Chapter 26
Maisie
Hard fingers dig painfully into the skin on my upper arm.
I hiss, wiggling to get free. “You’re hurting me.”
He leans into my face. “And I will keep hurting you if you don’t shut your stupid mouth.”
I cower.
One sentence, and it’s as if all the weeks I’ve spent smiling and loving life melt away. I feel myself shriveling into myself in a way I never thought I would again.
Idiot. Stupid. Pathetic.
Familiar words tunnel into my head—and my heart—and I’m right back to being Derek’s punching bag.
His hard stare bores into the top of my head, and for three long seconds, all I hear is the sound of his breathing.
Tensing, I brace for a punch. Maybe he’ll kick me in my belly when I’m down on the ground. It wouldn’t be the first time he’s done it.
The soft murmur of male voices draws his attention away, and I’m tempted to scream, “I’m here. Please save me!”
Screaming would open me up to a world of pain, so I keep my stupid mouth shut and wait for the first opportunity to run.
No one would think to look for us in the apartment where I would have died if Wyatt hadn’t gone for a late-night drive.
Two pieces of plywood sealed up the door that Wyatt had kicked open to save me.
Everything had happened in reverse. Derek kicked the bottom right corner of the plywood, and when it opened, he shoved me into the apartment, climbed in after me, and wrestled the wood back into place so it looked untouched. I’m certain he brought me here to kill me.
I stand with my back against the wall between the living room and kitchen as Derek stalks away from me. He’s light on his feet as he crosses my apartment, away from the destroyed stove and blackened walls, to one of the few windows that survived being smashed by the smoke or the firefighters.
Male voices just outside linger for a few seconds longer. It almost sounds like Knox, but maybe it’s wishful thinking?
Derek keeps out of sight, peering carefully down at the street with his body and most of his head tucked against the wall beside the window.
The only reason I don’t take advantage of his distraction to run is the thing he’s holding in his right hand, down low beside his blue jean-clad leg.
A gun.
He never had one before, which means he bought one especially for this.
For me.
I’ve tried to avoid looking at it, remembering how the cold metal felt pressed against the back of my neck. I shudder, wrapping my arms around myself, but it does nothing to warm my goose-prickled skin.
I have never been so terrified in my life. Not even when I walked into my Nevada motel room after work, and Derek had been waiting for me.
I’d just emptied Winston’s nearly overflowing trash in the dumpster, and I’d been whistling as I hurried to get back inside to wash my hands and return to waiting tables.
Cold metal against my skin. My heart froze and then pounded. I knew instantly and without turning around that it was Derek with a gun, and he was in Rios to kill me.
“Move,” Derek had ordered, fingers digging into my left arm as he pulled me away from the back door of the diner and out to the street.
When I glanced at him, he had a hoodie on. Dark blue. The hood concealed his face.
He hooked his left arm around my right. Then he pressed the gun against my side and kept it there. A tangible reminder of what he would do if I even thought about screaming.
He had been about to turn left when a group of college-age girls walked out of the diner. They’d been laughing as they chatted with each other, but a couple had glanced toward us, and so Derek dragged me right instead of left, hissing, “Where’s your car?”
I’d shaken my head. No. My whole body had shaken as I pointed to my gray Honda. “There. But I don’t have my car keys. They’re inside.”
It was an ordinary mid-afternoon day in Rios as he marched me down the street. Everyone was busy going about their day, blind to Derek walking down the road with a gun bruising my ribs.
Outside, male voices move away from my old apartment, and Derek turns around to look at me.
His rage stretches across the room toward me, my skin prickling and my heart racing. I want to cower, but cowering never stopped a punch or a kick.
“You’re going to pay for what you did to me,” he hisses.
My eyes drift to the gun in his hand. If I were in any doubt about what he brought me here to do, I would know it now. Maybe he had planned to take me to his car—he’d been dragging me left before the people leaving the diner made him go right—and I’d be dead already.
Derek will kill me, and he will get away with hurting me the way he always has. The certainty that nothing I do can change my fate makes it easier to lift my chin and ask, “How did you find me?”
“Put a tracker on your car in Nevada,” he says.
“And it was easy enough to track you there when you used my credit card at the gas station to fill up. From Nevada to here, all I had to do was follow a little dot on my phone’s GPS.
It led me right to you.” His smile is so smug, I itch to throw something at him.
It was our card, but he always saw everything as his, never ours.
I feel sick about the tracker, but I’m not surprised.
Nevada had been a mistake, and so had using the credit card.
But I’d spent the last of my money paying for a motel on the way to Nevada and thought I was far enough away from Oregon that he would never know where I was headed.
It was stupid, and he was determined. I would have been better off letting my car break down on the side of the road.
“Why have you spent so many years hating me, Derek?”
A muscle pops in his jaw. His hand tightens around his gun, and the breath stops in my throat as he stalks toward me. His eyes, once I’d believed were the most beautiful jade green in the world, glitter with hatred.
Outside, the distant scream of a siren wails as it heads away from the center of town—and me. Below me, a floorboard softly creaks. The flower shop was closed, its lights off, when Derek dragged me through the door beside it. There is no one around to save me.
“I deserved better than you,” he sneers.
“I was going to go to college, then go pro, and leave you behind. You were just a stepping stone to something better. My parents didn’t care what I did once I started dating you.
They never knew about the girls I fucked and the parties I went to because they always thought I was with you. ”
I’d braced myself for a punch. A kick. A slap to the face. We’re not in Oregon anymore, and I don’t have to hide my bruised face from his parents or people from church.
I hadn’t braced myself for this. I wish he’d punched me in the face instead.
