Chapter Twenty-Eight #2
As he looks up at us, I pull Peyton away from him because she hasn’t caught on to the vibe yet.
He notices my apprehension, something scary flashing through his features that even Peyton can’t miss, and slowly comes to his feet.
We both take a step back, and he moves, keeping his eye pinned on us.
I look for our forgotten weapons as we keep moving back, clutching each other’s arm.
The slats are now lying neglected on the floor and out of reach.
This is not good. Not good at all.
I think we made a grave mistake. Whoever he is, we never should’ve come in here. We never…
My frantic thoughts break when he lunges and grabs hold of Peyton’s arm.
She screams as he pulls her toward him and they begin to struggle.
I run for our makeshift weapon, and grabbing it off the floor, dash to where he’s trying to subdue Peyton and her kicking feet.
It’s hard to find an opening between two grappling bodies, but the instant his back is clear, I slam the wooden slat into his head.
But it’s not hard enough.
It hardly slows him down. In fact, he pushes Peyton back so hard that she slams into the wall, and he then spins on his heel to come at me.
I raise my arm to hit him again, but he easily takes the slat away from me and grabs my arms. I’m twisting and kicking to get out of his hold, but with me, he does things differently.
He doesn’t try to subdue me with just his grip; he puts his whole body into it and tackles me to the ground.
And fucking shit, it knocks the breath out of me.
My spine hits the wooden floor, and a howl of pain escapes me.
But it’s cut short because his weight is suffocating, and oh my God, he won’t let me breathe.
He’s crushing my lungs and my arms. He then pulls my hands overhead and pins them to the ground with only one of his hands.
While the other, God, the other, goes lower.
It searches blindly for something that freezes my heart for a second.
But just as his hand grazes it—the button of my jeans—Peyton lunges at him with a scream.
She attaches herself to his back and starts pulling at his hair viciously.
While he’s distracted with Peyton, I try to buck him off, but he manages to break Peyton’s hold and push her away.
Then he’s back on me, and I think this is it.
This is where all my nightmares will come true, things every girl tries not to dwell on but that are always there in the back of her mind.
The R word that I don’t even want to think about.
He’s going to force himself on me, and the only thing that comes to my petrified mind is him.
Not God. Not my mom. Definitely not my daddy.
“Arsen!”
I scream out his name like I did in the woods. Like that night, I keep chanting it as I struggle and scratch my attacker, even though I have very little hope of my forced-fake husband swooping in to save me. He doesn’t even know I’m here. He probably doesn’t even care anymore, and—
Suddenly, I feel a burst of air rushing through my lungs because the man who was crushing me with his body weight is gone. He’s thrown across the room, and like someone breaking the surface after being underwater for a long time, I gasp and cough as I sit up.
He is here.
Like I conjured him up with my words. I chanted his name enough times in the middle of the night, deep in the woods, and now the devil is here. But I’m not afraid of this devil. I know he’s here to save me.
I watch as Arsen prowls toward the man who’s crouching by the wall, struggling to get up, his eyes full of fear.
My husband bends down, grabs his collar, and jerks him to his feet.
The man tries to push Arsen away. He even tries to say something, but it’s all garbled because Arsen slams him into the wall before swinging his other arm back and hitting the man’s jaw.
He grunts painfully, but it’s drowned out by Arsen’s second punch.
After that, the man doesn’t get to make sounds, because Arsen doesn’t give him a break.
He starts raining his fists down on him, and I’m so mesmerized by how fast he does it, how he keeps the man stuck to the wall with one hand while the other works nonstop to just annihilate my attacker, that I belatedly notice my husband didn’t come alone.
Rad is here, too, and Peyton is wrapped around him in a hug in a corner.
At which point I come out of my fog and slowly stand up.
What just happened? How are they both here? And God, if he doesn’t stop right now, Arsen is going to kill that man.
I think he probably already did because when Arsen started hitting him, I could hear the man making noises, even though they were mostly drowned out by his head hitting the wall and bone hitting bone, but now he’s completely silent.
He’s also completely slumped over, his head is sagging like it was in the beginning, and his arms lie limply by his sides.
“Arsen,” Rad grunts from where he’s standing. “Stop.”
He doesn’t, though. It’s as if he didn’t hear Rad at all.
