Vacant Horizons Read online

  For Niki Gray. The amazing person who has loved Jaxton Whitlock since Save Riley and have looked forward to this story since I announced it. I hope I make you proud!

  So torch every banner,

  Every hope of surviving.

  This storm is breaking.

  ~ Idols and Anchors

  © Parkway Drive

  This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental.

  VACANT HORIZONS

  First edition. April 21, 2015.

  Copyright © 2015 Yolanda Olson.

  Written by Yolanda Olson.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Copyright Page

  Vacant Horizons

  Prologue

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Eternity | Meagan Moyer

  Prologue

  CHAPTER ONE

  Vacant Horizons

  Prologue

  I want to tell you a secret about monsters. Monsters, real ones, don’t hide in corners or in the dark. They don’t live under your bed and they don’t sit in the closet waiting to grab you when you reach in for your jacket. The scariest monster is the one that walks past you on the street in broad daylight. The one that stands in front of you in line at the grocery store. The one that engages you in polite conversation when you’re grabbing a coffee on the way to work. The one that seems to start appearing everywhere you happen to be, even when you change your routine because it’s becoming too obvious.

  The worst thing about knowing that monsters exist, is accepting that you are one. Not that he has fully accepted it yet, not that I have. But when you’re faced with being held captive by a monster, you learn to adjust. You learn their routine, you learn to gain their trust, and you learn to get out once you’ve been taught everything you need to know.

  Of course it all comes with rules; the first is, don’t get caught, the second is only take what you are sure you can destroy, the third is don’t get sloppy, and lastly, there’s the warning; call when you have found yourself in a predicament that only your mentor can get you out of. But if you do call, expect and accept the punishment for your transgressions.

  As I adjust the large duffel bag on my back and walk down the boat ramp, I think of how this started for me; with Riley. God she was so beautiful and I wanted her so bad and of course I thought she wanted me too. It turned out to be a trap though; she handpicked me and served me up to her mentor on a silver platter. Her deranged, somewhat caring, and completely sexy (if you like that sort of thing) mentor, Jaxton Whitlock.

  Hurling the duffel bag over the side of my small boat, Tempest, I think of how they were together. It was like a tragic symphony that the more it played out the more you feared for everyone involved, but the melody was so beautiful that you wanted to hear more of it; you needed to hear more of it.

  Pulling myself into the boat, I walk toward the hull and slide my key into the ignition. I bring the boat to life and race toward the Coral Sea.

  Yes, I’m still in Australia, but I left New South Wales when the opportunity was granted to me so graciously by my mentor. He stays in Newcastle and I stay in Rockhampton. So far I’ve managed to keep to myself and am damn good at what I’ve been taught to do. I haven’t broken any of the rules yet. I work hard to make sure that I never have to run into him again, but one thing he said to me before I left him was true.

  Once you’re on your own, it becomes a carnal hunger. Something you need to do in order to survive, in order to keep your head straight. What I do, what we do, is more addictive than any drug in the world. The sexual euphoria of it throughout and especially once it’s over ... it’s not something I can put into words.

  The wind whipped my hair back and forth across my face. It wasn’t completely purple anymore because once he decided that I was Riley, he used bleach to strip it. Not hair bleaches mind you, kitchen floor scrubbing bleach. It almost all fell out and I damn near went blind because it, but I wound up shaving it all off and letting it all grow back in. I convinced him to let me dye some of my hair back to purple even though he was still convinced that I was Riley.

  “Riley doesn’t have purple hair, silly girl,” he had said.

  A half an hour later, I slowed the boat down and turned off the engine. It still made my skin crawl to have him think I was someone I wasn’t. It made me sick to my stomach, the things he did to me, because before Jaxton forced himself on me repeatedly, I had never had sex with a man. I wanted to have sex with Riley.

  I grunted as I lifted the duffle bag and rolled it over the side and into the Coral. With a sigh, I lay down on the floor of the boat and crossed my arms behind my head. One thing he taught me was to wait for at least an hour to make sure that the bag deposited had sank to the bottom, if it floated, I would have to call him for help and I’d sooner jump into the sea and drag it down to the sea floor myself.

  I closed my eyes for a moment as the boat rocked gently back and forth thinking of Riley. That poor girl, how she died was absolutely terrible, but the fact that she loved him, actually loved him, toward the end was horrifying. I mean I guess if you were into that sort of thing, Jaxton was quite beautiful. Tall, well built, light brown eyes, blonde straight hair. Forceful, evil, manipulative, demanding, commanding, devious. And now I’m just like him.

  I can’t completely fault him; he was a product of what was done to him, and now I was a product of what he had done to me. Quite honestly, even though I never admitted it to him, after the first few goes, I actually found myself enjoying being with him. Partially because when he had good days and didn’t call me by any name, he seemed almost normal. The days he did call me Riley and take me into his Alone Room (we never fucked in his bed, he said that privilege died when she did) I learned to be able to tolerate him inside of me. So much so, that my marks were all men and they all resembled him one way or another. I was having mentor issues and these men were paying the price for his sins.

