Chapter 35 #3
She’s trying to tell me not to do this. I can see it in the frantic little movements of her head, the way her eyes keep darting between me and the gun and Drew’s hand in my hair like she’s trying to solve the room from the couch with blood running down the side of her face.
I want to tell her I’m not surrendering. I want to tell her I’m just buying time. I want to tell her Jimmy is going to come through that front door any minute and turn this whole house inside out.
But I don’t know if any of that is true. And if I lie to her with my eyes right now, she’ll know.
So I don’t.
I just hold her gaze and try to give her the only thing I can.
Stay alive.
That’s it. That’s the whole message. Stay alive long enough for somebody to find you.
Drew shifts behind me. “Turn around.”
I don’t move.
The gun digs harder into my side. “Don’t make me repeat myself.”
Slowly, carefully, I lift my hands away from my body and turn.
The second I do, his face comes fully into view, and I nearly wish it hadn’t.
Because he doesn’t look wild. He doesn’t look crazed or out of control or obviously unstable in the way people imagine dangerous men should.
He looks calm. Focused. Too pleased with himself. That’s somehow worse.
His shirt is rumpled, sleeves shoved up, jaw shadowed darker than usual like he hasn’t slept much, and his eyes are the worst part.
Too bright. Too sure. Too convinced he’s right.
The gun in his hand only makes that look more grotesque.
He takes me in slowly, his gaze dragging over my face like he’s cataloging every flicker of fear and trying to decide which parts of it belong to him now.
I hate him so much I can barely breathe around it.
His free hand comes up and grips my jaw, hard enough to hurt. “See?” he says softly. “Wasn’t that difficult.”
I jerk my face away from him on instinct.
His mouth hardens.
And behind him, my mother makes a desperate, strangled noise against the gag.
That’s what snaps his attention back to her. Drew glances over his shoulder, irritation flashing across his face. “She’s gonna be a problem,” he mutters.
“No.” The word tears out of me too fast. “She won’t.”
He ignores me. He steps toward the couch, gun still in one hand, and my whole body surges forward before my brain catches up.
“Don’t!”
He catches me by the arm so hard I almost fall and shoves me back hard enough that my hip clips the edge of the coffee table.
Pain flashes hot and immediate.
“Stay,” he snaps.
I stare at him, breath coming too fast now, my pulse pounding in my throat.
My mother is shaking her head violently, tears streaming now, and I know what she thinks is coming.
I know because I do too. “Please,” I say.
I don’t care. I don’t care that it sounds broken. I don’t care that I am begging this man for anything.
“Please don’t—”
“She needs to stop looking at me like she’s gonna try something brave.”
My whole body goes cold.
Drew takes one more step toward the couch.
My mother jerks back as far as the cushions and zip ties will let her, eyes wide and wild.
And then, with horrifying casualness, he brings the butt of the gun down against the side of her head.
The sound is sickening. A hard, blunt crack.
My scream tears through the room before I can stop it. “Mom!”
She slumps immediately.
One second she’s there, breathing, fighting, terrified and furious and alive in the room with me. The next she’s limp against the couch cushions, head lolled sideways, blood freshening at the edge of the earlier wound.
For one impossible second, I stop existing as a person and become something purely animal.
Rage. Terror. Instinct.
I launch myself at him.
I don’t think. I don’t weigh odds. I don’t remember the gun until I’m already moving.
I hit him hard enough to knock him half a step sideways, fingers clawing for his face, his throat, anything I can reach. “You sick fuck—”
He catches me by the shoulders and slams me back into the wall so hard the breath blasts out of me in a painful grunt.
My head clips drywall. Stars burst across my vision.
The gun is suddenly back, up under my jaw now, cold and unforgiving, and his face is inches from mine, every trace of fake calm gone. “Try that again,” he hisses, “and I’ll put you down right here next to her.”
I’m shaking. Violently now. Not because I’m scared of dying. Not even mostly.
Because my mother is unconscious on the couch and I can’t get to her.
Because I can’t even check if she’s breathing without him deciding whether I get to.
