Recommence ° Edward Cullen[Rewriting]

[017]

Chapter Seventeen | A Torturous Place

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Alex had fell down quite the rabbit hole in preparation to find out exactly where the coordinates Luke had given her led. Inputting them into the computer gave her an empty clearing embedded in the Kootenai mountain range in Montana. The woman didn't want to go in the first place but knowing that it'd likely put her a few, steps ahead of the Organization, it was a sacrifice she knew she needed to make.

But in her research of the area, she'd discovered some disappearances in the surrounding Kootenai Falls and its trails. And then when she'd dug further into that, there were more in Idaho, spreading throughout the other neighbouring states where towns previously known had been wiped off the grid and not one person had said a thing about it.

All loose ends were tied, the vanishing of tens and hundreds of people gone entirely unnoticed, disregarded and only briefly mentioned before never even glanced at again.

The reporting columns in newspapers were small as if it was something so painfully insignificant and it was absurd to see, especially when the header of the paper was something as silly as a sports win.

All across America, thousands had been reported missing or declared dead with no body found in the past century. And among them were not only the murders that accumulated in Washington but there were kinds of the same calibre and severity occurring like clockwork in some areas. Animals, as vicious as they could be under the right circumstances, didn't act on a schedule.

Humans weren't on the menu for cougars and bears and certainly not so far outside of their territory. The chance of these constant attacks was less than likely but Alex supposed that, when fed to the public, there was no other way to classify the deaths of people ripped apart, gutted or completely drained of their blood. Not without causing massive panic.

And to do that, for a hundred years with thousands of disappearances, it required a certain level of government help. Some involvement that suddenly made Alex irrationally nervous considering who her adoptive father was and where he worked. She wanted to trust that he wasn't involved but the young woman had no way to guarantee that, especially on the grounds that her father could have no idea he was being manipulated—or had been.

Trust is for mortals. Weaklings. You cannot trust anyone.

Alex's instinct was to disagree despite a part of her inclined to utter similar words in agreement. After a past of constant betrayal, trust was a fickle thing but Charlie had never even hinted at a reason she shouldn't but if he didn't even know. . . it was an entirely different circumstance then.

"We'll see," she murmured as she packed a bag for the number of days she'd be gone—three if everything went well, which with her luck, was wholly up in arms.