Chapter Fifteen #3
He started talking. About how she belonged to him.
About the five years he’d spent in a cell thinking about nothing but this moment, this room, this knife against her skin and the satisfaction of taking back what was his.
His voice gained intensity as he went, each word carrying more force than the last without ever becoming a shout.
He was too caught up in what he was saying to notice the shadow shift behind him.
Fox had held at the threshold, staying outside the ex’s line of sight while he waited for an opening.
I caught the smallest movement near the doorway -- enough to know Fox was there, shotgun ready, watching for his chance.
I gave no sign I’d seen him. Kept my attention on the man in front of me and let him keep talking.
His head started to turn -- a fractional movement, and for half a second the knife hand tensed and drifted with him, the blade lifting off her throat -- and what followed was fast and without ceremony because ceremony was for men who had time to spare and we had none.
Fox moved the instant the ex’s attention shifted fully to me.
He came through the doorway from behind and caught the wrist holding the knife, clamping down before the blade could move against Katy’s throat.
His other hand locked onto the man’s forearm and wrenched it back, pulling both the weapon and the arm away from her.
The ex stumbled with the sudden force, his grip breaking as Fox twisted his wrist. The knife hit the floorboards, and I closed the distance in two strides.
My left hand found his throat. Not a strike -- a control hold, thumb under the jaw, fingers behind the neck, the grip that cut off blood flow to the brain without crushing the trachea.
His body went rigid. Then his resistance disappeared.
Marcus folded at the knees, dazed, and made no attempt to get back up.
Fox released his arm once Marcus stopped fighting, but he didn’t give him room to recover.
He dropped a knee between his shoulder blades, pinning him face down against the floorboards, and pulled a second phone from his cut with his free hand.
Not his usual one. A prepaid, plain black, the kind that lived in a drawer for exactly this.
He dialed one-handed. Waited three rings.
“Anonymous tip,” he said, when the line connected.
“Domestic disturbance, possible kidnapping in progress. Farmhouse off the gravel spur north of Route 9, four miles east of the co-op. Shouting, a woman’s voice.
That’s all I’ve got.” He gave the mile marker twice, slow, like a man reading it off a sign rather than memory.
Then he ended the call and put the phone away before dispatch could ask a second question.
“Twenty minutes,” he said, to no one and everyone. “We’re gone before headlights hit that driveway.”
Marcus made a sound against the floorboards, something between a laugh and a cough. “You’re not going to kill me.”
“No,” Fox agreed as he tied Marcus’ hands to a support beam, pulling his shoulders back tight against the wood.
A fact, not a mercy. “Dead, you’re a story somebody has to explain.
Alive, you’re a parole violation and a prosecutor who doesn’t need our help making it stick.
Three years left on your original sentence, stacked under whatever’s coming next.
You’re going to disappear back into your cell for a lot longer than you were ever going to make it on the outside, and nobody’s going to ask a single question about what happened here.
” He shifted his knee, just enough to make a point of it.
“And if you go to the cops with a story about how we caught you and did this to you? They’ll likely give us a medal.
Or ask for our testimony against you for what you did here -- which would add a felony conviction to your sentence.
Either way, sure won’t help your case any. ”
“And when -- if -- you get out again?” I added, “You even think about coming after Katy again? No one will ever find your body.”
The room settled. The bulb swung on its wire, casting shadows that jumped and steadied and jumped again.
Katy was still on the floor, her wrists bound, the cut above her eye still running, and I was beside her before my brain registered the transition from standing to kneeling, the medical bag open on the floorboards, my hands already moving.
Trauma shears from the side pouch. I cut the electrical cord where it wrapped her wrists, the nylon blades parting the insulation with a sound that was almost gentle, and her hands came free -- raw, abraded, the skin beneath the cord angry and bleeding in places where she’d pulled against it.
I didn’t pause to examine. Moved to her face.
My palm against the cut above her eyebrow, applying pressure, feeling the wound through my skin -- superficial, thank Christ, no underlying fracture, the bleeding already slowing as the vessels constricted under compression.
Two fingers to her throat. Carotid pulse -- strong, rapid, the particular hammer of adrenaline working through a system that had been running on fear for longer than it was designed to.
Her pupils were equal and reactive. Respirations twenty-two, shallow but improving as my hand rested on her sternum and she felt the contact and something in her diaphragm remembered how to exhale.
“Katy.” I said her name firmly enough to pull her attention toward me. “I’ve got you. Look at me.”
She did. Her blue-gray eyes focused on my face, the left partially obscured by dried blood along her lid.
For a second, she only stared at me, as if she needed the evidence that I was actually there.
Then her expression crumpled. She leaned forward and buried her face against my shoulder, gripping the front of my shirt while a violent shudder went through her.
I wrapped my arms around her and held on until it passed.
I held her. One arm around her shoulders, my palm flat against her back where her spine met her ribs, feeling the rise and fall of each breath as it found its rhythm.
The cut above her eye had stopped bleeding.
The abraded wrists would need antiseptic and gauze.
Her lip was split at the corner -- a small laceration, clean-edged, the kind that would heal without intervention if kept clean -- and I noted each injury with the same thoroughness I brought to everything, because lists were how I functioned when the rest of me wanted to burn the world down.
Fox stepped outside. I heard the radio crackle -- his voice, low and clipped, reporting status to Cotton at the compound -- and then the sound of gravel under boots as he moved away from the doorway to give us the room the moment required.
He’d call it in from a burner phone on the way back, I knew, anonymous just enough for dispatch to send a unit -- an address, a description, a stranger’s tip about a woman’s cry -- so that by the time a county cruiser found the farmhouse, it would find Marcus alone with an injury he couldn’t explain and a story that wouldn’t hold.
Not that payphones were easy to find these days, but we still had a few in the area.
Hornet’s stocky frame filled the doorway, the shotgun now slung across his back, and his gaze moved from the ex on the floor to Katy against my shoulder to the medical bag open on the boards, and whatever he saw there -- the blood, the cord, the shape of a woman who had been taken and recovered -- he received without comment.
He nodded once, tight, and stepped back into the dark.