A tear slides down my cheek. “You loved me.”
He snorts. “Get over yourself, Maisie. I could always do better. The only one who never saw it was you.”
He turns away from me as if I don’t matter. As if I never mattered. He glances at the watch on his wrist and walks back to the same window to peer out of it.
I slide down the wall, wrap my arms around my legs, and stare straight ahead.
My entire life with Derek was a lie. All of it, right from the start.
The love, the happy future I thought we’d have if he just got over his work stress.
I was a shield he used to hide the real life he wanted.
He wasn’t working late. Why else was his dad always complaining that he was behind on his work?
He didn’t go away with the guys on weekends for fishing.
He was out fucking whoever he wanted, drinking, doing things he really wanted to be doing with people he wanted more than me.
As I process my feelings, he's peering out the window again.
“If you hated me so much, why didn’t you pull the trigger outside the diner?” I ask, wiping the tears from my face. “Why didn’t you kill me before you set my apartment on fire?”
As if startled by my voice, he looks at me as if in the time it took him to cross over to the window, he forgot I existed.
“You humiliated me. Divorcing me made people wonder why you ran out of town without coming to my trial.” He shakes his head, eyes hardening.
“No. You’re going to pay for that in a way that won’t land me in jail. ”
“You won’t get me away from here without someone seeing you.”
“I got you here, didn’t I?” he chuckles. “All I have to do is wait until it’s dark. No one will notice a couple walking down the street together.”
He’d been steering me right when the group of college-age girls walked out of the diner, forcing us away from where he must have parked his car.
That’s why he’d asked about my car, and that’s why he was pissed when I told him I didn’t have my keys on me.
Now we’re stuck here, waiting for it to get dark so we can leave town.
“I’m not going anywhere,” I say firmly.
He walks over to me, his face a blank slate.
I lean away from him, my head against the wall as he drops into a crouch in front of me.
He gets in my face. His eyes are cold and hard. “When it’s dark out, you’re going to get into my car, and you’re going to sit quiet and docile-like in the passenger seat. Then you’re going to write whatever I tell you to write so the people in this nosy, boring town stop looking for you.”
“And then you’re going to kill me?”
He doesn’t respond.
I shake my head. “I won’t do it. Kill me now, but I won’t write anything, and I won’t go anywhere with you. You’ll have to carry me out of here. You made my life hell. I won’t make it easy for you.”
“So because those men fucked you, you think they’ll save you?” he sneers.
I startle.
He laughs, the sound hard and bitter. “I heard all about you shacking up with four construction workers, and I saw you outside the diner. If you think you’re nothing but a quick fuck before they move on, you’re deluded.”
When I was too afraid to even look them in the eye, those four alphas watched out for me. For a month, they stopped in at the diner, telling me a bit about themselves, making me feel safe. They were kind, sweet, and endlessly patient.
They are still those things now.
“They love me. Just because you saw me as worthless doesn’t mean they do. They won’t stop looking for me until they find me, and they will kill you if you hurt me,” I say, looking him right in the eye.
I know what I am to Hunter, Elias, Knox, and Wyatt. They love me as much as I love them. Whatever happens to me, they will never stop looking for me.
Derek’s fist flies toward me. I try to dodge the blow before it lands.
Too late.
I cry out. My head rings, and everything goes black.
The apartment is darker when I blink my eyes open.
My head pounds as it rests on the smoky-smelling floor, and Derek is back to standing at the window, peering out.
I spot the gun tucked into his waistband. It’s not in his hand, which means I have a chance to run.
He glances toward me, and I slam my eyes shut, pretending to be out cold.
For ninety seconds, and I count slowly, I focus on pretending to be unconscious as I feel the weight of his stare on my face.
When I risk cracking my eyes open a sliver, Derek is standing in front of the coffee table with his cell phone in his hand, frowning at the screen.
I wait.
At a raised voice outside, he lowers his phone and rushes over to the window.
Something is happening out there, but what? Did they find his car? Have they tracked us here? Whatever it is has Derek worried. If he panics, he will lash out at me.
Go. Now.
With terror fueling me and a pounding head, I scramble to my feet, ignoring his yell as I sprint to the front door.
He shouts again, sprinting after me.
Pop.
I squeal, ducking as plaster rains over my right shoulder from the wall inches beside my head.
The stairs are right there. All I have to do is get to them. Who cares about a broken neck when someone is shooting at you?
The staircase is not empty.
Knox is there. He nudges me to one side and runs right at Derek, uncaring that Derek is pointing a gun right at him.
Pop.
Derek buries another bullet into the wall.
They slam together. Both grunt in pain. The gun flies out of Derek’s hand and skitters across the floor.
I’d see a whole lot more if Wyatt wasn’t wrapping his arm around me and urging me down the stairs to Elias and Hunter.
Seconds later, I’m rushing out onto the street, illuminated by bright streetlights. The two pieces of plywood that had blocked the door are leaning against the wall beside it. Whoever removed it did it so quietly that Derek didn’t hear a thing.
The sheriff is huffing and puffing as he races down the street. One of the deputies, not Lawrence, this one is older with reddish hair, overtakes him.
A crash rings out.
Everyone—me included—snaps their heads upward in time to watch a body fly through the boarded-up window above the flower shop.
My heart stops.
Knox.
Oh god oh god oh god.
THUD.
My gaze settles on a familiar face.
It isn’t Knox.
Derek.
My eyes slide from the unmoving body on the street and up to Knox, hunched over and breathing hard. Blood streams down the side of his face.
His relieved eyes find mine, and he shouts, “You okay, baby?”
“Fine.” A second later, my knees give out.