So Damn Beautiful: Lost Sanctum (So Damn Beautiful, #3): So Damn Beautiful, #3

By A.E. Hodge

Kidnapped, beaten half-dead and delusional with fever, Meredith Banks awakes as a captive in a hellish compound somewhere in the desolate backcountry of the American southwest. Ever since she set off in pursuit of her son's kidnapper, the obsessive psychopath Christian Morgan, Meredith's ordinary life as a working single mom has been swallowed whole by an endless, surreal nightmare.

Turns out, finding her son was the easy part. It's getting him to safety that's the trouble. Now, her only hope of surviving, much less escaping with her son, is to bide her time and try to integrate into Christian's cult of brainwashed, kidnapped girls—but for that, she has to resist the brainwashing herself, and that's no easy task. For Christian is impossibly beautiful, charming as the Devil and twice as cunning. Meredith's greatest trial yet may be resisting the compulsion of her abductor's hypnotic smile. Her son, her sanity, and her soul depend on it.

Thus continues the epic horror-thriller trilogy SO DAMN BEAUTIFUL. The full serial includes:
1. So Damn Beautiful: The Lonely One
2. So Damn Beautiful: Children's Home 5
3. So Damn Beautiful: Lost Sanctum

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fiction Fugitive Select
• Release date: Feb 13, 2015
• ISBN: 9781507091609

Book preview

The Story So Far...

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This is the third part of a serial novel. The previous parts are available worldwide in eBook and paperback:

So Damn Beautiful: The Lonely One (Part I)

So Damn Beautiful: Children’s Home 5 (Part II)

Meredith Banks is a 31-year-old former model living in Detroit, working as a legal secretary and struggling to raise her son Troy in the wake of her husband’s death.

When Meredith sleeps with Christian Morgan, a very handsome young intern at her law firm, she thinks it’s a one-night stand. But Christian has much bigger plans.

Meredith’s world is turned upside down when her son Troy disappears—kidnapped, she suspects, by Christian.

The police, led by Detective Antwon Lee, advise Meredith to leave the detective work to them; but she can’t just sit around while Troy is out there.

Soon she finds herself on a desperate one-woman quest that pits her against the cops, a crime syndicate, and Christian himself, who’s more dangerous than she ever imagined. To make matters worse, along the way, she learns she’s pregnant with his child as a result of their one-night stand. She intends to abort, but lacks the funds and dares not risk any delay until Troy is safe.

When her amateur sleuthing lands her in trouble, she’s forced to kill one of Christian’s friends in self-defense: a surly thug named Reggie Green, who works for a local sex trafficking gang. Now, wanted for Reggie’s murder, she flees her home, following Christian’s trail to Colorado.

There she meets a college student named Glen, and learns that Glen’s fiancée, Melinda Swan, also disappeared four years ago. Ever since then, Glen has been researching similar cases of lost girls across the country, obsessively looking for Melinda. Together, Glen and Meredith come to believe Christian is behind all of these disappearances.

The two of them track Christian to Shadebrook, a half-abandoned ghost town in the Nevada desert. With the help of Frankie, a local bartender and Vietnam vet, they begin to unravel dark secrets from Christian’s past.

But Shadebrook has secrets of its own. The entire town is under the control of the same organized crime group that employed Reggie Green, a powerful, international sex trafficking gang called the Syndicate.

As it happens, the Syndicate is looking for Christian, too—and they think Meredith knows where he is. They come for Meredith and Christian armed to the teeth, led by ruthless German assassin Gunther. Gunther bears a personal grudge against Christian, and will do anything to Meredith to make her talk.

Meredith’s only hope of finding Christian is to find his real name in the records of Shadebrook Children’s Home, an abandoned orphanage once used as a front for abusing and trafficking children, where Christian spent time as a child. After escaping Gunther and his men in a violent gunfight that costs Frankie her life, Meredith and Glen find their way into the Black Room, a hypnosis chamber deep under the Children’s Home—where the Syndicate turned children into slaves.

There in the darkness, as bizarre hypnosis videos play, a stranger in a gas mask ambushes the two of them, killing Glen and tranquilizing Meredith. Meredith thinks the masked stranger is Christian, caught up with her at last.

But when the stranger removes the mask, it’s Glen’s missing fiancée, Melinda Swan, who promises as Meredith fades out, We’ll be with Christian. Soon.

Chapter 1: Last Woman Standing

I’m lying at the bottom of my own grave.

Daylight glares down from the opening above, cutting through my fevered dreams. I try to will it away. It’s so much easier, drifting alone in the timeless, painless void of unconsciousness.