So Rad tries again, still holding on to Peyton, who’s gone all frozen, witnessing the brutal scene before us. “Arsen, fuck. Stop.”
Nothing.
Arsen doesn’t even slow down, so Rad thunders, “Listen to me, you’re gonna kill him and—”
“Arsen,” I call out then, my heart pounding in my chest. “Please. Just stop. Stop. Stop it, right now.”
I’m screaming by the end of it, my fists clenched at my sides, my body almost bent in half, but I don’t care.
He needs to stop, or he’s going to jail.
And he already did that once. He already went to prison for eight years for the woman he loved, and I’m not letting it happen again. Not for me. Not for anything.
I’m about to dash over to him, consequences be damned, when my voice finally gets through to him and he stops.
His shoulders move up and down, his back swelling like waves with his heavy and thick breaths.
After a long, tense moment, Arsen lets him go, and he falls to the floor with a thud.
The sound echoes in my bones, and I can finally draw a full breath.
It immediately dissolves the moment Arsen turns around, his eyes homing in on me.
I was probably expecting to see anger. Danger and threats. And all of those things are there, of course. All of those emotions, along with a hundred others of the same variety, are lurking in his eyes, but what gets me is the fear. No, wait, it’s despair.
Yes, it’s fear mixed in with despair.
It’s subtle, and I don’t think anyone else has noticed it, but it punches me in the gut.
I’ve seen it on him once before. Last night, in fact.
When he talked about Annie. And I also know why it’s there now.
It’s because he’s stuck in the past. His brain went back eight years to when the worst thing that could happen to a man happened to him.
He lost the woman he loved because he couldn’t get to her in time.
He’s probably thinking the same thing right now. His dark, gorgeous eyes have grief in them because of me. Because I was so stupid. I didn’t think. I didn’t…
“What the fuck happened?” Rad asks, his voice angry, but I’m not looking at him right now.
I only have eyes for my husband. Who stands there, his breaths still wild, his frame so tight it looks brittle. Like anything could shatter it instantly.
“I… We…” Peyton struggles, but again, I can’t help her.
I can’t look away from Arsen. I can’t stop telling him with my eyes that I’m okay. He saved me. God, he saved me. Again.
“You tryna run?” Rad asks, his voice even gruffer than before. “That’s what this was?”
My eyes go wide, and I shake my head, my answer for Arsen. I promised him I wouldn’t run, and I didn’t. This wasn’t about that.
And Peyton confirms, “No! No, absolutely not. It’s… We w-weren’t running. We…”
“Then what the fuck were you doin’?”
Rad’s voice is the loudest here, and it makes Peyton squeak. Not me, though. I’m steadfast. I’m unafraid. My spine is made of steel so I can lend strength to the man who looks like he once again lost everything.
“I… It’s… fuck,” Peyton begins again, but to no avail.
“Listen to me, yeah?” Rad growls. “We just saved your fool asses. So you tell us what you were doin’ here or I’m really gonna fuckin’ hog-tie you and leave you in my room.”
“Fine, okay,” Peyton snaps. “First, it’s not Reverie’s fault. She didn’t want to do this. She didn’t want to come here. I dragged her. It was me.”
“Why?”
“Because.” Another deep breath. “Because we don’t trust you, okay?
We don’t fucking trust you. Can you blame us after everything?
” I see her hand waving and snapping from the corner of my eye.
“After how you forced me to fool my brother on the phone today. And while I don’t care about my family, because frankly they’re just like you guys, I do care about myself and my best friend.
So we came here because we know your secret. ”
“Secret.”
“Yes. You guys are hiding something,” she accuses. “There’s something fishy going on at your ranch and we came here to get proof of that.”
I hear a sigh and the shifting of feet. Then, “Proof of fuckin’ what?”
“Who is this man? Why was he beaten up and tied to a chair in a cabin in the middle of the woods?” Peyton asks instead of answering.
Rad responds with silence. But I see something flicker across Arsen’s face. I can’t say what it is, and honestly, in this moment, I don’t care about any secrets. Maybe it’s selfish, but I can’t hold my silence and let him suffer.
“We came here because…” I say, keeping my eyes on him. “We know about the men. About them going missing, prison inmates. And we know somehow Rawhide is involved in their disappearances. So we came here because we wanted to find out what exactly was going on.”
I hear Rad sigh again, but at the end of it is a growled curse.