Haven of Nightmares (Littlemoon Investigations Book 5) Read Online Free PDF Page A

anniversary of his sister’s death.
    Well, he thought it was.
    If they were lucky, the day his sister was taken, was the day she died. He hoped she didn't endlessly suffer at the hands of her abductor.
    He prayed none of them did.
    Their deaths weighed heavily on him, but for very different reasons. Love died that day, and he’d never been the same. When he lost his heart, his family, and his way in life, he’d filled it with work.
    What choice did he have?
    If he didn’t obsess about his career, what would be left? With each day, he filled his moments with working hard to help those who had caught a bad break in life.
    Like his sister.
    Like his family.
    Roman had been a damn good reporter, but he wanted to do more. He wanted to help those who couldn’t help themselves, but he wasn’t really cop material. While smart, he wasn’t beefy like Kane or built to fight like Beau and Justin.
    He was a brain.
    So, he wanted to use it. That was his strength in life— his asset —and he was going to make the most of it.
    It fueled him.
    It gave him solace.
    With those ‘weapons’ against the world, he was ready to fight.
    His mom had been his rock. She was wise, and he missed her wisdom. Deep down, Roman always kept his mother’s words in the back of his mind.
     
     
    ‘You come from good people, Roman, so do good work. Let the world know you’re a kind person.’
     
     
     
    He’d lived by those last remembered words from a woman who died way too young.
    His heart ached.
    Now, he was lighting a candle for each of them. Roman wasn’t sure it would work, but it couldn’t hurt.
    Right?
    With each flicker of the long match, his heart ached. He hated this day. It broke him every year when the anniversaries of their deaths came.
    It destroyed another piece of him.
    Ten years ago, his sister Rylee went missing with two other girls from the school campus. That day had doubly changed his life.
    Not only had his family lost one woman, but he lost a girl he was madly in love with too. On that day, his high school sweetheart also went missing. She was the first and only girl he had ever thought about marrying.
    When she went missing, so did his heart. It created a giant sucking void in his soul.
    He’d never recovered.
    At that one point in his life, he thought he ruled the universe. He was eighteen and heading off to college in the fall. He was the big man on campus.
    He’d found a sweet girl to be his. The second he saw her, he knew she was the one. There was that instant spark between them. Their conversation lit something aflame in him.
    She was sixteen and his world.
    He was willing to wait for her to graduate.
    She was worth it.
    Then the worst thing happened.
    On that horrible day, they were both stripped from his life. To make it a million times worse, the police accused him.
    They made him bleed, and in the end, he’d had nothing to do with it. Roman had to swear up, down, sideways and back that he was innocent.
    In the end, they still pointed at him.
    That’s why he never went back. What kind of person did they believe him to be?
    They actually thought he was a killer?
    How?
    Then the tide changed.
    Five years ago, when the next three girls disappeared, they stopped blaming him.
    He was across the country, working on his Master’s degree. Instead, they pointed their fingers at someone closer to home.
    That was the day his father had hung himself. They decided the men in their family were deviants, and he’d picked up where his sick son left off.
    So, his father did the only thing he could.
    He’d strung himself up at the top of the school citadel. In his own way, he’d taken the blame. Now the finger was no longer pointed at Roman. His suicide had spoken volumes.
    Instead, it was forever burned into his soul that his family was being blamed for a horrible crime.
    It was hard to miss the pattern. Every five years, three women went missing.
    He’d read the news.
    He’d checked up this time of the year.
    In a