  That would all change if I could just get the hell out of Australia. I would leave my home and start new again and he’d never find me.

  My cell phone rang startling me out of my fantasy of escape and back to reality.

  “Hello?” I asked.

  “Is it done?”

  “Yes sir,” I whispered shakily.

  “Good. Then get home once it’s gone.”

  He hung up. I put the phone down with shaky hands wondering when Jaxton’s voice would stop giving me nightmares.

  I knew that the only way to make those feelings go away would be to kill the monster. Put him down like the animal he was and run.

  I sat up and looked over the side, the bag was gone and I went back to the hull and turned on the engine. As I turned the boat around, I found myself on a new mission. No one was able to save Riley and I knew I couldn’t save myself unless I got rid of him.

  Riley called me Purple.

  Jaxton calls me Riley.

  My friends call me Tempest.

  But my name is Tuesday Zeric. I want to be free, truly free and I’ve been bred to kill my way to freedom.

  One

  Yawning, I closed the door of the hotel room behind me. 246 days since I had earned my freedom and last seen him. Last week’s dump was especially sweet, because the man looked more like him than the others had and because the monster inside of me grew a little more each day. Today was a new day and I decided to spend the day on Bondi Beach. I had driven almost seventeen hours straight to Byron Bay to play with the exquisite fire of being so dangerously close to him. But I was a curious perso
n and I heard him mumbling at times about Bondi Beach and I wanted to see it with my own eyes. Not to mention, after extensive research I found that he was out of the country for the next few months. Probably grabbing another girl, I thought shaking my head.

  But first, I would get some well-deserved sleep. I had driven from the dump straight here because I knew I would be wired enough for it. I stretched before I dropped face down onto the stiff bed and closed my eyes.

  I restlessly rolled all over the bed, backward and forward, trying to get comfortable enough to sleep, but the package in my bag was burning a hole into my thoughts. It was from him, he had given it to me the day I earned my freedom. He told me there was no time restriction on when I could open it. The only rule attached to the package was to open it alone and enjoy what was inside. It was his parting gift to me which he told me he would take back if he ever had to clean up one of my messes.

  I rolled onto my back; arms and legs splayed out, and groaned loudly. This wasn’t how I wanted to start my vacation. Sitting up on the bed, I crossed my legs underneath me and stared at the bag that held the gift. Considering who it was that gave it to me, for all I knew there was a severed head in the fucking box.

  With a sigh, I got off of the bed and picked up the bag. I grabbed my car keys and went out to the car, where I unlocked the trunk and tossed the bag in. I decided the best way not to think about it would be not to see it.

  That goes for a lot of things in life, doesn’t it? Out of sight, out of mind? I wish it was that easy with what I went through. I didn’t have any physical scars, but my emotional ones ran so deep that even a team of world renowned archaeologists wouldn’t be able to excavate the real me back to the surface again.

  “C’est la vie,” I mumbled to myself as I climbed back onto the bed.

  I couldn’t fall asleep. Not that I was particularly tired anymore, but I knew I needed the rest. Unfortunately, when I closed my eyes, I saw his face; strong, beautiful, determined, vacant of feeling human emotion. Ever since Riley died accidentally at his hands, Jax had lost all sense of anything she had brought out of him. He had regressed back into being a mentor; he had regressed back into being a monster. I think if Riley had survived, if she had killed me like he instructed her too, he would’ve had a chance at a normal life. Or at least at however normal life could have been for him at that point.

  I opened my eyes and stared at the ceiling. I could see it so clearly again. Jaxton had come down to the Alone Room and told me that I needed to come with him. He punched some codes into the front door and told me to go straight to the back of the property and get some kindling together and to start a fire in the pit. He told me that if I tried to escape he would slit my throat and let me bleed out when he found me. Out of fear, I did as he told me.

  Moments after I had the fire going, I saw him coming toward me carrying a lifeless body, but I couldn’t tell who it was until he tossed her onto the burning wood. He dropped to the grass a few feet away and put his face in his hands. I could almost swear that I saw his shoulders shaking, but I wasn’t brave enough to get close enough to check; or keep looking at him.

  Instead, as the smell of burning flesh started to drift toward me, my curiosity got the better of me and I walked toward the makeshift pyre, a feeling of dread deep inside of me. Unless he had caught someone else in a very short amount of time, it had to be—

  Riley? I thought timidly as I got as close as I would dare.

  “Get away from the fire, Riley,” Jax suddenly said behind me.

  I turned around and looked at him. He had a stern look on his face and his eyes were red, but I didn’t see any tears on his face.

  “I’m not Riley,” I replied nervously. “I’m Tempest.”

  Jaxton scoffed as he got to his feet and came over to me. He put a strong hand around my arm, pulling me away from the fire, “Don’t try to trick me. I know who you are.”

  My body started to tremble when I came to the realization that any ounce of sanity he had left, any hope for redemption at all in him, was lying in the fire. I was afraid to ask him how Riley died because he didn’t seem to understand that I wasn’t her.

