Chapter Eight #4
He forces me down harder against the table, one hand between my shoulder blades, the other handling me like I am no longer a person but a task. I twist on instinct, every muscle in my body fighting even when I know it is useless. The old wood bites into my cheek. My breath comes fast and ragged.
My whole body goes rigid as he forces my clothes out of the way.
Fresh tears fall from my eyes as he settles himself behind me, leaving me no room to move, no room to fight in any way that matters. His voice drops low, ugly with satisfaction, and revulsion rolls through me so hard it nearly chokes me.
“I’ll be nice and give that perky ass a good spit before I fill you up like the slut you are.” He murmurs, the sound of him spitting into his hand follows. I flinch as he spreads his sticky salvia around my back entrance and then my body goes rigid as he assaults me with a single finger.
A sharp cry tears out of me before I can stop it.
The humiliation of that hurts almost as much as the pain itself.
I have never known this kind of violation, never imagined the body could be turned so quickly from something living and mine into something trapped, overpowered, and made to endure.
Tears blur the lantern light into a sick, wavering smear.
My fingers claw uselessly against the tabletop.
Every muscle in my body locks tight with terror, but the fear only makes the moment crueler.
He works me open with brutal efficiency before forcing his way in.
Pain tears through me at once, sharp and burning, and I can’t stop the sound that escapes.
It does not matter that he is not as big as the first. My body is already raw, already rigid with fear, and every movement only turns the violation into something worse.
His thrusts become frantic as he rushes to the end, his breathing jagged. His grip bruises. I can feel the violence of his urgency in every movement, frantic and selfish and cruel.
When it ends, it ends with a final shudder that leaves me shaking so hard my teeth nearly chatter.
The indignity of what remains, the physical evidence of him, warm and inescapable, makes nausea lurch violently through my stomach.
I bite down hard on the inside of my cheek to keep from making another sound.
Copper floods my tongue. My whole body feels wrong now, turned against itself, every nerve flayed open and left exposed.
Across the room, the boss says nothing.
He only watches.
And somehow that silence makes everything filthier.
If he had laughed, if he had shouted, if he had acted like the others, maybe it would have felt smaller somehow.
More human. But he just sits there in that crooked chair near the stove with the same composed, terrible patience, as if this is only another stage in a lesson he has already decided I deserve. His stillness hollows the room out.
The second man finally steps back.
I barely have time to register the shift before another set of footsteps moves across the warped floorboards.
Slower. Heavier. Deliberate. The third man.
Not the smoker. Not the one who just used me.
The heavyset one. He moves with the same blunt certainty he has carried all night, like he has never once had to doubt what his hands can do once they land on something weaker.
My breath hitches. My whole body is still trembling, every nerve raw and screaming.
I try to push myself up, try to twist away, but my limbs feel distant and unresponsive.
The rope bites into my wrists. The table digs into my ribs.
My cheek sticks to the rough wood where tears have dried.
My shoulder throbs. My scalp burns where hair has been yanked and twisted.
I am shaking like an animal that has run itself into a trap and only now understands the teeth have closed.
Boots stop just behind me.
A shadow falls over my back.
No.
My mind screams it even as my body fails to obey.
Not again. Not again. I drag in a ruined breath and try to twist, to kick, to claw my way toward anything that feels like movement, but panic has changed shape now.
It isn’t flight anymore. It is the wild, humiliating terror of a creature cornered after the fight is already half beaten out of it.
The third man reaches for me. The door explodes inward.
Wood splinters with a deafening crack. The deadbolt tears free. The frame buckles hard enough to shake the wall. Cold night air rips through the cabin in a violent rush, carrying pine, rain, wet earth, and something far more dangerous.
Marius.
Everything happens at once. The heavyset man jerks around first, caught half between intent and surprise.
The smoker swears and lunges for the nearest weapon.
The second man doesn’t freeze at all. He moves fast, faster than a man his size should, peeling away from the table and breaking for the back hall in the same instant the first shot detonates through the room.
The gunfire is unbearable in the small cabin.
The first bullet takes the smoker before he can get his hand fully around the weapon.
His body snaps backward, slams into the edge of the wall, and crumples in a heap so suddenly it barely looks real.
The lantern swings wildly, throwing the room into slashing bands of yellow and black.
