Chapter 14 - The Reunion in the Shadows
The woman on the mattress flinched violently at the sudden, loud noise of the door breaking open, instinctively raising her incredibly thin, pale arms to shield her face from the light. She was wearing faded, oversized, sterile gray hospital scrubs. Her beautiful brown hair was severely matted and tangled, and she looked dangerously, heartbreakingly malnourished.
"Sarah?" Ethan whispered, his deep voice completely breaking into a ragged, agonizing sob as the heavy gun slipped uselessly from his trembling fingers, clattering onto the concrete floor.
The woman slowly, hesitantly lowered her frail arms. She looked up at the towering, broad-shouldered man standing in the doorway. The heavy, highly illegal sedatives they had been pumping into her veins for fourteen months made her vision blur, but the exact millisecond her eyes locked onto his face, the dark, suffocating fog completely shattered.
It wasn't a hallucination. It was her husband.
"Ethan?" Sarah gasped, her voice incredibly weak, raspy, and completely broken from disuse.
"Oh my God. Sarah," Ethan choked out, falling entirely to his knees on the freezing concrete floor. He crawled across the cell and pulled her fragile, trembling body incredibly tightly against his broad chest. He buried his face deep into her neck, weeping openly, entirely unashamed, holding onto her with the desperate, protective strength of a man who had finally found the missing half of his soul.
Sarah clung to his white dress shirt, her bony fingers gripping the fabric as if her entire life depended on it. She broke down into profound, hysterical, overwhelming tears, the sheer, impossible reality of her rescue finally washing away fourteen months of absolute, waking nightmare.
May you like
"I thought you left me," Sarah sobbed into his shoulder. "Corinne told me you signed the papers... she said you didn't want me anymore."
👉 What dark, apocalyptic promise will Ethan make to his traumatized wife about the woman who tortured her?
