Chapter 29
Emmett practically drags me up the front porch steps. When we reach the top, he pushes me up against my front door, his mouth finding mine and kissing me savagely, like he couldn’t stand to go one more second without touching me.
I put my hands on his chest, pushing him back gently to break the kiss. “Let me just check the chickens first,” I say, turning my head as he leans back down, causing his lips to find my cheek instead.
He sighs, resting his forehead against my own. “Go,” he says, giving my ass a light tap when I step around him and go back down the porch steps.
The chickens are probably fine. We had put them in their run before going to the Christmas festival earlier, and they know to go into the coop at night. Still, I always feel better peeking inside to make sure they all made it in.
Pulling my cell phone from my pocket, I turn on the flashlight and round the corner of the house. There are no outdoor lights on this side, so it’s pitch black out here at night.
The coop is off to the side, nestled right up against the tree line. The trees will provide nice shade for the run in the summer, and in the winter, they’ll keep the snow from building up too much. Hopefully, I’ll have very little shoveling to do once mother nature does decide to grace us with some of the white stuff.
I shine the light from my phone on the ground in front of me, hoping to avoid tripping as I make my way to the coop. My yard is mostly cleared, but all the surrounding trees are constantly dropping twigs and branches. I’ve tripped more than once already, walking out to the coop in the dark.
I’m just stepping over said tripping hazard when I stop, my hand coming to my mouth to fight down the bile rising up my throat.
Oh God. Oh God oh God oh God oh God.
There’s blood and feathers everywhere.
I whip my light around me, scanning the area as I scream for Emmett.
As I back up blindly, scanning the area in front of me for the chickens, my feet tangle with a branch on the ground. I fall backwards, landing on my ass with a hard thud.
And that’s when I see it, the first of my chickens.
Marge’s eyes stare back at me from her severed head, half of her body not far away. I look around, searching for the rest of her, but not seeing anything as my heart lodges itself in my throat.
“Emmett!” I yell out again, though it comes out as more of a croak, my throat feeling restricted and my breathing becoming erratic as I feel like I’m choking.
The front door slams, the porch steps creaking as Emmett runs down them and toward me. “Riley!” he calls out, his deep voice edged in concern.
When he finds me, he grabs me under my arms, hauling me up against him with one hand, gun held steady in his other.
“What is it?” he asks. His voice is calm now, but he’s tense against me, every muscle taut and ready to react.
I shine my light at Marge, and he sucks in a sharp breath before cradling my head against this chest and turning me away from the carnage.
“Get in the house,” he says, pulling out his own phone to use as a flashlight.
“No,” I protest when he starts nudging me in the direction of the house. “I have to find the others.” My voice shakes. “I need to see if they’re okay.”
Emmett swears under his breath, studying me in the dark. I can see him grinding his teeth, a muscle in his jaw ticking as he considers me. “You might not like what you find.”
“I don’t care. I need to know.”
I step out of his reach, swinging my light over the yard again as I make my way to the coop. Emmett follows behind me, and when I look back over my shoulder, I see him holding his gun steady, pointed toward the ground as he scans the area.
When I reach the coop, the door to the run is cracked open, but the automatic door to the coop is closed. I pray that Mrs. Cluckfire and Henace the Menace made it inside.
Fighting back the sick feeling in my gut, I hold my breath as I open the door to the coop. But when I swing my light inside, I find it empty.
Tears swim in my eyes, and I try not to give into the feeling of dread making its way into my chest.
“Maybe they’re hiding out here somewhere,” I tell Emmett when he comes to stand beside me. “Maybe they’re hiding in the trees.”
“Baby,” he starts, but I don’t let him finish.
“No! They have to be out here!”
The way Marge was hacked apart, I know it”s na?ve to think the others are still out there, safe somewhere. But until I find them, I won’t just give up.
I turn around and start methodically sweeping the yard. It’s not long before I find Mrs. Cluckfire, the bottom half of her red body laying in the grass near the tree’s, her entrails spilling out and feathers scattered about.
A sob escapes me, my heart cracking as tears run freely down my cheeks. Forcing myself to move past her, I search for Henace the Menace.
“Riley,” Emmett calls out, and I turn to find him looking down at his feet not far from me, just into the tree line. I walk over to find Henace the Menace, her body cut up into five chunks and scattered about the area.
I fall to my knees, grabbing a stray feather and clutching it in my hands, my shoulders shaking as I cry.
Emmett’s hand finds my shoulder, and he gives it a squeeze. “We need to call the sheriff.” I give him a confused look, and he explains, “An animal wouldn’t cut them up like that, baby. They were butchered. Probably by someone playing a sick joke.”
The idea that someone was here, in my yard, with the intention of killing my chickens, makes me sick. Bile works its way up my throat again, and I turn away from Emmett just in time to throw up my dinner.
