Dark Abyss Read Online Free PDF

father.”
     
     
    * * * *

     
     
    The unthinkable had happened. Miles Cavendish had dropped a bombshell on Anna that had totally disrupted her focus. He’d torn apart the very fabric of her life by telling her that her entire life had been a lie. She wasn’t certain an actual bomb could have so completely traumatized her.
    The shock itself was almost as debilitating. She’d never in her life had trouble concentrating. If anything, she’d been accused of too much focus, tunnel vision that blocked everything out except whatever it was she was centered on. To find herself suddenly without the ability to concentrate threw her even more off-kilter, as if she’d lost a vital part of her body and was trying to learn to cope with it. Try though she might to find her inner strength, though, she hadn’t managed to block out the many things disturbing her for more than a handful of minutes at the time since the night she’d met Miles Cavendish.
    She couldn’t even sleep! If she managed to beat her thoughts back during the day enough to go through the motions of carrying on her research, at night when she lay down total chaos erupted in her mind. Random thoughts seemed to pelt her and lead her in first one direction and then another in an endless round of tug-of-war—everywhere except to composure and sleep.
    Releasing a pent up breath of annoyance, Anna threw her covers off and rolled out of her bed. Food, she decided, would help her achieve her goal—sleep. She needed to find something pleasurable enough to keep her focus and filled with enough drugging elements to knock her out. High fat, she decided as she made her way down the hall toward the kitchen. Milk had sleep inducing properties.
    Moving to the cooling unit, she opened the door and stood staring a little blankly at the nearly empty interior, wondering when she’d last ordered a grocery delivery. Of course, she never ordered much. For one thing, food was rationed. For another, it was damned expensive and she had to keep costs down and focus her spending on her project.
    Which her ‘father’ had been paying for all along!
    Squeezing her eyes closed, she forced the thought to the back of her mind. She tried. When that didn’t work, she started humming a tune, forcing her mind to focus on the tune rather than the thoughts battering to get inside.
    Unfortunately, she couldn’t really think of any damned songs except the childhood songs her mother had taught her and they were too simple to help her keep focused. “Old MacDonald had a farm ….”
    She picked up the container of milk and examined the expiration date. “Had sour milk because his cow had expired ….” She opened it and sniffed just to be sure. “Oh my god! I could make cheese with that! Ok, milk’s out. Fattening, fattening ….”
    The take out boxes were empty, she discovered, wondering why she’d emptied them and left them inside the unit. “Old MacDonald had a farm, e-eye, e-eye, O!” she sang, pitching the containers over her shoulder in the general direction of the trash bin.
    “And on that farm he had wrinkly tomatoes and withered lettuce, something unidentifiable and a black, hairy moldy thing! E-eye, e-eye … fuck!”
    Slamming the door of the unit, she turned to head to her cabinets to check those for something that might appeal to her. It took her eyes a few moments to adjust from the brightness of the cooler to the darkness of the kitchen, several critical moments for her eyes to discern that there was a big, black, impenetrable shadow between her and her objective. The split second she realized that the dark shape was roughly the size and shape of a very large man, she screamed.
    Something brushed her arm—a hand—and she screamed again, whirling to flee.
    She slammed into the wall before she’d taken more than two leaps of fright. Stunned by the impact and the discovery that the wall was a lot closer than it should have been, the man she’d slammed into had coiled his