Larger Than Life by Alison Kent (read the beginning after the end novel .txt) 📕

Now she was panicked. Her gaze darted from the gun to the door handle to the rocky terrain ahead. "Ed. What have you done?"

"It's the oldest cliche in the book, Nevada." He spun the wheel, brought the truck to a stop. "I've made sure since I can't have you, no man can."

He shut off the engine and ordered her out. Since he had a gun, she didn't argue. She shaded her eyes and crossed the rocky ground he indicated, climbing up a small incline, stumbling, catching herself on her knees and both hands, damning herself for not paying more attention to where she was going. And for getting in the truck with him at all.

It was on the downside of the rise that she saw the opening in the ground. A small limestone cave, not at all uncommon in this area, carved out over time by the trickle of water through the cap rock above. One she was quite sure she wasn't going to like being forced into.

Because that's exactly what happened. Ed took hold of her arm and urged her inside. She ducked her head, straightened once they'd made their way around the curve of the entrance tunnel. The main chamber was dry and dark.

Ed pulled a flashlight from his back pocket, switched it on, and tossed an arc of light over the room. Neva cried out. Lying bloodied and beaten on the other side was Holden Wagner.

And behind him, in the corner, three sets of human remains.

Holden Wagner looked like hell. He sat leaning against the opposite wall, his wrists and ankles tied together, as were hers, his body bound with ropes to a rocky outcropping, as was hers. His eyes were bloodshot, his cheek bruised, his mouth crusted with dried blood.

The face of his expensive watch had cracked in a star-burst pattern. His shirt and pants had both been ripped in more than one place. But it was the expression on his face, the eerie acceptance of his fate at Ed's hands, that frightened her the most. He was beaten. He'd given up. He'd lost his fight and his will. He was just as numb as she was.

And how could she be anything else after listening earlier to Ed tell his story? How the first time she'd blown him off, he'd taken it in stride. How the second time was a bigger knock to his ego. How the third time left him crushed, the fourth fumbling for answers.

Then came the fifth time, the last time, the one that set him on a path to settle what he thought was an uneven score. She shouldn't have been surprised to find that a man would think of sex as a scale for weighing a friendship. Not when she'd known men who'd used it as a weapon, others who'd thought of it as a game.

But Ed had surprised her. His bitterness, his rage. His ridiculously misdirected sense of entitlement, which she'd thought all this time was simply Ed the control freak demanding his right to be in charge. Instead, she'd been seeing hints of Ed the psychopath.

She couldn't believe the lengths he'd reached to get back at her. He was the one who had whisked away the three missing girls. They were pawns, disposable, the first step in his plan. He'd known she would worry—over what had happened to them, over the possible leak in her network.

He'd counted on that worry. He'd wanted her on edge. Her emotional state guaranteed she'd be suspicious of Holden when the attorney came snooping around. Ed had been responsible for that, too. Dredging up enough of Holden's past to shake him. Sending him in her direction, looking for clues. Making sure their paths crossed repeatedly.

It was all a setup. A simple case of a man scorned. He had used her cause to ruin her life, claiming her focus on her cause had been the ruin of his. It was a revenge he found fitting but a full circle she found made little sense. She had tired herself out and failed miserably trying to get from there to here as he had.

She leaned against the rubble where he'd tied the ropes that bound her midsection, pulled her knees to her chest, and wondered when she'd quit crying, only realizing it now because she had no more tears. She had never in her life been this exhausted, and wondered if she looked as beaten up, beaten down as Holden.

On the opposite wall, he stirred. "You thought it was me, didn't you? That I'd discovered your network. That I'd taken back the girls."

She did not want to have this conversation. She did not want to think about Ed killing the girls, dumping their bodies, planning all this time to blame her and implicate Holden. What type of wool had he pulled over her eyes to blind her? God, but she'd been such a fool!

She answered Holden's question with a question. "What network?"

"The one Dr. Hill told me about," Holden said, and tried to sit straighter, groaning, grimacing, drawing a breath in sharply. "I knew you had one. That you were taking the girls out of Earnestine. I just never could figure out how you got in, or how they knew to find you."

Tears welling again, Neva glanced toward the mouth of the cave through which Edward Bronson Hill, a man she'd called friend, a man who'd been an associate, a man whose bed she'd once shared, had left. He had an afternoon house call to make, he'd told them. No doubt part of his elaborate alibi before he returned to do them in. At least his absence gave her time to think, to figure a way out.

Or it would if Holden would stop talking. "I don't know why you thought I would kill those girls," he said. "I've never tried to do anything but give them the best lives they could have. That's what I was brought to Earnestine to do."

She rolled