Chapter 26
LARK
“Uh, uh, uh, birdie,” he taunts with an infuriating smirk. “Not so fast. You know you could never overpower me. Maybe if you used your logic instead of the emotions that rule women, you’d have come up with a better plan than this.”
I don’t know what his deal is with thinking women are inferior to him. It’s weird and uncomfortable.
It also makes me wonder how the hell I missed this in the year we were dating and the few months of our engagement.
At one point in time, I thought I loved Andrew. He was handsome, charming, the perfect gentleman, and everything I wanted in a future husband.
Nothing raised red flags about him until the night he discovered I wasn’t a virgin.
And the most embarrassing part of this is that I probably would’ve gone back to him if Wren hadn’t died that night. I would’ve brushed his almost strangling me to death under the rug. And still married the man who planned to break me, violate me, and probably kill me when I was no longer useful.
What the fuck is wrong with me?
How could I be this stupid?
Figuring out the answers to that is going to have to wait because I really need to find some way out of this mess.
“Let me go, Andrew,” I rasp, my voice rough from where his hand is still wrapped around my throat. He’s squeezing hard enough to make breathing a struggle without risking making me pass out.
Yet.
He laughs, the sound cruel and taunting. “No, I don’t think I will. I’m enjoying watching you realize that you never had a choice in your life. You never have and you never will.”
He reaches down and starts patting my thighs. He moves his hands up to my jacket before I have time to freak out about what he’s doing. Eventually, he pulls my phone out of my pocket and tosses it onto the couch. “You won’t need that where you’re going.”
Andrew has his entire body pressed against me, pinning me to the wall and making escape difficult. I struggle against him, anyway, desperate to get myself free and away from him. But I can’t think clearly enough to figure out how to do that.
After sighing at my admittedly weak struggles, Andrew uses his grip on my throat to slam my head against the wall. He repeats the motion over and over until I’m seeing stars.
As pain splinters through my skull, the world starts spinning, and I have the urge to throw up. It’d serve Andrew right if I puked all over his fancy navy suit.
My eyes are also refusing to focus, so the world is blurry. I’m pretty sure I have another concussion, thanks to my psycho ex-fiancé bashing my skull against the wall.
“Not so brave, are you now, birdie?” he taunts. “I’m growing tired of these games. You’ll never be a worthy opponent, so it’s time for you to go to sleep. Who knows? Maybe by the time you wake up, you’ll already be pregnant with my heir.”
I don’t even have the energy to struggle at that horrific notion as less and less oxygen reaches my brain. The world starts to go black around the edges, and consciousness begins to slip away, no matter how hard I try to cling to it.
When I’m weakened to the point of almost passing out, my creature surges up. She’s able to take control in my damaged and addled state to force a shift. Normally, I have her on a tight leash so she can’t force anything, but I’m too weak for that right now.
Not that I’d try to stop her.
I’d like to say that if I were less concussed, I would’ve thought of shifting to overpower Andrew sooner, but who knows.
Regardless, I’m thankful she kept her wits about her when I very clearly didn’t.
I expect us to shift into some sort of bird and hightail it out of my apartment. While Andrew would still be a problem, at least I’d live to fight another day.
She has a different idea, apparently, and shifts us into a massive green anaconda. The anaconda form is as wide as Andrew’s torso and probably close to thirty feet long, if the coils bunched around where my feet used to be are any indication.
Once she shifts, I see the world in confusing fragments and moments of time. It feels like one moment I’m standing there, and the next I’m peering through slitted pupils as I watch my creature deal with Andrew, feeling like a spectator in my own body.
My creature is in complete control of our body as she rises up to reach the ceiling, hissing at a terrified Andrew. She showcases her massive fangs, dripping with a bitter liquid that I’m pretty sure real anacondas don’t produce.
After shaking himself out of his shock, he starts backing away from my giant snake form. I mean, I don’t blame him. I, too, would run the fuck away from a white tiger shifter that turned into a massive anaconda out of the blue.
Too bad for him, my creature is much quicker than he is. After lifting her lips into a terrifying snakey smile, she darts toward him, lightning fast. He has no chance to react before she wraps around him, completely immobilizing him.
Her coils encase him from his feet to chest, and she still has enough length to lift her head up and tower over him, hissing menacingly.
It brings me a sick sense of enjoyment seeing the complete and utter terror on Andrew’s face, and the way he’s turning an interesting shade of purple as she tightens around him with each of his exhales.
The world goes black for a beat. Then my vision returns just in time to watch her tail punch through Andrew’s chest. When her tail breaks through the front of his torso, his heart is skewered onto the end of one of the barbs.