Still, without my consent, awareness returns in waves. A musty, summer-basement smell assails my nose, cloying and acrid. The pain becomes focused.

I open my eyes into the light.

The pit isn’t a grave, after all; not yet, anyway. It looks like a short mine shaft. Wood beams brace rough, earthen walls, lumpy with lichen and drippy rock deposits. The pit slopes some eight or ten feet up to an opening surrounded by the tops of high pine trees. The sun peeks through their nettles, and I squint in the light.

Where the hell am I?

I try to sit up, but I’m too weak to even move. My whole body is enveloped in pain. Whoever dumped me in this pit must’ve done a real number on me, too.

I try to piece it together. I remember sneaking into the Children’s Home in Shadebrook, in search of Christian’s records. I remember the storm of gunfire when Gunther found us, tearing up my friend Frankie with Uzis. And I remember the awful Black Room under the Children’s Home: the restraint chairs, the sex toys, the cameras.

But after that? What happened in the Black Room, and how did I get here—wherever here is? It’s like there’s a glaze over the memories, a protective film that keeps me from opening and inspecting them too closely.

All I know for sure is pain, everywhere—my face, my fingers, my feet, and everything in between.

Meredith, a deep voice says, somewhere beside me. You don’t got to worry about how you got here now.

With great effort and pain, I turn my head. Max?

My dead husband leans casually against the wall of the pit. He looks in the peak of health, his hair shaved short, his brown eyes bright, his dark face smooth and full and handsome. He wears a blue Detroit Lions T-shirt and a sad smile. "All you gotta worry about is getting up again. You got to get up, honey, or you’re gonna die down here."

So? I murmur. Then I’ll be with you.

Max transforms before my eyes, skin shrinking tight against his skull, eyes sinking into deep sockets, dying of cancer all over again, in seconds.

You got unfinished business, honey.

No, Max. This time let me stay with you.

You have to keep going. Keep moving forward.

It’s too late. I don’t think I can go any further.

I told you before, back then. You’re stronger than you know. It’s time you found out just how strong you are. You made a promise, Mare-Bear.

To me, too. Glen sits against the wall opposite Max, his slender face white as gravestone. He clutches his red, wounded abdomen, holding in his guts. You promised you’d find Melinda. Give her a proper burial.

Melinda. Somehow the name plucks at my memory—

For whatever reason, you’re his favorite.

—but I only feel nauseous thinking about it.

Please, Mom. Troy stands at the mouth of the pit, looking down at me, a little silhouette against the slate gray sky. You have to get up.

Troy? The sight of my son reaches deep enough through the grogginess to alarm me. Troy! I reach for the vision with a feeble hand, all five fingertips wrapped in dirty brown gauze. Dragging a body that’s stiff and uncooperative, I manage to pull myself with my elbow to the sloping wall of the pit, and try to scramble up the sides.

But the sides of the pit are far too steep, the walls far too high. I slide back down, breathing hard and wincing. Waves of suffocating heat alternate with sudden chills. The pain is paralyzing, I feel vaguely nauseous, and my black polyester fatigues are glued to my skin with sweat and dried blood.

When I look up again, Troy is gone. Glen, Max, all of them have vanished.

Shock and fever depersonalize me, and I can almost see myself, like someone in a movie, alone at the bottom of this damp, stinking pit. My long limbs lie at haphazard angles. What used to be a pretty face is now a purple, swollen mess, eyes black, cheeks caked in blood. My once-luxuriant red hair is crudely bobbed and dyed brunette.

The fingers on my left hand are wrapped in dirty gauze, covering the bloody nail beds where the Syndicate torturer Hadad ripped my fingernails off, one by one. The gunfight at the Children’s Home left my ear permanently ringing and my shoulder grazed by a passing bullet, the wound now wrapped in bloody bandages.

Last, but far from least, my right wrist is bound in a splint. Pain radiates from my swollen forearm, and it hurts to close my hand. I don’t remember how I got this injury. It must have happened in the Black Room, the hypnosis chamber under the Children’s Home. Glen and I found a video there, recorded over with a message by Christian.

But what was the message? And what happened after we watched it? Why can’t I remember? I clutch my head.

As I try to get up again, something jingles at my feet.

The shaft of my combat boot has been shoved down, and to my surprise, I’m wearing a steel manacle around my ankle. A thick key ring is soldered to it, and on the ring is a single brass key. The key is too big to fit the tiny keyhole in the manacle, and anyway it can’t reach the hole from the angle allowed by the soldered key ring.

