her full-on family over the years. It had been her safe haven these last three years, the only place she could relax away from prying eyes.
Now it was time to say goodbye.
To her room, to her home, to her family, to the town she had lived in all her life, and after the mess her life had become, Dahlia wasn’t surprised that much stronger than the wisp of sadness she felt was the relief.
Trudging down the stairs, both her parents looked up when she walked into the kitchen, suitcase in tow.
Her mom jumped up from her chair at the table. “Dahlia?”
“I’m leaving,” she said simply. She had prepared herself to have this conversation ever since she had come up with this plan. She had the next stage of her life all mapped out. She would be moving to San Diego, with two jobs lined up to pay her way through college—no way did she feel she deserved to have her parents’ hard earned money pay her way after she had defied them and ruined her own life and her friends’—one of which would be cleaning offices at a rehab center that worked mainly with military men and women injured in combat. Her end goal was to become a physical therapist and maybe undo a little of the bad she had caused by helping those who were brave, strong and dedicated their lives to making the world a better place.
“You only graduated yesterday,” her father said.
Dahlia nodded. What was there to say? She knew yesterday had been her high school graduation, she’d been counting down to it for the past three years.
The back door opened and her oldest brother Abe walked through it. He caught sight of the suitcase, looked from her to their parents and back again. “You going somewhere, kiddo?” he asked in his gruff way.
“Yes, San Diego,” she replied.
Her mom gasped. “That’s so far. Couldn’t you have gone to college somewhere closer? Somewhere where you could have continued to live at home with us?”
Of course she could have.
But she didn’t want to.
She wanted to get as far away from here as she could so she was literally fleeing to the other side of the country.
The truth of the matter was, she just couldn’t spend another day here in this house, crushed by the weight of her mistakes. Still, she could see why this would be surprising to her parents, she hadn't stepped foot off their land since she was brought back here after her brothers and the FBI rescued her. She couldn’t face the looks of blame she was sure she would see on the town’s residents, so she had refused to leave and no one had ever tried to make her.
Because they knew.
They knew what the town’s residents would say to her, and they agreed.
So, they had let her hide out here, finishing high school online, no proms or homecoming for her, not that she’d wanted them anyway.
All she wanted was to do the best she could to make up for her mistake that had gotten Alicia killed, Brynn maimed, and herself sexually assaulted.
“I don’t want to stay here, Mom,” she said simply. Her mom flinched, but Dahlia just shrugged, it was what it was, and truth be told, she was sure that once the shock wore off her parents would be glad to see her gone.
“You don’t need to run away, sweetheart,” her mom said, cautiously closing the space between them but not touching her. Her family had quickly learned that she did not like to be touched.
By anyone.
Not even her family.
Being touched always gave her a flashback to her assault and as was her pattern she avoided anything and everything that caused her pain.
“I’m going, Mom. I'm going to UCSD, I have two jobs lined up to pay for it, and I’ve already rented an apartment. I'm leaving, and I won't be coming back. Ever,” she added just to be clear.
Her mom’s face crumpled, but Dahlia refused to get sucked into staying here. She just couldn’t. She wasn’t trying to hurt her family—goodness knows she’d done enough of that to last a lifetime—it was just that she absolutely could not remain here. If she did, she was terrified she would slowly waste away until her only option left was to take her own life.
She’d thought about it a lot, especially in the early days after her assault, but in the end, she could never go through with it because if she did, she could never make up for the mistakes she’d made and the damage she’d caused. The only way to do that was to live, to help others.
“Sweetheart, I wish you could forgive yourself.” Mom grabbed her and dragged her into a tight hug, one Dahlia struggled to return. “You made one little youthful mistake, baby. What happened wasn’t your fault. Can't you find a way to forgive yourself?”
The answer to that was simple.
No.
She couldn’t.
She didn’t bother saying it because all four people in the room already knew that she wouldn’t ever forgive herself for what she’d done.
Carefully, she stepped out of her mother’s embrace and looked at the clock on the wall. “I have to go, my flight is at twelve.”
Tears in her eyes, her mom nodded. “Dad and I will drive you to the airport.”
“That’s not necessary, I'm taking a cab,” she said.
“Dahlia,” her mom looked aghast.
“I’m taking a cab,” she said firmly.
“Like Hell you are,” Abe said. “If you don’t want Mom and Dad to take you then I’ll drive you.”
