5

Little Toy Bikers and a Woman on the Run

Chapter 74 Hunted

Jax looked at Scarlett shocked by her words. Her ex-fiancé having a girlfriend that disappeared and another who was found in pieces wasn't a good omen for Scarlett's marital future with him.

"You think he killed her?"

"Yes. The cutting up of the body while she was still alive is exactly the kind of thing that he would do."

Scarlett's face was deathly pale. She couldn't tell him why she was so sure that her ex had been the one to cut up his former fiancée. There might come a time in the future, but she couldn't tell him yet.

"What do you think happened to his fiancée?"

"I don't know. Her parents filed a missing persons report, but the investigation went no where. I hope that she's running from him and her parents filed the missing persons report so it would look like they don't know where she is."

"It's too bad your stepdad didn't learn all this before you got involved with him."

"He feels very guilty about that. My ex had a high level government job, so I knew the guy was a crook on some level; I just didn't think it went as far as murder."

Jax chuckled.

"You are right about the high level government job and being a crook. The two go hand in hand a lot of the time."

"I was out of my mind with fear when my dad told me."

Scarlett's words understated her reaction. Her hands actually shook so hard she dropped the phone. Her stomach was in knots and she couldn't eat for almost a week. Even now, she still felt overwhelmed with fear when she thought about him.

"It's different because he has money. I don't have to just look for him. He will hire a team to come after me and kidnap me. He'll keep me and torture me until I'm dead or he's tired of it. Then he'll kill me. Or maybe he'd sell or give me to a sex trafficking ring. I can imagine him watching me being raped on video.

"I can't let him take me alive. That's why I need to have a gun with me at all times."

For the first time since he met her, he saw the lighthearted happy girl in the red Corvette vanish and a scared, vulnerable woman appear.

"What did you do?"

"My father and I thought that I could change my behavior and make him want to break off the engagement. We thought he only killed when he got dumped. I tried to be as annoying as possible, but it didn't work. He just got angry and now that I knew what happened to those two girls, I was too scared to continue to provoke him.

"Around this time, I started trying to find a way out. He didn't amass his fortune working for the government. I knew he had to be making money illegally in his legal business. I was right, but the evidence wasn't hard enough to prove it.

"I could have called a news conference and made the charges with minimal proof. I thought about doing that, but he has so much money and power, I knew that he would still win. He would say that I was unstable and he would produce records that would back that up. Everyone has a price and he would find it.

"He would pay doctors that I'd never seen in my life to say that I was being treated for a variety of mental problems and they would say they couldn't reveal more because of the privacy laws. When you have enough money and power, you can reinvent someone's past. I would disappear and there might have been suspicion that he was behind it, but he'd get through it and I'd be tortured or dead."

"Is Scarlett your real name?"

"It's a family nickname I had when I was little. He doesn't know it. When I was born, I had thick black hair and green eyes. My mother loved the book "Gone With the Wind" and I had the same hair and eye color as the heroine, so she nicknamed me Scarlett."

"How long has it been?"

"Four years."

"Have you thought about killing him?"

"Many times. The problem is he always has security with him. I thought about poisoning him. I didn't think I could get away with it. My final plan was to get out of marrying him."

"You were a runaway bride."

"No, I was a bride escaping. He always had security around me. I know they would have stopped me leaving him. As the wedding date got closer and closer, I had a feeling that I wasn't going to live through the honeymoon."

"Were you pretending that nothing was wrong?"

"Yeah, it was the hardest thing I ever had to do. Every time he touched me, I wanted to throw up. About two weeks before the wedding, I told him that I thought we should be apart until the wedding. That helped because I didn't have to have sex with him anymore, but I still had security guarding me."

"How did you get away?"

"My father and I faked a big huge fight a couple of days before the wedding. We were getting married in Florida and most of the people I knew lived in Texas. My father and my best friend were the only two guests for my side. With the fight, I was down to just my maid of honor. I told him that I wanted to be alone in the limo ride to the chapel because I wanted to savor that moment and think about how happy I was to be his bride.

"I had been complaining about nausea for a couple of weeks. I made myself throw up a couple of times. I told the limo driver that I needed ginger ale, crackers and tissues. He had to stop and get them for me. I couldn't go into the store in my big, fluffy wedding gown and veil.

"As soon as he went into the store, I got out of the limo and into a car where my father was waiting for me. We changed cars a couple of times and of course I changed clothes.

"He was standing at the altar waiting for me in front of his friends and business associates. He would have been humiliated when the driver called to tell him that I wasn't in the car.

"Those first few days were terrifying beyond belief. My father and I took every precaution we could think of including changing our appearance."

"Do you know what he told people when you didn't show up?"

"He said that I had been troubled and he feared for my safety. He then asked for privacy during this time. More news happened and this got forgotten by everyone except those involved in it."

Scarlett didn't tell him everything because she would fall apart. There were some things that were too horrible to ever tell.