Chapter Twenty-Nine
Haizley
Leaning against my closed door in the safety of my home, bag of food still in my hand, I texted him a thank you.
Me: Thank you for dinner. It really isn’t necessary.
Giant: It is. You need someone to take care of you.
Me: I’ve been taking care of myself for the last twelve years.
Giant: Twelve years too long.
Slipping my phone into my back pocket, I ignored the last text. Moving to my kitchen, I pulled out the food and sat down. How did he always get it right? Three times a day, Gunner had been sending me food. Always exactly what I wanted.
Maybe what made it so appealing was that I didn’t have to choose for myself. I didn’t have to cook it, and I didn’t have to clean up after it, either.
I was so freaking tired. Tired of being alone. Tired of carrying everyone else’s burdens for them. When I became a therapist, I was young and stupid. I didn’t understand the emotional toll it would take on me.
Not that I would ever give it up. I enjoyed helping people. I just needed someone to help me.
That’s what Gunner is trying to do.
I knew that. I just… I just couldn’t put that pressure on someone else. He had an entire club to take care of. I had done my research when I came home and found the MC had moved in. I knew he had important responsibilities as the club’s Sergeant at Arms.
Gunner was responsible for the safety and welfare of everyone in the club. That included the old ladies and children. As it was right now, he had over two dozen people to take care of. It would be irresponsible of me to add to that burden.
Decision made; I would still enjoy the food he sent me. Tomorrow I would start refusing it. Sending it back to wherever he was ordering it from.
Yes, I knew it was rude not to accept a gift, but at this point he had no one to blame but himself.
As I was putting away my leftovers, there was another knock at my door. I’d had more visitors in the last two weeks than I’d had in the last two years since coming home.
I was distracted. That was the only explanation for not looking through the curtain before opening the door. Had I checked like I did every other time, I never would have opened it.
I wouldn’t have had to do the unthinkable.
Reaching for the door, I turned the knob, and as soon as the latch let go, the door slammed open, knocking me onto the ground. Struggling to inhale the breath that had been knocked out of me, I looked up and saw the man Gunner and the others had been looking for.
Greg.
The man who had been drugging and raping women for the past six months or so. The man who had drugged and raped Aspen. The stench of stale alcohol clung to him as he leered down at me, a cruel, sinister sneer twisting his lips. Without a word, he turned and closed the door. With a resounding click, he locked us both inside.
“What do you want?” I forced a calm tone into my voice as I spoke, though a cold sweat slicked my palms.
He stalked toward me as I crab-walked backwards, hitting the kitchen island. My home had an open concept. I loved the space growing up. But now, there was too much open space for me to run.
“What I want is Aspen. But she’s hiding in that fucking club. So, you’re it,” he said, holding his arms out wide. “Normally I would just go to the bars. Find a girl who was lonely, distracted. Slip her a little courage and she would open right up for me. Walk them out, take them somewhere we could be alone.” He crouched down to my level. “Aspen though, she was my downfall. I couldn’t wait. I took a chance. That was my fault. I won’t make that mistake again.”
“Then why come here? Why not go back to the bars?” Fear gripped me, and I was unable to move, stuck to the floor like a statue, the cold seeping into my bones. I knew the longer he talked, the longer I had to come up with a plan.
“See, that’s your fucking fault.”
He must have noticed my confusion because he just kept on talking.
“That fucking biker you brought to her house. I know he was the one who drew up that picture that is posted in every fucking bar in the area.”
“Have you ever tried getting a girl the old-fashioned way? Maybe talking to her, or you know, paying her.”
“Bitch.” He reached down, his grip like a vise on my arm, yanking me roughly from the floor. “Why pay for something I can just take?”
He held both my arms, pushing me up against the counter and pressing his body against mine.
“You know I’ll just tell the sheriff. You won’t get away with this.”
“You won’t be able to tell the sheriff anything. See, I learn from my mistakes. You won’t be making reports, no eyewitness statements. Just a dead girl in her home. Killed by the fucking biker who’s been stalking her.”
“What?”
Stalking? Gunner has been stalking me!
“Oh, this is priceless. That fucking biker has been sitting outside your house all hours of the day and night, watching you. Why do you think it took so fucking long for me to get to you?”
That meant he wasn’t out there now.
Ok, Haizley, you’re on your own. You know what to do. Corbin taught you how to get out of this.
I didn’t think and slammed my head into Greg’s nose, hearing a loud crack. I wasn’t sure if it was his nose or my head because that fucking hurt. He dropped my arms, and his hands went to his face. I wanted to run, but the stars distracted my sense of self preservation. Shaking my head, I moved away slowly before I tried to run. That was my mistake. I waited too long, because Greg got his bearings faster than I did.
When I turned to run, he grabbed me by my braid, pulled me back against his chest, then bent me over, slamming my face onto the counter.