I give a half-hearted try, but the manacle is clearly too tight to slide off over my foot.

Effectively, this strange anklet is attached permanently.

What the hell? I mutter.

Not only did someone tend to my wounds before they dumped me in this pit, they also attached this manacle.

No, this isn’t a grave at all. Whoever left me here must have meant for me to live. But why?

For some reason, it’s a disquieting thought.

I have to focus. Like Max said, I don’t have time to worry about how or why I’m here. I just have to get out. This pit isn’t a grave, but it could become my grave if I don’t do something quick. Even in my stupor, I can tell how badly I need medical attention.

I look around carefully. The steep, uneven walls are impossible to climb in my state. Though the sides of the pit are pocked with little nooks and openings from water runoff, I see nothing I can use as a hand or foothold.

Then I notice something, nestled back in one of the holes in the wall. Squinting, I reach inside cautiously and drag out a brown leather backpack, hand-sewn with crude, red stitching. As I slide it free, the heavy pack falls to the earth at my feet.

The dim, rational part of my mind warns me to be alert. I kneel over the bag and open the drawstring slowly with clumsy, bandaged fingers.

Something gleams inside. I pull out a tin canteen, a compass, a bundle of rope, and a long, serrated hunting knife in a leather sheath.

Only when I drop the empty backpack on the ground do I notice the envelope taped to the front. In red ink and a spidery, unfamiliar hand, a single word is written:

MEREDITH

A fresh chill moves through me. I pluck the envelope off the bag and struggle to open it with my teeth.

Inside is a formal invitation, printed on folded bond paper—the expensive, cardstock kind that my boss Anderson used to yell at me if I used for taking notes, in some life that now seems far away and historical.

On the front of the card are the words, You’re Invited! The flowing, fancy script is superimposed over clipart of fireworks and balloons.

With a dream-like sense of unreality, I open the card.

Typed across both sides of the interior is a manifesto in bold, blocky text:

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Congratulations, Meredith Banks!

You’ve been selected as a contestant in our little game.

To win, defeat the other contestants and use the compass to find your way to Sanctum. The doors of Sanctum will only open for the contestant who holds all three keys.

You’ll notice the keys are attached rather permanently. To collect all the keys and win the game, you’ll have to cut the other two contestants into little pieces.

Only the last woman standing gains access to Sanctum.

These are the rules. Only by killing will you survive. Refuse to play, and you die. Cheat, and you die. Leave the arena, and you die. Enter Sanctum without all the keys, and you die. Try to cooperate, and you die.

Play the game, collect the keys, reach Sanctum... and you survive. Have fun, good luck and may the best girl live!

Signed,

The Game Master

As I read, a slow rage grows inside me. I glare at the cuff around my ankle which holds the brass key. Then I kick my way out of the combat boot to reveal my slender foot, wrapped in bloody bandages. I try to yank the cuff down past my ankle, pulling till the steel shreds flesh and draws blood. It’s no use. The note is right. Short of hacking off my foot at the ankle, there’s no escaping the cuff.

I give up with a grunt. "Game Master, I mutter. Christian must be behind this. I don’t remember how, but he must have captured me back at the Children’s Home. What the hell am I supposed to do now?"

Step one is still getting outta here, says a deep voice. I look over. My husband has returned, oscillating under his T-shirt between health and sickness, his arms and chest inflating and deflating with the flickering unreality of a dream. I know he’s only an illusion, a manifestation of my fever, but still I’m comforted by his presence.

Nodding, I go to the pile of supplies on the musty floor. I take the length of rope and look up at the mouth of the pit, considering my options. Getting out will be an enormous task in itself, almost more than seems worth it. It would be so much easier to lie back and die.

Troy’s small, curly-haired head peeks over the lip of the pit’s opening again, limned in light, like an angel. He smiles down. Come on, Mom. I know you can do it. You always take care of everything.

I swallow. My mouth feels very dry. Finally I nod with a weary sigh.

I can’t tell how long it takes. I fade in and out, talking to visions that I know in a vague way can’t really be here. My maimed hands work slowly, deliberately. Sweat beads and dribbles down my brow.

Eventually I arrive at the finished product. I’ve tied the backpack to the end of the rope, shoving the long hunting knife through the bag to form an anchor. Since my right wrist is splinted and engulfed in pain, my left hand is now my good hand, despite the damage to my fingertips. Using it, I throw the bag at the pit opening. It takes several tries before I manage to hook something outside the pit. The rope pulls taut when I test my weight on it.