Andrew’s mouth opens on a silent scream as his heart is ripped out of his chest. Blood dribbles out of his mouth and down his chin as the light leaves his blue eyes I once thought were so handsome.
Blood splatters everywhere, spotting her dark green scales and face with bright crimson liquid. My apartment falls victim to the bloody spray, but I don’t have time to mourn the ruined furniture, rug, and walls right now.
Rather than dropping his heart, my creature lifts her tail to her mouth and chomps down on the bloody organ. I would probably throw up from the sheer grossness of having a human heart in my mouth if I were in control of our body.
But I’m not.
So, instead, we swallow down the warm, wet, and coppery mush in one go.
Now that Andrew’s very thoroughly dead, I expect my creature to let me shift back. But I guess simply ripping out Andrew’s heart, one of the surefire ways to kill a shifter, isn’t enough. She wants to make sure that he’s as dead as can be.
Coiling her barbed, scaly tail around Andrew’s limp neck a few times, she pulls until a sickening crack sounds throughout the strangely silent apartment. Rending sounds echo throughout the small space as she forcefully separates his head from his body.
Tossing his head aside, my creature squeezes Andrew one last time, hard enough to pulverize almost every bone in his body.
Then she reluctantly uncoils herself from around Andrew, letting his body fall carelessly to the ground with a soft thud.
I’m glad she doesn’t make me look at the gruesome scene very long before turning her back to his body. After one last hiss, she gives me back control of myself, allowing me to shift back into my human form.
When I turn into myself again, my legs buckle underneath me. I fall to my knees on the plush ivory rug, stark naked.
I can feel the flecks of Andrew’s blood drying on my face and skin, and there’s even a few places where it’s dripping down me. But I’m too emotionally numb and in too much physical pain to care.
Shifting helped heal the concussion enough that I can form a coherent thought, but my head is still throbbing with pain. My throat feels bruised and scratchy from Andrew choking me. My back hurts from where he body-slammed me into the wall.
And I feel numb from everything I learned about Andrew, Marcus, Wren, and the plans for me. My heart is even more mangled than the one currently sitting in my stomach, but I can’t really feel anything right now. No sadness or heartbreak or anger or anything, really.
The only thing I can feel is a mild horror at the fact that I just killed a man.
A really fucking awful man, but he was still a person. And I just ended his life. Brutally.
I don’t know how to feel about it. Sure, there were many reasons he absolutely deserved to be killed, not the least of which was that he knew what was happening to Wren and didn’t stop it.
But who am I to decide who gets to live or die? Who am I to be judge, jury, and executioner of anyone, even someone as evil as Andrew?
I don’t know, and I don’t think I’m going to find out the answers to those questions right now. Not kneeling on a bloodstained rug with a mangled corpse a few feet from me. Not when I can’t even begin to start processing everything I just learned.
What I do know, though, is if I don’t get away from Andrew and all the blood and gore soon, I’m going to lose it.
I’m barely holding myself together right now, and I need to keep it together until I figure out what to do about the very violent crime I just committed in my home.
Feeling slightly energized by the simple task of getting away from the carnage, I robotically climb to my feet.
I walk over the bloodstained sofa in a daze and vaguely notice myself grab the dark green throw draped over the back.
After wrapping it around myself, I swipe my phone and stiffly walk around the couch.
Between the sofa and the wall is a foot of space.
It reminds me of the hiding spot I used to run to as a kid when my parents started screaming at each other and anyone unfortunate enough to be around them.
I’d crawl into the nook behind one of the couches in the formal sitting room and put my hands over my ears to block out the sounds of their fighting.
I’d stay curled up in a ball like that until Wren found me.
The first time I hid there, it took her hours of frantic searching to find me. After the first couple of times, she could find me in minutes. She’d take me up to our shared room and hold me until the screaming and crashing and glass breaking stopped.
I haven’t hid like that from my parents in almost twenty years.
Yet the urge to curl up in the smallest space I can fit in is so strong right now that I can’t fight it.
Getting on my hands and knees, I crawl behind the couch until I reach the opposite wall. Resting my back against it, I bring my knees up to my chest and hug the blanket around me.
All I want is for Wren to come find me and tell me everything’s going to be okay like she used to.
But I’ll never here that from her again.
So, I have to find a way to make it okay myself. I pull out my phone and dial the one person I think might be able to help me fix this mess.
The phone rings for a few beats before he picks up with an enthusiastic greeting.
“Hal?” I rasp into the phone. “I didn’t know who else to call, and I need help,” is all I manage to get out before the phone slips from my numb fingers and falls to the floor with a crash.