Wiping the back of my mouth with my sleeve, I make my way to my feet on shaky legs before Emmett sweeps his arms under me and picks me up, carrying me back to the house.
When we get inside, he sets me down on the couch, sitting beside me before calling the sheriff.
I lean into him, and he wraps his arms around me, holding me tight against him. His face is severe, his eyes dark and deadly, and I know without a doubt he’ll make whoever did this pay. And they’ll pay dearly.
Twenty minutes later, the sheriff arrives. He introduces himself as Sheriff Chris Miller, asks us to explain what happened, and we give him a brief recap before walking him around the yard, showing him what we found.
Sweeping his flashlight over the pieces of Marge, he says, “This was definitely done by a human.” He takes a few steps back toward the house, his flashlight lighting the way in front of him, before he stops. “You folks didn’t mention this,” he says, pointing his light at the side of my house.
I feel Emmett tense beside me. The blood drains from my face as I take in the scene in front of me.
Written in large, bloody letters across the side of my house is one word.
Soon.
“No. No no no,” I whisper, my hands coming to my mouth. “No. Those were from you.”
Emmett turns toward me, his eyes icy. “What are you talking about, Riley?”
The sheriff comes closer, shining his light toward the two of us as he says, “You know who might have done this, ma’am?”
“No,” I say. Then clarify, “Yes. Well, maybe.”
I swallow, panic creeping in. All those little incidents over the last couple months suddenly don’t seem so insignificant. In fact, they are all starting to seem really damn intentional.
“Can we go inside?” I ask.
I need to sit down.
I can’t breathe.
I can’t breathe.
I can’t fucking breathe.
Bending over, I put my hands on my knees, as Emmett rubs soothing circles on my back.
I take a few deep breaths–in through the nose, out through the mouth–then stand up and walk toward the house, Emmett and Sheriff Miller trailing hot on my heels. Pushing through the front door, I make a beeline for the couch, sinking heavily into the cushions, my body feeling like it weighs a thousand pounds.
Glancing between the two of them standing across from me, I try to figure out where to even start.
Sheriff Miller looks at me with a kind expression, silently encouraging me to share what I know.
Emmett looks at me like he wants to kill someone. He stands in front of me, his arms crossed over his chest, his jaw working as he tries to keep his cool.
When I finally feel like I can talk without my voice breaking, I explain, “About a month ago, I got some flowers and chocolates delivered to my office. I thought they were from you.” I meet Emmett’s eyes. “I thought it was about the deal with Adam. Because there was a note that came with them that said ‘You’ll be mine soon’.”
Emmett’s nostrils flare, and suddenly I feel the need to defend myself for not telling him. “I was mad at you,” I explain. “And I thought you sent them to me because of the deal you proposed. I… I threw them away because I thought you were messing with me.”
“What else?” Emmett says, his voice severe. His tattoos shift as his muscles tense.
“I found flowers on my porch a few days after closing on the house.” I look away from Emmett, unable to hold his dark glare anymore. “I thought they were from you, too.”
I close my eyes, dreading the last part. When I open them and look back at Emmett, he’s still watching me, his face hostile.
“I think there was someone in my old apartment, too. I woke up one night, and someone was outside my bedroom door.” I drop my face into my hands. “I got out of bed and grabbed a bat, ready to fight them off if they came into my room, but they walked away. When I searched my apartment later, no one was there.” I look back up at Emmett. “I thought it had been a dream at the time, but now, I’m not so sure.”
“For fuck’s sake, Riley!” Emmett yells, throwing his arms up. “Why the fuck didn’t you tell me?”
The look on his face kills me. A combination of hurt and anger that slices at my heart. “I didn’t think it meant anything before,” I say, dropping my head again. I can’t take the look in his eyes.
Sheriff Miller smoothly moves himself between Emmett and me. “Sir, I’m going to ask you to go out to the front porch while I ask Riley a few questions.”
“The fuck you are! I’m not leaving.” Emmett moves to step around the sheriff, but stops when Sheriff Miller casually rests his palm on his weapon.
I wonder if the sheriff knows Emmett’s packing right now, too.
Before things can escalate anymore, I say, “It’s okay. Emmett should stay and hear this.”
When I give the sheriff a small nod, he steps back aside and Emmett comes to sit beside me on the couch. He grabs my thigh, giving it a squeeze, and though he’s gentle about it, I can feel everything he’s not saying in the controlled motion.
“Are there any other unusual incidents you believe might be related to this?” Sheriff Miller asks, pulling out a notepad to start taking notes.
“No,” I answer at the same time Emmett says, “My car was vandalized.”
Sheriff Miller looks between us. “I had been driving the car for a while when it happened,” I explain. “So it could have been related.”
