All Chapters of The Heaven Hill Series: Chapter 171 - Chapter 180

Jagger finally broke the silence. His voice was low, the tone tortured. "Tell me. Just tell me everything that you went through. I need to hear it, and I don't want you to hold anything back. We need to get it out in the open if we're going to move past it."Christine couldn't look at him when she spoke, so she turned, facing the backyard, focusing on the fence that surrounded the property. "The day you left, I knew that my life was over. I could tell in the way Dad looked at me, the things he said to me. He would get onto me if I ate what he deemed too much, if I didn't exercise the way he thought I should. I had a feeling he was grooming me for something, but I didn't know what. I waited, and waited, and the closer I got to eighteen the more nervous I got."Jagger let out a deep breath and his stomach clenched. He wasn't going to like what she had to say, and he knew it, but he'd told her not to sugarcoat anything. If she had lived through it, he sure as hell could listen to it.

Jagger had the decency to wait until the next morning to approach Travis about running the facial recognition. If he were being completely honest, he was nervous. He hadn't meant to attack Travis that way, it was the last thing he had wanted to do. Purposely, he had stayed away until late morning. When he entered the clubhouse, he spotted Tyler."You know where Travis is?"Tyler grimaced. "He and his much shorter hair are in the cave.""Shorter hair?""Yeah, dude. It was kinda short to begin with, but they had to buzz him to put some staples in his head where you busted it wide open. I'm not sure you're the person he wants to see today, if you get what I mean."Now Jagger felt really bad. His temper had gotten the better of him—that and the shock. "Has Liam said anything?" Things like that could have more than one potential consequence. It normally was not kosher to fight in the clubhouse."Nah, I think he gets it. Hell, we all get it, but the rest of us are far enough away

It hadn't been easy getting behind the electrified barbed wire fence that surrounded the property, but they had managed it. Took them over an hour, and they knew at this point they had no time to lose. It was a struggle they hadn't counted on."You sure you know how to work this stuff?" Liam asked Travis as he laid everything out and began putting batteries in the pieces that needed it."I'm not a dumbass. I set up your phone and everything having to deal with that. Might I also add, I make sure every single one of our houses is safe. I know what I'm doing, I just need to make sure I do it right. These batteries don't last forever, and we need a little juice to figure out what works best."Jagger kept watch towards the main house, watching through a pair of binoculars for anything that could be taken as a threat from the man who lived there. "Everything's quiet up this way. Just do what you need to. I'll let ya know if we've got to book it."Liam wished he could be of some help

Meredith could feel Tyler's gaze on her back as she met with one of her former co-workers and the field agent of the FBI in charge of the Bowling Green area. She could tell just by the way she felt that he was twitchy, that he didn't like her being around all this law enforcement, but she knew that Clinton was much bigger fish than Heaven Hill had ever been for them. Religious zealots were a dime a dozen, but the Feds always looked good in the public eye when they could bring a group of them down. Waco being the perfect example. They would gladly tout the America experience and get patriotic, and then they would look like the best people in the world. For a few days, even the conspiracy theorists would put their trust in the government. She knew that as soon as she called her contact with this information, they would call in for a full-scale operation. She smiled slightly at her husband as she walked over to where he stood. "They're about to give us some bulletproof vests, and it's

Christine rubbed her hands against the denim of her jeans and took a deep breath. "You sure you want to do this?" Jagger asked. He stood behind her, Steele at her side, Bianca at his."If you do, I do. I think we need to. This is the one thing that's been holding me back; I need to make peace with it."She felt Jagger's hand on her shoulder as she ascended the old porch steps. It had been a long two months of counseling that she'd undergone. Sometimes Travis would come and sit in with her, sometimes Jagger would. Every time, she and Doc Jones would work on some part of her childhood or adulthood that had caused her anxiety. At her last session, Jagger had been there, and Doc Jones suggested that the two of them go back to their childhood home, together. She thought that it would go a long way in making them feel better about the way things had gone down. It would give them a sense of closure that neither one of them ever had."I do," he told her. "If you two don't mind," sh