With a deep breath, I plant my feet on the wall and start to pull myself. Just gripping the rope with my right hand sends blinding pain to my splinted wrist, but I clench my teeth and climb anyway, inch by inch, to the opening.

Just outside the pit, the backpack is lodged under the root of a pine tree. I drag myself that far, eyes bleary in the light. Then I collapse, my legs still dangling into the hole behind me, my arm wrapped around the tree root as I catch my breath.

Come on, Mom, Troy says in my ear.

Using the low branches for leverage, I pull myself to my feet. Behind me, the pit hides under a small outcrop of rock. The land slopes away before me, thick with pines.

Exertion and adrenaline have loosened the fever’s grip. Troy is still out there, somewhere, and he needs me. That’s enough to keep me going. I can’t give up, not yet.

I sheathe the knife and slide it into the shaft of my boot, bundle the rope back into the backpack, and start to climb the slope toward higher ground, where I can survey my surroundings and figure out my next move.

In sharp contrast to the desert of Shadebrook, where I last remember being, I now find myself navigating a dense, alpine forest. Twisted, wind-blown evergreens grow from the rocky soil, so close together I have to brush through endless soft passages of nettles and duck around low branches.

Every lurching step brings fresh stabs of pain. A bitter wind cuts through my thin black fatigues, clings like ice to my sweat-soaked mop of brown hair.

The trees break, and an open plateau rises up ahead, covered in loose, treacherous scree. The full scope of the desolate landscape unfolds before me, and my heart sinks.

I’m standing on a ridge at the bottom of a canyon, boxed in by tall cliff walls to either side. Back the way I came, the canyon descends into a dark, forested ravine, split by a long, thin, winding river. Wherever I am, it must be a higher elevation than Shadebrook, for the clifftops shine with snow, even in October, and my breath frosts in front of me. The sun is a cold, pale disk above the high canyon walls. There’s not a single soul or sign of life.

Where on Earth am I?

Again I try to remember what happened before. I’m certain Christian revealed the location of his hideout in that video at the Children’s Home; but what did he say? Some National Forest, I think, not far from Shadebrook. I suppose that’s where I am now, but to my dismay I can’t remember exactly what the tape said. Everything after Glen and I found the Black Room is now a blur.

I pause to take the compass out of the backpack. It’s a simple mountaineering compass on a plastic backing card, the kind my dad used to bring on our family camping trips, so many years ago. I hold it before me and turn my body slowly, watching the red arrow inside swivel along the bearings. Along the left side, someone has put an X in permanent black ink at the 295 degree bearing.

"The note said follow the compass. I guess this marks Sanctum? I gesture northwest, down the long canyon that cuts like a wound through the mountains; then I turn the other way. So I’ll just go the opposite direction. If I go far enough, I’m sure to hit a town or something, right?"

Max looks at the compass over my shoulder. You sure that’s a good idea, Mare? We got no idea where we are, how far we are from civilization. What if you get lost out there, in the wild, in your condition?

In my condition, I say grimly, "I can’t face Christian, not on his turf. And I won’t play any silly game. Jim was right. I’ve been in over my head from the start. If I can find a town, turn myself in and get someone to help... that’s the only way I can save Troy now."

Leaving the trees, I set out across the scree toward the white-capped peak of the canyon wall. There’s nothing out here but thin scrub brush, growing up from the gravel. The slope quickly becomes too steep, and my aching feet slide in the loose rocks. I have to crawl on hand and knees, my wrist throbbing in its dingy splint.

As I reach out for the twisted arm of a stunted tree to use as a handhold, a loud blast rings through the canyon. The arm of the tree snaps with a twang above my head, and a gunshot echoes through the vast, open space.

I look all around the wilderness, bewildered and dazed.

Then a second blast from a high-powered rifle makes me flinch. A small boulder a few feet ahead of me splits in half as it takes the bullet.

Finally alarmed, I scramble back down the bald slope. Small rocks twist and tumble underfoot and I fall on my butt to join them. Somehow I come up again on my feet, gasping, and stumble back into the dark cover of the tall pine trees.

I crouch in the shadow of a spindly evergreen and scan the canyon walls for movement, my head swimming.

He must have snipers posted all around, to keep you here. Glen leans against the tree behind me, arms folded above his red stomach, one foot planted against the tree trunk in a way that irritates me. He can afford to look so casual. He’s not really here. So much for just heading the other direction. The rules did say you couldn’t leave.