Emmett swears under his breath next to me, but I refuse to look at him, keeping my focus on the sheriff.
“Is there anyone you can think of who might want to harm you or try to scare you? An ex-boyfriend? Maybe a family member?” Sheriff Miller directs his next question at Emmett. “Or anyone in your life who would want to see your girlfriend harmed?”
“My ex,” I say before Emmett can answer. “Trevor Hendricks. He’s the only one who would want to hurt me.”
“And when was the last time you spoke to him? Does he live in the area?”
“It’s been over a year and a half since I’ve spoken to him. But he couldn’t have done this.” I wrap my arms around myself. “He’s in prison in Utah.”
“You’re sure he’s not out?” Sheriff Miller asks.
Emmett’s grip on my thigh tightens.
“He was sentenced to ten years. He couldn’t be.” I turn to Emmett as I say the next part. “He almost killed me the last time I saw him. He was arrested, took a deal to get a lesser charge and reduced sentence. He shouldn’t be out yet.”
“Sometimes people are released early,” Sheriff Miller says. “We’ll put in a call with Utah to find out his current whereabouts.”
“I was supposed to be notified if he was released,” I say, panic edging into my voice.
This isn”t happening. This isn’t happening.
It can’t be happening again.
I start tapping my fingers together. Thumb to pinky. Thumb to ring finger. Thumb to middle finger. Thumb to pointer and back again.
Emmett notices and grabs my hand, squeezing it.
“We’ll find out for sure,” Sheriff Miller says, his voice kind and gentle. “In the meantime, do you have any security cameras around the property? Outside or inside. You never know what may have been caught.”
“No,” I answer.
But then Emmett squeezes my hand, leans over to kiss my temple, and rises. He walks over to the sheriff, pulling out his phone. “There are cameras in the house,” he says.
What the hell?
I stare at Emmett, but he refuses to look at me as he continues. “Here are all the feeds.” He taps on his phone. “We’ve been gone since the afternoon, so I’ve backed up to the point when we left.”
Blood rushes in my ears. Emmett put cameras in my house and never told me.
“You’ve got every angle covered,” Sheriff Miller says, impressed by whatever Emmett is showing him on his screen. “Whoever put in your system did a hell of a job.”
I laugh bitterly. “Yeah, they sure fucking did,” I say, my voice laced with ice.
Emmett finally graces me with a look, but there’s no apology there. No remorse. No hint of any regret that he’s completely invaded my privacy without my knowledge.
The two continue to look through the footage, but ultimately find nothing.
The rest of the night goes by in a blur. Sheriff Miller spends the next hour or so asking questions, getting all the details of every incident I had brought up.
The fact that someone was in my apartment, so close while I was sleeping, makes my skin crawl and fear grip my chest.
They could have killed me. They could have so easily walked into my bedroom that night, overpowered me, and killed me. I shouldn’t have written it off as a dream. The more I talk about it, the more I’m convinced it wasn’t.
Emmett pulls all the security footage of today for the sheriff and also sends him the footage of the night the flowers were delivered. We looked at it briefly and didn’t see anything, but now I know it wasn’t Emmett who sent them.
By the time Sheriff Miller leaves, promising someone would be making extra drive by’s for the foreseeable future, it’s late, my nerves are fried, and I’m exhausted. Emmett makes the unilateral decision that we’ll go back to his place tonight, but I can’t even acknowledge him.
There’s this feeling lingering in me, a strange kind of partial numbness, like the feeling you get when you receive bad news. A pit that forms in your stomach as you lose track of all sensation, other than the ache in your chest and the sick feeling in your gut.
That’s how I feel right now, looking at Emmett, knowing that whatever morsel of happiness I had found with him has shattered. That he’ll never be what I want or need. That his need for control will overrule anything I could ask of him. That he knowingly lied to me after asking me to trust him.
He stands at the front door, having just double checked the security system after walking the sheriff out.
“How long?” I ask, my voice barely concealing the unbearable pain in my chest.
He says nothing, shoving his hands into his pockets as he watches me, his jaw ticking.
His silence only feeds the anger simmering under my skin. He doesn’t get to stand there and look at me like he’s the one with any right to be angry.
“How fucking long, Emmett!” My yell comes out hoarse, the lump in my throat making it hard to even speak right now.
“Fuck,” he says with a sigh, running a hand through his hair. His eyes meet mine, a combination of dread and anger on his face. “I had them installed the day you closed,” he finally says.
The answer shocks me, my mouth falling open. “You told me I could trust you,” I whisper, the pain in my chest gripping me. “And you’ve been lying to me this entire time!”
“I did what was—”
I cut him off. “Don’t you dare tell me you did what was best for me. You barely even knew me then!”
