Dying for Love by Rita Herron Read Free Book Online Page A

blur. By the time she reached the outskirts of Slaughter Creek, she’d hoped to be calmer, but her emotions were on a roller coaster. She spotted the pond where children and families gathered to skate.
    Still reeling from her encounter with Ms. Lettie, she parked in front of the pond and sat hunched inside her coat. Two mothers helped their little girls tie their skates, then led them out onto the pond and stopped to show them how to balance.
    A little boy of about five raced across the ice like a pro, his bigger brother chasing him. Their mother waved, laughing at their antics.
    Her son would have been about that boy’s age.
    If he’d lived.
    But he hadn’t survived.
    She choked on a sob. Finding out she’d had a son and that she’d lost him was almost more than she could bear.
    If he’d survived and she’d gotten to keep him, what kind of mother would she have been? Would she have had the patience to teach him simple tasks? To reprimand him without being harsh? To soothe his worries at night?
    Or would her own neurosis have kept her from giving him the love he should have had?
    Another thought made her insides chill. Who was the baby’s father?
    She had no idea . . . She’d been drugged, locked away. Was he someone who worked at the hospital? One of the Commander’s men?
    Sickened at the thought, she swallowed back bile. How would she ever know?
    Maybe she could try hypnosis again . . .
    Or . . . the answers might be in her journals. But the alters had destroyed those . . .
    Hands shaking, she started the engine and drove to the graveyard where Ms. Lettie said her son was buried. It was the same cemetery where her parents, Papaw, and Gran had been laid to rest.
    Sadie had told her about Jake and Nick exhuming their sister’s grave there, that she’d supposedly been buried by their mother. But when they’d opened the casket, their sister hadn’t been inside.
    The Commander had made everyone think she was dead so he could put her in his experiment.
    Discovering that empty coffin, Jake and Nick decided to exhume their mother’s grave to verify that she had died, that the Commander hadn’t locked her away somewhere. Her body was in the grave, but they discovered she hadn’t died in childbirth like the Commander had claimed. The Commander had killed her and lied about that, too.
    Dead flowers littered the snowy ground, plastic ones swaying and fading in the weather, as she searched the tombstones for Mrs. Blackwood’s name. Fallen, dried leaves looked like ashes on the graves.
    She paused at the monument. It was obvious the grave had been disturbed.
    Arthur Blackwood had lied about his daughter Seven being buried just as he’d lied about so many other things.
    What if he’d lied about her son? Was he in that grave?

    John looked up from his desk at the TBI office, his eyes narrowing as Amelia Nettleton walked inside.
    The receptionist had alerted him that Amelia had requested to see him. Meanwhile, he’d done his research on her.
    Not that he didn’t recognize the name. Her face and story had been all over the news. Hell, he even had those pictures and files at home.
    But what was she doing at the office?
    He stood, his pulse kicking up as his gaze rested on her face. He’d seen her picture from Brenda Banks’s profile, and before that, when she’d been arrested for allegedly killing her grandfather.
    But he wasn’t prepared for the bolt of awareness that shot through him when he looked into her eyes. Mesmerizing, haunted eyes that reflected the strain of the horrific torture she’d endured.
    Eyes filled with pain and sadness as if she’d lost herself along the way.
    An artist’s eyes.
    He knew that from her profile as well. Had seen a few of the canvases she’d painted depicting the trauma. A dark bleak painting of Alcatraz. A portrait of herself chained inside a cell. A canvas of psychedelic colors reminiscent of the hallucinogens she’d been given.
    For a brief second he felt connected