“I was gonna be nice and make it good for you since, you know, this will be your last time. But fuck, this position works fine for me.”
He leaned his body over mine, trapping me between him and the counter. One arm pressed firm across my shoulders, while he used his other to try to get my pants off.
Thank God I wore jeans today and not sweats.
I stomped on his foot, and he cried out, then slammed my head against the counter again. Now we had matching broken bones.
Pushing his arm down across my shoulders, harder than before, made it difficult for me to breathe. Because he was in such a rush, he failed to constrict my arms, an oversight that would come back to haunt him. With my arms extended before me, I was in the exact same place as when I had just finished eating dinner a short time ago. I put the leftovers away in the refrigerator, but the used silverware and plate sat on the counter, still dirty. Grabbing the knife with my right hand, silently thanking Gunner for getting me something that needed to be cut, I pulled it close to my neck.
I couldn’t let him see that I had it.
With my other hand, I grabbed the plate and swung it over my head, trying to hit him with it. I heard the plate break when it hit the floor, but it must have hit him enough to piss him off because he pulled me up from the counter and spun me around. His arm went up, backhanding me across the face, adding a cut on my cheek to the broken nose.
“You fucking bitch!” Spittle flew from his mouth, hitting my face, but I couldn’t think about that right now. I had seconds to make a decision that might haunt me for the rest of my life.
Time seemed to slow down once my mind understood it was him or me and fuck what anyone thought. He didn’t deserve to live. He didn’t deserve to continue terrorizing women, raping them, maybe now killing them. There was no question what I was about to do would save countless women. Greg tried to pull my shirt up and off my body. When he lifted my arms, he saw the knife and his eyes widened.
He hesitated.
I didn’t.
I brought my arm down and stabbed the knife into his neck. It sliced through his skin with no hesitation. I had taken an anatomy class in college. I knew where the carotid artery was, but when you’re fighting for your life, it was easy to miss. But I also knew I was close. I didn’t lift the knife; I couldn’t take the chance he would snatch it away from me and stab me with it. No, I left it lodged in his throat while I twisted that son of a bitch deeper, making sure it spun around. Only then did I yank it out as blood spurted all over us both.
The whole scene took seconds. But watching him stumble backwards, grabbing at his neck, the blood seeping through his fingers as he tried to stem the flow, felt like watching a horror movie in slow motion. My hands and knees slammed against the floor when he released me, his body no longer there to hold me up.
I sat there numb as blood seeped from his mouth and he gurgled, trying to breathe. He was drowning in his own blood, and I watched, my eyes never leaving his.
“Fuck you, asshole!” I screamed.
I didn’t move while his life drained from his body. I needed to be sure he was dead. He blinked three more times; his body frozen, hand outstretched as though he thought I would do something to help him.
Talk about a fucking narcissist.
As his lifeless eyes stared back at me, I wrestled with my next decision.
Should I call the sheriff or Corbin? This was clearly self-defense. The man was a wanted fugitive, his crimes—drugging and raping numerous women throughout western Nebraska—causing widespread terror and a desperate manhunt.
Or should I call Gunner and let the club help me?
This was a textbook example of a catch-22. Six of one, half a dozen of another. I didn’t believe for a second the sheriff would rule this anything other than self-defense, and Corbin would do what he could to protect me. But they were both bound by the law.
Even if I called him directly instead of calling 9-1-1.
It would take time to prove self-defense. My patients would be affected. I could lose my license just for being held in a police station.
Decision made; I stood from where I sat, my eyes never leaving the dead body on the floor. I might have been in shock, but in every horror movie I had ever seen, the bad guy came back and had to be shot in the head or have his head cut off.
Shuddering, I considered it for a minute. I didn’t have a gun, but there was an axe in the shed. My father used it to chop wood. Now I had my wood delivered.
It was likely still there. But there was something else I learned in horror movies. If you looked away, they disappeared.
So, I didn’t look away.
I backed up to the counter, used my hands to feel for the edge, and made my way around to where I had eaten my dinner while scrolling through my phone. Only it was no longer there. It had been knocked to the ground. I just prayed it hadn’t broken in the fall.
It took a few minutes to find where my phone had landed. I refused to take my eyes off the dead man in my living room for longer than a second. Yes, it was irrational to think he would come back to life. This wasn’t a movie. But I had just killed someone.
I wasn’t exactly in a rational state of mind.
Once I had the phone in my hand, I dialed the number of the one person I knew would do whatever he had to in order to protect me. One that wasn’t bound by morals and laws.
“Haizley, what’s wrong?”
How did he know?
Because you’ve never called him before, and you walked away from him.
“I… I… um found Greg.” I kept my voice low. Not wanting the dead man to hear me. Again, irrational.
There was a small pause before he asked, “Where is Greg, baby?”
With a shaky breath, I spoke the words that would change my life forever.
“Dead on my living room floor.”