  “Should we scatter the ashes on the beach? Or should we just bury them, Riley?” he asked, glancing down at me.

  I remember not being able to look up at him at that point. The fear that had washed over me was paralyzing and if I said the wrong thing, I could just as easily have been tossed into that fire.

  By some unknown act of mercy, a knock at the door disrupted the memories of watching Riley’s body burn. I sighed and climbed off the bed determined to thank whoever it was for bringing me back to a current state of reality. A state where Jaxton hadn’t lost his sanity, a state where I was still Tempest, and a state where I had nothing to be afraid of.

  But when I got to the door and put my hand on the handle, I felt something was wrong. No one knew I was here, so who could it possibly be knocking on my door? I decided to dismiss it at room service and undid the chain before pulling the door open a crack to peek into the hallway.

  I raised an eyebrow when I saw that no one was there. Against my better judgment, I pulled the door open and stepped out, tripping over a small brown box. I stared down at it like it was a venomous snake and jumped back into the room.

  There was a purple string wrapped around it which was almost the exact color of my hair. My arms involuntarily crossed over my chest as I continued to stare down at the box before I finally took a deep breath and moved to retrieve it. Closing the door and setting the chain back in its place, I walked over to the bed and sat the box down. Sitting next to it, I stared at it for what felt like an eternity. Just do it, I said to myself.

  As quickly as I could, I pulled the string away and ripped the box open. Inside was purple tissue and a small card with my name—no Riley’s name written on it. With shaking hands I picked up the card and turned it over.

  I miss you.

  That was all it said. Simple and endearing; only I knew that the person that wrote it had no capability of being endearing.

  I tossed the card onto the floor and began to dig through the purple tissue to see what it was exactly that he had left for me. Underneath the tissue was a set of Polaroid pictures and they were all of me. From outside when I arrived to the hotel, from inside the lobby where I had checked in, and from down the hall before I disappeared into my room.

  It became apparent at that moment that Jaxton hadn’t left Australia like I thought he had. He was here in Bondi Beach. And he was making it clear that he was still watching my every move.

  Two

  I guess I can say I had become kind of pyromaniac in my time with Jax. He told me that burning things usually disposed of everything that needed to be disposed of. Usually.

  So as I sat in the bathroom, with the pictures burning in the bathtub, I wondered what of them, if anything, would survive. I knew there would be ashes, but would they be soft or plastic? Would that damned smell ever go away or would I have to go to the store and buy some scented candles? How could I have possibly gotten it wrong that he had fucking left Australia and gotten into his hometown while he was here too?

  I felt a bit odd as I watched the pictures burn. One thing he had told me after he had poured accelerant onto Riley’s body was that “you should always burn all that you love.”

  I didn’t love these pictures; I didn’t. Instead of taking a nice relaxing vacation, I was being watched by him and I knew that he would force me into taking a new victim. If I didn’t he would kill me; this was something he had made abundantly cleared. The weird thing was that Jax had stopped taking when I started. He would watch what I did and intervene if he felt I was doing something wrong. In a way, it felt like he was living the sexual tortures and the degradations through me.

  I have to get out of this room, but I can’t risk him seeing me. I have to get the hell out of Bondi Beach and I have to do it sooner rather than later.

  I turned the shower on and let it put out t
he small fire. I stood up from where I had been sitting on the edge of the tub and used one of my feet to push the pile of wet ashes toward the drain before turning off the water and using a towel to clean my foot.

  Fuck, Tuesday. Fuck, fuck, fuck! I chanted to myself silently.

  I made my way into the bedroom and grabbed my unopened bag. I reached around the bed and grabbed my purse and glanced inside to make sure both of my phones were in there. The phone that I owned that told me I was free, and the phone that he had given me, to remind me that the freedom was a false reality.

  I made sure to power off mine and hid it in the zipper compartment. If he knew I had that phone, all bets would be off, and I’d be back in the Alone Room. Permanently.

  With one last glance around the room, I went back to the door and opened it as my body tensed up. I didn’t know if he was staying in the same place or if he had someone following me, which could also have been very plausible.

  I made my way into the hallway that was empty except for a young couple that was laughing and walking toward me. I was in such a hurry that I left the door open to my room and didn’t even care; let them take whatever they wanted, I just had to get the hell out of Bondi Beach.

  Keeping my head low, I walked past them quickly and practically ran down the ramp on the way to the front desk. When I saw the small line waiting for an available hotel representative, I was tempted to throw the key onto the table and run out.

  But I decided to be a good girl and wait in line. So ten minutes later, when I was standing against the desk impatiently tapping my fingers along the top, I can’t really say I was surprised to feel someone press against me. I wasn’t surprised when I saw two strong arms suddenly appear on either side of me and I wasn’t surprised when I saw the hands that had done so many terrible things to me come to rest on the desk top.

  “Hello,” he whispered brushing his lips against my right ear.