Because if I keep fighting right now, he really will shoot me in this room and then whatever happens to her after won’t matter because I won’t be alive to stop it.
So I force myself still. Every muscle in my body screaming against it.
I go still.
Drew watches me for one long second, breathing hard. Then he smiles.
And God, I hate that smile.
That ugly little flash of satisfaction like he thinks this means he’s won. Like he thinks forcing stillness is the same thing as breaking me. He lowers the gun from under my jaw and steps back. “That’s better.”
I’m breathing like I’ve run miles. My scalp still aches from where he dragged me. My side throbs where the gun dug in. My head is starting to pulse from where it hit the wall.
And all I can do is stare at my mother.
Please breathe.
Her chest moves. Small. Shallow. But it moves.
Thank God.
That nearly drops me to my knees.
Drew catches my arm before I can even sway. “Come on.”
I don’t look at him. “Let me make sure she’s alive.”
“She is.”
“You don’t know that.”
His grip tightens. “She’s alive enough.”
I want to kill him.
Not metaphorically. Not in the exaggerated way people say when they’re angry.
I want to physically tear him apart with my hands and leave whatever’s left for the dogs.
Instead, I say, “Please.”
That one actually makes him stop.
Not out of compassion. Out of ego. Because he likes the sound of it. Likes knowing he can make me beg.
He follows my gaze to my mother and rolls his eyes like this is all becoming inconvenient for him. Then he drags me two steps closer to the couch, keeping the gun tucked low but visible. “Look.”
I do.
My mother is breathing. Still alive. Still here. Unconscious, bleeding, but alive.
I memorize that.
I have to.
Drew jerks me back by the arm before I can keep cataloging. “That’s enough.”
I dig my heels in on instinct. It buys me half a second and nothing else.
He slams me into him hard enough to jolt my teeth and presses the gun back into my side. “Don’t start.”
I close my eyes for one second. Then open them again.
Think. The prospect. Ryan dropped me and left. Jimmy’s going to expect a text soon, a check-in. And if I haven’t answered...
Unless Drew has my phone.
My whole body goes colder.
My purse. I can’t remember if it’s still on my shoulder or if I dropped it when he grabbed me. I look. It’s by the front door. On the floor. Close enough to see. Too far to reach. My phone is almost definitely inside it.
Drew notices where I’m looking and laughs softly. “Looking for this?”
He tosses my phone on the floor I can hear it shatter as it skids out of sight. Then he drags me toward the back of the house. Every nerve in me lights up at once.
The back.
He’s not taking me out the front. Of course he isn’t. He parked where he can move me without being seen. He planned all of it. The realization lands with a sick, heavy certainty as he marches me through the kitchen.
The house feels wrong in a different way now. Violated. Too familiar and too dangerous at once.
The yellow dish towel hanging from the oven handle. My mother’s half-read magazine on the table. A bowl of bananas on the counter. And me being dragged through the middle of it with a gun in my side by a man who thinks he owns what he can scare.
I look toward the back door.
Sunlight. Too bright. Too normal.
If I scream now, will anyone hear?
Maybe.
Maybe not.
The houses out here aren’t right on top of each other, and even if somebody does hear something, by the time they come looking he’ll already have me in the car.
Still.
Maybe that’s enough. Maybe any noise is better than none.
I drag in a breath.
Drew must feel it happen, because the gun presses harder. “Don’t.”
I don’t answer.
He opens the back door and heat slams into us instantly, heavy and humid and cruelly ordinary.
The yard stretches out behind the house exactly the way it always has. Patchy grass. My dad’s old smoker by the fence. The line of trees farther back. The gravel cutout where people park when the driveway’s full.
And there, half hidden around the side of the house where it wouldn’t be visible from the road or front drive, is Drew’s car.
Dark. Waiting. Driver’s side door already open.
My stomach drops so hard I almost gag.
No. Not the car. Anything but the car. Because the second I’m in there, this changes. Becomes mobile. Becomes harder to interrupt. Becomes the kind of problem that can disappear fast if nobody gets eyes on us soon enough.