Shit! I should’ve known he wouldn’t make it easy. I scowl at Glen. What the hell happened to you, anyway? Where’d you go? Resentment enters my voice. How’d I get here, and why am I here all alone?

Glen shrugs. Don’t you remember? What happened to us in the Black Room?

In all your ways submit, and your path shall be cut clear.

No, I murmur, rubbing my head. It’s all a blur.

Glen adjusts his glasses. His quirky half-smile looks sad. We found the truth, at last.

Where light, there is darkness. Where beauty, there is sorrow.

What truth? I whirl on Glen, but there’s no one there. Figures. Abandoned again. In my delirium, his disappearance is not something to be questioned. The whole situation is so surreal, it occurs to me to wonder if it’s all just a dream—if I’m still back in that cave in the mountainside, dying of thirst and infection.

If that’s the case, maybe the sniper isn’t real, either. Maybe the bullets were only a fevered fantasy.

But I can’t take that chance. I’ll have to find a different way. Adjusting the backpack on my one good shoulder, I slip back down the ravine in the green shadows.

The river has to flow out of this canyon eventually. If I follow the water, beneath the cover of the pines, perhaps I can elude Christian’s snipers.

I stumble dreamily to the bottom of the basin. Soon I see the tiny blue band of the river through the light brush, and I can hear the water babbling over rocks.

Then the ground falls out from under me—not the ground at all, just a lattice of sticks and nettles. I land hard on my side in a shallow dell, branches cracking beneath me.

Out of one pit, into another.

Gasping, I look up through tear-blind eyes as the brush beside the pit trap rustles and a figure emerges from the darkness under the pines.

The person peers down at me, holding a long, makeshift spear. The tip of the spear is a hunting knife, like the one I have, fastened to a gnarled stick with loops of rope. Clad in a tattered white hoodie, face hidden under a hood, the stranger points the spear down at my face.

Any last words? says a rough woman’s voice.

Before my poor exhausted brain can even comprehend what’s happening, my body moves by instinct. I seize the spear with my good hand, just behind the blade, and wrench it aside with all my weight.

The girl in the hoodie is pulled off balance with a cry of alarm, falling in the pit on top of me. My injured wrist is crushed between us and I scream till her hands find my throat. Gurgling, I stare up into the darkness beneath her hood, at the fierce, bright eyes gleaming in her dark face.

My left arm snakes down as we struggle, fumbling for the knife in my boot, my bandaged fingertips numb and clumsy. The girl screams on top of me, spittle flying from her lips as her fingers squeeze and squeeze. My throat tightens. My breath runs short. Waves of unconsciousness rush up to suck me down, forever this time.

Then my fingers close on my knife’s hilt and I draw it, slashing the woman’s arm in one fluid motion. Her furious shrieking changes an octave and she rolls aside, clutching the ragged, bloody slash in her sleeve.

I scramble back to the other side of the dell, breathing hard, holding her at the point of my knife.

In the course of our struggle, her hood has fallen to reveal a petite, pretty young black girl. Her long dark hair is an impressive mess of frizzy waves. Her cheekbones are high and prominent, her skin clear and dark as ink. Her velvet lips are full, her straight white teeth bared as she pants for air. Beneath the hoodie, she wears a rhinestone belt, a set of threadbare jeans, and a pair of red sneakers.

On her ankle she wears a steel cuff and key, like mine.

She eyes the spear lying amidst the broken branches between us. I wave the knife threateningly. Don’t.

I got to. The girl clutches her bleeding forearm, her eyes shining in the dark. Nothing personal. It’s the rules, lady. I didn’t mean to do it. I didn’t want to kill anyone.

My eyes trail down to her belt, where a third steel cuff hangs, the key jingling softly, still crusted with dried blood.

"She came at me. I didn’t want to do it. But I did what I had to. I don’t wanna die, lady. I want to live!"

She lunges for the spear and I slash at her, much too slow in my stupor. She ducks my blade, seizes the spear, and rolls past me to the corner of the pit.

"I want to live, so you got to die!"

The spear darts out and I try to dodge, but she’s too fast. The blade catches my shoulder as I spin away with a yelp of pain. She stabs again and I deflect it with my knife, but her force knocks the weapon from my hand and sends me sprawling. I land on my back in the corner of the pit, fresh blood running down my sleeve.

Before I can move, the spear stabs in again, slashing my side and pinning me to the rough dirt floor through flesh and fatigues. Howling in pain, I clench the dry, crooked shaft of the spear in my armpit, holding it there so the girl can’t pull it free and finish me.

You got to die, so I can live, she