CHAPTER 29 ELODIE
ELODIE
I hate this new tension with Alfie. It’s so foreign and strangling I can no longer breathe properly around him.
I’ve never been with a man where it hasn’t been forced.
I’ve never experienced genuine pleasure.
Never got the chance to explore what I like.
And the more Alfie touches me during our workouts, the more he catches my eye from across the room, the more I crave him.
I long to discover what he looks like when he loses himself in a woman. In me.
Someone like him should know he can do so much better than me, and he clearly does, not that it makes it hurt any less.
I’ve had enough rejection. I’ve finally taken the hint. Whether Alfie likes me back or not, he’s made it crystal clear he’ll never act on it. My fractured little heart can’t take any more. I’m hanging by a thread as it is.
There are only a few days left until The Hunt now.
I’ve followed Alfie’s advice; I’ve eaten as much as possible, lifted as heavy weights as I can, but I know time’s not been on my side.
There’s not much improvement I can make in two weeks.
But I have more of something than Caden does.
I have smarts. I don’t exactly know what goes down during this weird ritual, but I know it’s something I can outsmart Caden with.
He’s a man, after all, a man who’s going to be juiced up on pure primal hormones.
All he’ll be seeing is prey to hunt, fuelled by a caveman instinct to track and kill.
I have intelligence, strategic thinking. I can outplay him.
I can easily tell how close we’re getting to the full forty days. Fiz’s comments about my body and pussy are getting filthier by the day, and Caden’s glances at me are getting longer and more menacing.
Alfie’s downing coffees and RedBulls like water, and his jitters are the worst I’ve ever seen.
Any rattle in the kitchen causes his shoulders to rise to his ears.
He was working on his Lego tower last night and abruptly yanked the socks off his feet.
When he caught me staring, he just mumbled, “They felt weird.”
He’s so like my brother it’s almost uncanny. As awkward as it is between us, being around him still feels familiar. It brings me to a homely place in my memories where I still had Lewis. Before he was torn from my soul and I was thrown into the zoo with these animals.
For the first time since I moved in here, the zoo’s empty.
Alfie’s not taken his eyes off me unless it’s been to let me sleep, but he left me alone ten minutes ago.
Caden and Fiz have been out on a job all afternoon and Alfie got called away for an emergency from Russell.
It’s why I’ve got a quiet moment to filter through these confusing feelings about him.
It makes me vulnerable, liking him this way, but he doesn’t have to know how deep that actually runs.
He told me he trusts me as he was leaving, but he’s leaving Bruiser here as an incentive to behave. As if he’d been trained to keep human prisoners. Looking at him now, I believe it.
It’s more than enough. Alfie leaves me in the kitchen, having a stare-off with the brute.
Bruiser watched Alfie leave, now it’s just us two.
Yes, I’ve been staring at him for ten minutes while I daydream about Alfie.
Because I’m paralysed. I’ve got on their good side from all the treats I’ve bribed them with, but I know where their loyalties lie.
If I ever reached for the front door, he’d have my fingers severed between his teeth in an instant.
I’ve never been alone with any of them before, and I’m feeling the effects of not having Alfie here as a buffer.
Bruiser finally comes up to sniff at me, and I back off until I crash into the counter behind me. What was it Alfie said? Don’t let them know you’re afraid.
I fish around blindly, not daring to take my eyes off the dog for a second, until I feel the jar by the stove. I grab a handful of treats.
“This what you want?” I say, “Will this make you back off?”
His tail starts wagging, long tongue flopping out as he pants. A hint of a smile plays on my lips as I dangle the treats just above him.
He reaches up and gently takes them from my fingers.
I finally let out my breath. He inches closer to me, a softness in his eyes that feels welcoming.
I squat down and slowly reach out a hand. He immediately steps forward.
“You’re not so bad, huh?” I mumble as I give him a tentative scratch between the ears.
Bruiser’s face turns to one of contentment, his tail wagging wildly.
“Gees, you’re not as scary as you make yourselves look,” I whisper. “I kind of get Caden’s insistence on not feeding Sarge now.”
Bruiser tilts his head, and I get the feeling he understands. It makes me smile at him.
This moment of quiet acceptance between animal and human is shattered across the room as the front doors burst open and raucous chaos fills the space.
Fiz is carrying an unconscious Caden in his arms like a child. My body jerks upright. Bruiser runs up to Sarge and Bob, who run inside barking like rabid beasts.