I stop dead.
Drew nearly yanks my arm out of the socket. “Move.”
“No.” The word comes out raw and immediate. I don’t even think before saying it.
The car changes everything, and some desperate part of me understands that better than I understand anything else in this moment.
If I cross that stretch of grass and get shoved into that backseat, the odds of getting back out cleanly drop so far I can’t even let myself calculate them.
So I plant my feet.
He jerks me forward again.
I fight him. Not wildly this time. Not like the living room.
Strategically. Ugly. Desperate. Enough to slow him. Enough to make him work for every inch.
He swears and grabs for my hair again, but I twist hard enough that he only catches part of it. Pain flashes anyway.
I use it. Throw my elbow backward. Catch him in the ribs hard enough to make him grunt.
He slams me sideways into the exterior wall of the house, and the vinyl siding rattles under the impact.
My shoulder lights up. My vision blurs.
“Jesus Christ,” he snaps. “Stop fighting me.”
“Go to hell.”
That gets me another shove, harder this time.
My back hits the wall again. I hear myself make a sound, small and involuntary and pained, and hate it instantly.
Drew’s face twists. Not guilty. Not even angry, exactly. Frustrated. Like I’m making this inconvenient. Like my terror is somehow poor manners.
That thought sends another spike of rage through me strong enough to cut through some of the panic.
Good. I need the rage. It keeps me from collapsing into the fear.
He crowds in close, gun low and hidden between our bodies if anyone happened to look this way from a distance, his other hand braced on the wall beside my head. “You are making this so much harder than it needs to be.”
I laugh once, breathless and shaking. “You broke into my parents’ house and split my mother’s head open.”
“And whose fault is that?”
I stare at him. Actually stare. Because there it is. That perfect, nauseating piece of him. That inability to imagine any version of this where his choices are his.
“You’re insane,” I whisper.
His expression hardens. Then smooths. And when he speaks again, his voice is almost gentle, which is somehow the most terrifying thing he’s done yet.
“No,” he says. “I’m committed.” The words slither over my skin.
My stomach turns.
He leans in closer, close enough that I can smell coffee and aftershave and the sweat from his collar, and I have to force myself not to gag. “You’re mine now,” he says quietly. “For better or worse.”
A pause.
Then, with horrifying calm, “alive or dead.”
The world narrows to a pinpoint. Not because I don’t understand what he means. Because I do.
Perfectly.
He’s not bluffing. Not about taking me. Not about keeping me. Not about what happens if I make this difficult enough that he decides he’d rather own the end of me than the rest of me.
And for the first time since I walked in and saw my mother on that couch, I understand the shape of what he actually wants.
Not just revenge. Not just punishment. Possession. The ugliest, most rotten version of it.
Something in me goes very still. Not surrender. Calculation. Because panic isn’t helping anymore. Fear isn’t helping.
I need time. Distance. A crack. A mistake. And I’m not going to get any of that if I burn everything I’ve got fighting the loading phase of this like it’s the last chance I’ll ever have.
Maybe it is. Maybe it isn’t.
But if I’m wrong, and I spend it all here, then my mother bleeds in that house, Jimmy finds my car in the driveway and maybe never finds me at all.
So I force my body to stop fighting. Not all the way. Just enough. Enough that Drew feels the difference. Enough that his grip eases by one dangerous inch.
There it is.
He smiles like he’s won.
Good. Let him.
Let him think stillness means submission. Let him think fear means compliance. Let him think he’s in control enough to get sloppy. Because the second he does, I’m taking whatever opening I get and shoving it straight through his throat.
He steps back just enough to steer me again, the gun still hidden, his hand locked around my arm like a vice. “Better,” he says.
I don’t answer. I let him drag me one step. Then another.
Closer to the car. Closer to the open door. Closer to the point where this becomes a whole different kind of nightmare.
And as I’m walking across my parents’ backyard toward the man who thinks he owns me now, there’s only one thing in my head.
Jimmy will come.
He has to.