The second shot comes almost on top of the first, and this one catches the heavyset man high.
He staggers, crashes sideways into the table hard enough to jolt it under me, then collapses to the floorboards with all his weight hitting at once.
“Down!” Marius barks.
The command cracks through the room like another shot.
I flinch violently anyway, every muscle in my body seizing.
My ears scream from the sound. The room tilts.
My vision fractures into brief, useless flashes.
For one horrible second I can’t tell who is standing and who isn’t, only that the air is full of splintered wood, gun smoke, cold rain smell, and the aftermath of violence colliding with violence.
Then I hear movement. The second man. He is already gone down the back hall, a dark blur of height and muscle vanishing through the doorway at the rear.
He doesn’t look back. Doesn’t hesitate. He runs like he knows the route and intends to live.
And the boss.
The chair near the stove is empty.
My head lifts a fraction, slow and unsteady.
Empty. Not fallen. Not overturned. Just empty, as if he had stood and slipped away in the exact second chaos opened for him.
The back hallway door beyond the stove stands crookedly ajar now, moving once on its hinges in the wake of everything that just tore through the room.
He used the others exactly the way he used me.
As cover. As time. As things to discard when they stopped being useful.
He leaves them. He leaves me. He leaves without one backward glance. My stomach drops so hard I almost gag.
Marius stands in the ruined doorway, gun still raised, every line of him drawn tight with lethal control.
He sees all of it in one sweep. The smoker dead.
The heavyset man down. The table. The ropes.
The open back hall. The empty chair where the real center of this just sat.
He understands instantly. The dead men are not the ones that matter.
A shift moves through him, subtle but brutal in its restraint.
“Willem,” he says sharply.
Behind him, boots hit the porch hard.
“Back exit,” Marius snaps.
Another set of footsteps tears off into the night without hesitation.
Then Marius moves. He crosses the room fast, gun still trained toward the back hall for one final beat before lowering it.
And then he sees me. Really sees me. Something in his face changes.
Not softer. Never softer. It goes colder in a way that feels almost inhuman, as if everything that might have passed for distance or calculation inside him has just frozen solid around something far worse.
“Leona.”
My name comes out low and steady, but there is something under it, some violence so tightly controlled I can hear it anyway.
I try to answer. Nothing comes. Only a broken breath and a sound that doesn’t feel like speech at all.
I don’t want him to touch me and I want him to touch me immediately and both instincts tear at me so hard I can’t separate them.
My whole body has gone into that terrible, feral state where every hand feels like a threat, every movement feels like danger, every sound is too loud.
I am still shaking. Still trapped halfway inside the panic.
A caged thing with blood on its fur and nowhere left to run.
His hand comes to my shoulder, firm but careful, and I flinch anyway.
“Hey,” he says, quieter now. “Stay with me.”
The rope at my wrists is cut in one clean motion.
Pain floods back immediately, sharp and brutal as circulation returns.
I gasp, my body folding in on itself before he catches me.
The moment the bindings loosen, whatever was holding me upright vanishes with them.
I can’t hold myself up. I can’t even pretend to.
My knees buckle and my hands shake uselessly and the room lurches again, too bright and too dim all at once.
Marius gets an arm around me before I hit the floor.
I go rigid in it on instinct, every part of me still expecting more hurt, more hands, more force.
He feels it. I know he does. His grip changes at once, not looser, not uncertain, just more deliberate, one hand coming to the back of my neck, the other anchoring me against him as if he knows I’m one bad breath away from shattering apart entirely.
Behind us, the cabin sits in ruin. Two bodies.
A swinging lantern. An empty chair where the real monster had been.
The second man is gone. The boss is gone.
The others are dead where they fell. Marius’s gaze flicks once toward the open hallway door, then back to me.
He already knows. I can see it in the set of his mouth, in the hard line of his jaw.
He knows the men he killed were the ones in front of him, not the ones who matter most. He knows the real target slipped the trap by seconds. Gone. For now.
His jaw tightens hard enough to show. Then he looks back down at me, at the way I tremble, at the damage already written across my body and the deeper kind he can’t yet see. Whatever calculation has been running behind his eyes shifts into something far more personal.
“He’s not getting far,” he says, voice low and lethal. “Not from me.”
I don’t know if he means it for me. Or for himself. But I believe him anyway.