Read Taken: The MISTAKEN Series Complete Third Season for Free Online

bones, that was the truth. I was hiding from him. And he was clearly pissed about it.
    “You left because you thought it was happening again, right? You thought you needed to go back to that loony bin—that freak show your mother made you go to—”
    I finally interrupted his ranting. “First of all, Waterville is not a shit hole, Brandon. The people here have been very kind to me. Show a little respect.”
    “Fuck respect. They have phones here … all it would have taken—”
    I raised my voice a little. “Second, I think the term you are looking for is ‘private residential mental health facility.’ And I haven’t been back to Shady Shores since I first attempted suicide. Which I haven’t even contemplated since I’ve been here.” I glared over at him. “Just so you know.”
    He let out an exasperated sigh. “Well, just so you know, I’ve been searching for you for the past eight months. I’ve looked for you all over the world, Jen. I went to fucking Bangkok looking for you.” He made a waving motion with his arms. “And you’ve been here. Here . In Maine. This whole fucking time, within spitting distance of your mother’s family’s compound. Are you fucking kidding me with this?”
    My shoulders curled over my chest. It hadn’t been my intention to hurt him—I had only wanted to protect him. And because of how he was—his over-protectiveness of me—I knew that he couldn’t know where I was. He would have blown everything trying to keep me safe. I didn’t know how to make him understand that this time … this time, I had been the one trying to keep him safe.
    My voice cracked when I spoke. “You were supposed to believe I was dead.”
    “Right. Those fake pictures. You think I couldn’t tell those were faked? Did you think even if I didn’t think they were fake, I wouldn’t have kept looking? Fuck, Jen, there were just too many damned sightings of you. People saw you everywhere.”
    I shook my head. “People thought they saw me everywhere. People wanted to see me everywhere. But no one saw me anywhere. No one saw me at all until I came here. Until I came to this place you call a shit hole.”
    “Right, so I’m just supposed to believe that you were holed up somewhere for … how long? Months? You hid out by yourself for months until the chatter died down?” His body almost collapsed into the chair on the other side of the tiny room that served as my living quarters. “You expect me to believe you were able to just disappear?”
    “Something like that.” It wasn’t like it was that cut and dried. It wasn’t as if I had made the decision to just “disappear.” And it wasn’t as though I had much of a choice after what happened in Montana.
    “You were pissed at me, right?” He dropped his head into his hands and stared up at me. “You left because you were pissed. And scared—you must have been terrified after what happened that day. I shouldn’t have taken you there. I never should have taken you to Montana.”
    The pounding in my chest turned into more of an ache. I did know that he would search for me. I did know that he wouldn’t believe that I was dead. I knew that because of everything that had already happened between us, there was no way he would ever believe anything that anyone ever told him when it came to me—that he would have to see me with his own eyes to believe it. And I had tried to tell them that. I had tried to warn them.
    I sat on the edge of the bed, directly across from his chair. He looked up at me again, his head still in his hands as though it might fly off if he wasn’t holding onto it so tightly.
    My hand quivered as I reached out and touched his knee. A lightning bolt jolted up my arm when I touched him—whatever had happened, I could still feel the same electrical energy between us. It was almost as if no time had passed—it was the same feeling I’d had the moment we met. The same electrical pulse that threatened to shatter me any time I