Chapter 20
Chapter Twenty
CHARLOTTE
The feeling that rushed over me the moment I closed myself into my apartment chilled me to the core, making the tiny hairs on my arms stand on end as my entire body erupted with goosebumps.
It was that instantaneous sense of not being alone. A warning siren from my subconscious that I had just walked right into danger. Only problem was, it was too late to do anything about it.
As soon as the latch clicked into place, a figure I hadn’t seen until it was too late stepped in front of me, materializing like smoke. “Don’t scream,” a deep, craggy voice said.
Ignoring the man’s warning, I spun around, my mouth opened to do just that as I reached for the doorknob.
My mind wouldn’t cooperate. I couldn’t remember where I’d left my baton or stun gun, not that it would have made a difference in that moment.
He got to me before a sound could pass my lips.
His hand fisted in the back of my hair, using his grip to bash my face into the hard, unforgiving door.
I heard the crunch of cartilage in my nose just a moment before the white-hot pain followed, causing stars to burst before my eyes.
I felt his hot breath fan across my cheek from behind as I was pulled back, the same threatening voice hissing in my ear, “You make a sound, you get hurt even worse.”
My fight or flight instincts had kicked in, overriding the fear that clutched my chest in a vise grip.
Reaching back blindly, I grabbed at the man’s arm, digging my nails into the bare flesh just above his wrist. He let out a sharp curse, but instead of releasing my hair, he bounced my face off the door one more time before throwing me to the ground so hard it jarred every bone in my body.
His booted foot connected with my ribs a second later, knocking the wind right out of me.
“Fuckin’ warned you,” he grunted, coming to a crouch at my side as I struggled to pull in a much-needed breath through the fire in my ribs, desperately trying to re-inflate my lungs.
“You scream or fight, I’ll make this even harder, bitch.
” He leaned closer, his dark, muddy brown eyes all I could see thanks to the ski mask obscuring his face. “You feel like cooperatin’ now?”
“Wh-what do you want?” I wheezed, my whole body throbbing like it was one giant bruise.
“Where is she?” the man asked ominously.
I blinked, trying to clear the wet from my vision thanks to my broken nose. “Who?”
He let out a beleaguered sigh, like he was dealing with an annoying kid. Grabbing the top of my head, he slammed it against the hard floor. “Not in the mood to play games. Now where the hell is she?”
I could barely hear him over the drumline in my head. It felt like my skull had been cracked wide open and my brains had been scrambled. “I don’t know who you’re talking about.”
“You know, I got orders to get the truth outta you however I gotta do that.” I let out a whimper, terror coating my veins in ice, as the masked man revealed a big hunting knife he’d pulled from behind his back.
“So, now you got a choice.” His lips pulled back, revealing two rows of crooked teeth through the opening at his mouth.
I didn’t need to see his face through the mask to know the smile he was giving me was downright evil.
“You can either cooperate . . .” Chills wracked my body as he pressed the very tip of the razor-sharp blade against my skin.
A tear broke free and trailed its way down into the hair at my temple as he dragged it across my neck and down my chest toward my cleavage.
I felt stinging heat in the places where he pressed hard enough to open the skin.
“Or I’ll start carving up this pretty little body. ”
“I-I don’t know who you’re looking for,” I croaked. I kept telling myself to stay perfectly still, but adrenaline and pain and fear were making everything shake, and I couldn’t get it to stop. “If you’d just tell me—”
A knock on my front door put an abrupt end to my plea. The man huddled over me shot up to his full height just as the doorknob rattled and Ms. Weatherby’s voice carried in from the other side. “Charlie, darlin’. You home? I brought you back some brownies from the rec center.”
My attacker bolted toward the back of my small studio apartment just as my front door opened, climbing out the window he’d obviously used to break in in the first place.
“Ester Ryan’s not the best baker, so they’re a little dry, but I thought—oh my word!” She dropped the plate of brownies as soon as she spotted me. “What in the world happened?” she cried as she scurried over to me as quick as her old, arthritic knees would let her. “Are you okay?”
“Ms. W,” I panted as I tried to push myself up off the floor. “I think—” My words were cut off when a razor-sharp pain stabbed through my side.
“My God, child. Just stop movin’. You’ll just make it worse.”
I took small breaths, unable to pull in a full one as she eased me back to the floor. “I think you might need to call for an ambulance.”
I sat on my couch as the paramedic in front of me poked and prodded, breathing in and out slowly and carefully to keep the black seeping into the edges of my vision from closing in any further as police wandered through my apartment.
Micah hovered nearby, not right in my space, but close enough.
There were people dusting for prints, taking pictures, cataloging evidence, and the whole time, my self-appointed brother stood sentry between them and me.
One uniformed officer had made the grave mistake of attempting to question me as I sat there in the middle of the room, and Micah nearly took the poor guy’s head off.