“Get Maggie!” Fiz yells at me.
Everything absorbs into my brain at once.
The unhinged terror on Fiz’s usually smug, pretty face.
The blood that’s coating his clothes. The limp body of Caden, who’s also smothered in blood, his head lolling back over his best friend’s arm.
Sarge is going nuts, jumping in circles around Fiz’s legs as he marches Caden over to the dining table, which is making the other two dogs go nuts too.
The combination of barking and the roaring of my blood is rattling my brain.
“Are you fucking deaf?!” Fiz screams at me. “Get fucking Maggie, now!”
“She’s – she’s not here,” I stutter.
“Then get Alfie!” Fiz places Caden on the table as gently as possible, but his body just flops down, his head landing with a thump that reverberates through me.
“He’s not here either.”
Fiz whips his eyes up at me. I see his features clearly for the first time. His eyes are red raw, like he’s been crying. Smears of blood cover his dark skin. “Then you help me!” Fiz turns back to his friend and starts ripping his clothes off.
Don’t, the darkness says, let him die.
I don’t move.
Fiz rips Caden’s shirt apart, the fabric falling limply over his shoulders. There’s a towel that had been placed under it, whatever colour it was, it’s now dark red and dripping.
Fiz looks back at me again. “Get your fucking ass over here, I need you!”
“No.”
This makes him freeze. A darkness sweeping over him that I’ve only ever seen on Caden.
He marches over to me, a raging bull to a flag. He grabs me by the throat and says, deathly quiet, “You are going to help me save his life or I will make sure the rest of yours is a living fucking hell.”
“It already is.” I hiss. “Let the cunt die.”
A heartbeat later, I’m looking down the barrel of a gun. “I will do it, Elodie,” he says with deadly calm. “Fuck a marriage, fuck a contract. If you let my best friend die today I will fucking end you.”
It’s funny. How much you want to face death until you’re actually staring death in the face.
It’s not just the promise of dying that makes me move towards Caden.
It’s the flicker in Fiz’s black eyes that displays more than just the usual soulless, callous asshole.
Fear. Genuine fear. For the seconds he stands pointing a gun at me, staring down the barrel and into my eyes, he looks human for the first time.
I know what it’s like to lose someone you love, and even though this prick does not deserve anything good in his life, no one deserves to bear the weight of grief.
It’s worse than any torture I’ve ever known.
I take a steadying breath and move over to Caden to assess the damage. Blood’s already dripping off the sides of the table.
“What happened to him?” I gingerly lift the sopping towel from his abdomen and immediately see what happened.
“Stab wound,” Fiz says beside me.
“How long’s he been bleeding like this?”
“Only a couple minutes, the idiot pulled the knife out in the car himself.”
“Shit. What supplies have we got?”
Fiz darts away, the dogs follow him, Sarge standing close by my side, jumping up on his hind legs constantly to nudge Caden’s face, barking and whimpering. He never wakes up. Eyelids don’t even flicker. I press my fingers to his neck and feel a drilling pulse. It’s too fast.
Fiz comes back with a duffle bag, but the two dogs don’t. Must have locked them away; too much distraction, we need to focus. I don’t think there’d be any chance of getting Sarge away from his best friend though.
Fiz unzips the duffle and hastily empties the supplies on the table above Caden’s head, then goes back to pressing on the oozing wound.
There are bandages, gauze, flannels, plasters, wipes, sterile liquid, needles and threads.
“Okay, shit.” My hands are shaking as I reach for a bottle.
I unscrew the lid and pour some on the gauze, my tremble making the alcohol go everywhere.
“Come on, buddy, wake up,” Fiz gently coaxes, his voice thick and shaky.
I try not to listen, try not to let the words penetrate, and focus on cleaning his stomach. The gash is huge, at least three inches. I don’t know if anything’s damaged inside. We’re way out of our depth here.
“He needs to go to hospital,” I say, wiping the wound as best I can. “We don’t know if there’s internal bleeding, anything ruptured, we’re not doctors.”
“He’s not going to a fucking hospital. And Higgins can’t get here yet, I called. Just fix him now and Doc will get here later,” Fiz spits in a tone hard enough to tell me there’s no arguing with him. “But we’re not waiting. He’ll bleed out.”
“Exactly. He needs a blood transfusion. Look at the blood he’s lost already.”
Fiz’s eyes widen with realisation. “We have blood.” He darts for the door. “Stay here.”
He hasn’t given me much of a fucking choice, has he?