“I knew you enough,” he says, taking a small, testing step toward me. “I knew that I had to have you. That I couldn’t stop fucking thinking about you. That I’d do whatever I had to do to get you and make you mine.”
“So, you invade my privacy? Did you watch me?” I practically spit the questions at him.
He looks at me, his expression cold and hard, and says nothing.
But his silence and the rigid set of his shoulders are answer enough. He watched me. Back before we were even together, he’d been watching me without my knowledge. Invading every aspect of my life that he possibly could.
“What else haven’t you told me?” My eyes start to sting as the tears threaten, and I pray like hell there’s no more secrets because I don’t think my heart can take anymore.
He studies me for a second, hands now fisted at his sides, before saying, “I have a tracker on your phone. I can see everything you do on it. I snuck into your apartment after we met and put it on there.”
The air whooshes from my lungs. My chest aches so badly it’s all I can do to not curl myself into a ball and give up on everything.
Emmett stalks toward the couch and I jump up, moving behind it to put a barrier between us. He stops, putting up his hands as though in surrender.
I can’t be close to him right now. I can hardly look at him.
“So it was you I heard in my apartment that night.” Tears escape my eyes again as I realize I don’t even know who this person standing in front of me really is.
“No, baby.” His voice is tight. “That wasn’t me that night.” He says the last part like it should be comforting. Hey, don’t worry, that wasn’t me breaking in to scare you. I only broke in to put a tracker on your phone.
“Why are you doing this?” I ask, begging for some kind of answer that makes sense. An answer that would make his actions forgivable.
“Because I fucking love you, Riley!” he yells, throwing his arms out to the side. “Is that not enough?” The question comes out strained, his voice betraying the emotion he’s trying to keep a hold on.
I flinch. “This isn’t love. Whatever this is between us? It’s toxic.” My voice cracks, my throat is so tight I can barely get the words out. My whole body shakes and I can’t stop the tears that flow freely. “You can’t keep doing this. You’ve invaded my privacy in every possible way. You’ve forced me into decisions and taken control of every aspect of my life. You don’t own me, Emmett!”
“That’s where you”re wrong.” He flies around the couch, getting in my face. Grabbing my chin, he forces me to look at him. “I do own you, Riley. Body, mind, and soul. And I don’t give a fuck if you think that’s toxic, because I can’t have you any other way. I need you. Every. Fucking. Piece.”
I tug out of his grip. “Love shouldn’t be this painful.” Turning from him, I walk to the front door, holding it open. “Please leave.” When he doesn’t move, I beg. “Please. I can’t keep doing this.”
“I’m not leaving. Not like this.” He braces his hands on the back of the couch, settling in. “We’re not running from our problems anymore.”
“I hate you,” I choke out in response, unable to control the emotions reeling inside me. It’s immature and the wrong thing to say, but I just can’t help it as the words slip out.
It’s also not true. As mad as I am, I can’t hate him. But I hate the way he’s making me feel in this moment. That he can keep lying to me, manipulating me and making decisions for me behind my back, and somehow he makes me feel like I’m the one in the wrong.
“That’s okay, baby.” He walks toward me, but when he tries to touch me, I step out of his reach. He clenches his jaw, something dark flaring in his eyes. “You can hate me all you want, and I’ll still fucking love you.”
Riley follows behind me in her car. I finally got her to agree to leave her place by telling her she could stay at Tracy’s house instead of with me. While it damn near killed me parting with her, there’s no way in hell she was staying at her house alone tonight, only hours after someone slaughtered her chickens.
The same someone who has apparently been stalking her for months now, and I had no clue. I almost lost it earlier when she finally shared everything that’s been happening. Not because I was mad at her, but because I was scared for her.
Someone had been to her new house right after she got it. Someone knew where she worked. Someone was in her apartment.
Someone other than me had broken in while she’d been asleep.
The thought makes me livid, my horn blaring when I slam my hand into the steering wheel.
When I find out who”s been stalking her, they’ll wish they were dead.
My PI contact said that all records indicate Trevor is still in prison, so I don’t know who’s messing with Riley. But it has to be someone she knows. The escalation tonight with her chickens was personal.
I glance at her headlights in my rearview mirror. She’s pissed at me right now, more so than she’s ever been before, but I don’t care.
It’s not that I want her to be angry at me, or that I don’t care about hurting her, but every single thing I’ve done, every decision I’ve made, has been in her best interest. I’ll do anything to protect her, and if that means upsetting her by tracking her phone and putting cameras in her house, then so be it.
Sure, at first it started as a fascination with her, an obsession with getting her and ruining her and claiming her. But it’s so much more than that now.
I love her, more than anything else in this entire fucked up world. I’ll never stop loving her.
And I’ll take her hate over not having her at all. Every single time.