After that, word spread fast that I wasn’t to be questioned until I was seen to physically.
The paramedic shined a tiny little light right into my eyeballs, and I could have sworn they were going to melt right out of my skull. “On a scale of one to ten, how’s your pain right now?”
“Uh.” I made the mistake of looking too fast from him to Micah, jarring my poor, abused brain.
The man in front of me let out a sigh. He knew a difficult patient when he saw one, I was sure. After taking one look at me, the first words out of his mouth had been to inform me I needed to go to the hospital.
“I’m fine,” I’d quickly argued, then listed to the side when a wave of dizziness nearly swept me under.
Instead of addressing me this time, he looked to Micah. “She’s probably got a serious concussion. Her nose is definitely broken. And she needs an X-ray of her ribs. She needs to go to the hospital, Detective.”
My panicked gaze shot back to Micah despite the pain, and I was just about to issue another protest when Dalton came storming into my little apartment with all the power of a hurricane breaching the shore, leaving destruction in its wake.
“Where the fuck is she?” he barked.
He reminded me of an angry bull, and an image popped into my head of him physically throwing people out of his way in an effort to get to me.
His frantic gaze darted around the small space.
As soon as it landed on me, the dread in those stormy depths gave way to a hard, intense rage that turned the gray to stone.
He froze in place just a few feet inside the doorway, but even the space between us didn’t prevent the tidal wave of emotions from rolling off him and slamming right into me.
His jaw ticked. A vein in his forehead I hadn’t seen since I woke up in the hospital months back bulged violently. He held himself so stiff I worried he might shatter into a million pieces if he moved.
Even from a distance, the potency of Dalton’s fury was enough to send a small tremor of fear down my spine.
The air in the apartment suddenly started to crackle, and I knew by the way all talking and movement stopped that every single person around us felt it.
I was frozen in place, speech suddenly failing me. Everyone in Dalton’s immediate vicinity must have sensed the monster stirring to life right beneath the surface because they moved back, giving him a wide berth as he slowly started toward me.
“Dalton, man. Just try and keep calm, all right?” Micah attempted to cajole. He stepped forward, putting himself between Dalton and me, and I had the feeling the move was intentional, like he was worried about what would happen if my man got to me.
Dalton’s hands clenched into fists so tight the knuckles turned stark white. He looked about a moment away from driving his fist right through Micah’s skull. “Move out of the way, Langford,” he clipped with barely contained rage.
Micah’s hands went up in a placating gesture. “I will, just as soon as I know you’ve got a lock on your shit.”
I hadn’t thought it possible for the atmosphere to get thicker and more suffocating than it already was, but as the two men in front of me entered into a stare-off, I suddenly found it harder than it already was to pull in a breath.
Dalton took a menacing step toward Micah. “You do not wanna stand in the way of me getting to my woman. Ever.”
“I do when you look like you’re about to rip this place down to the studs with your bare hands,” he bit back.
“One last warning, Langford. Don’t get between me and Charlotte. Move . . . now.”
Shit. Shit, shit, shit.
“Micah, it’s fine,” I said through a wince, trying to deescalate the situation. “I want to see him.” And I really did, despite the fact he looked like his head was seconds from exploding all over the place.
My home was supposed to be my safe place. It was a sanctuary. Realizing just how easily that security could be taken from me was rattling enough, but having that man hold a knife to my throat had been downright terrifying.
I needed to feel safe and protected, and the only person who’d ever given me that was standing a whole room away.
The sense of relief I felt as he side-stepped Micah and started for me quickly dwindled when he stopped a few feet away. I wanted to be wrapped in his arms, not have him looming over me.
Something was seriously wrong.
“What’s the verdict?” he asked the paramedic.
In the two minutes he’d been there, he hadn’t said a single word to me, and now he was choosing to speak to a stranger instead of asking how I felt.
The ice that had built up in my veins, crystallizing my blood, began to melt in the wake of my own anger.
“I’m fine,” l clipped, my eyelids narrowed into slits. “Thanks for asking.”
The look he shot me just then was icy enough to make me clamp my mouth shut and curl my lips between my teeth.
The paramedic spoke like I wasn’t sitting right in front of him. “She needs a hospital.”
“I don’t need—”
That hard, glacial gaze returned, effectively silencing me once more. “You’re going to the hospital,” Dalton commanded, speaking the first words he’d said to me since walking through my door.
My anger went from a sizzle to a full, rolling boil. “That’s not your call.” I made the mistake of trying to rise to my feet. It felt like someone had just driven a blade into my side while spots danced in front of my eyes.
Hands came at me from all sides as I teetered precariously, but in the end, it was Dalton who steadied me. When my vision cleared, he looked even more pissed than before.
“You’re going. Now. End of discussion.”
Oh yeah, I thought as the paramedic and his partner loaded me up on a gurney and began strapping me in. There is something seriously wrong.