Free Silent Daughter 3: Owned by Linnea May, Stella Noir Page A

shoulders and looks at me with the sweetest horror and worry I have ever seen in anyone’s face.
    “That’s a lot of questions at once,” I try to joke, but she just shakes her head.
    “I haven’t even started, trust me,” she says. “I’m going to call the police! And an ambulance.”
    She wants to get up, but I hold her back. “You can’t do that.”
    She frowns at me.
    “Leonard, get over yourself!” she says. “I’m not going to wait until this maniac wakes up and let you bleed to death in the meantime.”
    “What will you tell them?” I ask. “About you being here.”
    She hesitates. “What do you think I should tell them?”
    “Robbery,” I breathe. “The guy broke in, wanted to rob-”
    Shit. My vision darkens, and I feel sick and dizzy.
    “It's okay,” I hear Liz's voice coming from afar. “Don't worry, Master.”
    The fact that she calls me Master makes me smile, even in my painful vertigo.
    “I’ll figure something out,” she promises.
    It's the last thing I hear her say before I lose consciousness.

Chapter 12

    LIZ / Epilogue
     
    Six months later
     
     
    If it weren’t for him, nothing would be the way it is today.
    Leonard is walking next to me, the tallest and most handsome man around. He wears his suit and bow tie like a perfect gentleman. Only the thin lines of his tattoo peeking out at the top of his collar are a reminder that he is not like everyone else around here.
    He is scarred, dark, and twisted in his own little way—and I love him for that.
    William Bishop's business and family name was saved from a total disaster thanks to Leonard. I am the only person who knows about that and it comes as no surprise that my mother and my sister still don't like him.
    Fair enough. I prefer it this way. I will never be able to please them or be the person they want me to be; why would I choose a man they approve of?
    We enter the church among a crowd of other guests, some of which are casting us curious looks as they must have heard the stories. The story of how I ran away from home and was saved by Leonard who found me running around by myself more than a week after my disappearance and took me in and tried to convince me to return to my family, just as that crazy bastard broke into his house.
    How anyone could believe that story is beyond me, but they did. My family asked me once where I had spent the week, and I told them that I went to a motel upstate before I drove back but was unwilling to return home just yet. I told them that Leonard ran into me and found me in a confused state, only taking me with him because I strongly refused to go home.
    It is a strange story, but not too strange for my family and the police to believe. Besides, the entire neighborhood was too busy coping with the fact that some crazy guy with a gun—a man who was wanted by the police, no less—broke into this paradise of bourgeois boredom and tried to kill one of them.
    I’m the only person who knows why that guy, Charlie, went after Leonard because he told me everything. But for everyone else, this was just a random coincidence. He could have broken into any house, but he chose Leonard’s because it is so remote from most of the others. A simple robbery attempted by someone who had nothing to lose.
    “So, here we are,” I whisper as we take our seats in a place that neither of us feel we belong to. “And you’re still here.”
    “I am,” he says, stroking along my upper thigh, dangerously close to a place where no hand should be seen inside a church.
    He told me what his plan was, all of it. I insisted on visiting him at the hospital every single day and every minute I could be with him.
    He was stubborn, boy, was he stubborn! He didn’t accept me being there and kept pushing me away, refusing to speak to me and reminding me that he is bad news.
    “Are you really?” I wanted to know, and that’s when he snapped and told me everything. About his former business, the kind of people he used to be