Chapter 57 Eliana
ELIANA
bone-in /bōn in/: adjective
The door closes.
Aleksei is gone.
Brandon remains.
I can hear him breathing, wet and eager, but he stays planted where he is. The fear in the room marinates and condenses. He’s savoring this, the sick fuck. Our whimpers and terrors… it’s all foreplay to him.
“You know how long I’ve waited for this?
” he says. “Months. Months of planning while I sat in that fucking jail cell. I might’ve gone crazy in there with the planning if Aleksei hadn’t come along and gotten me out.
” His boots squeak on the floor as he starts to saunter, following the same circuit Aleksei did.
“You ruined my life, you fucking sluts.”
“We ruined your life?” Yasmin is crackling with fury even through her tears. “You beat me. You stalked me. You—”
“Shut the fuck up!” he bellows. “I’m not talking to you yet, Yas. We’ll have our reunion soon enough. Right now, I’m having a conversation with your blind bitch friend.”
I tighten my grip on Excalibur. The aluminum feels pathetically inadequate against whatever Brandon’s got planned, but it’s all I have.
“You think you’re so crafty,” he purrs. “Hit me with that lamp and ran off like a couple of scared little girls. Left me bleeding on the floor ‘til the cops showed up. Do you have any idea what county lockup is like for someone with domestic charges?”
“Cry me a river,” I snap. “Maybe try not assaulting women if you don’t want to face consequences.”
Wrong thing to say.
His hand closes around my throat and sets to work on ridding me of all my oxygen. He shoves me backward and my spine connects with the wall hard enough to rattle my teeth.
“I’m going to enjoy breaking you,” he whispers against my ear.
His fist connects with my temple before I can even raise Excalibur to defend myself.
I crumple against the wall, sliding down until my ass hits the floor. My world is reduced to fizzing static and hellish ringing and the distant sound of my own pulse thundering in my ears. My baby kicks frantically, sensing my distress or sharing it—I can’t tell anymore.
As I lay in a wounded puddle on the floor, Brandon’s boots move away from me.
“Now that that’s handled,” he says, dripping with sick satisfaction, “let’s get everybody else settled in nice and cozy.”
Mom screams as he grabs her. I hear scuffling, the scrape of a chair, the rip of what sounds like duct tape being torn from a roll. “Please,” she begs, “please, I’m—”
“Shut up, Grandma.”
Her screams cut off as he plasters tape over her mouth.
Sage is next. I hear him scrambling, growling, “Get your hands off me, you piece of—”
Then there’s the crash of his wheelchair tipping. An ugly thud as his body hits the hardwood. Sage grunts in pain, and I hear the useless scrabble of his hands against the floor, trying to drag himself somewhere, anywhere.
“Fucking cripple,” Brandon sneers. “You’re not going anywhere.”
I try to push myself up, but my head is still swimming from the blow and motion only makes it worse. Everything veers sickeningly. By the time my sense of balance is starting to settle back down, Brandon’s boots are stomping back across the room.
Toward Yasmin.
“Hey, baby,” he croons. “God, it’s good to see you.”
“No, no, no!” Her voice pitches high with terror. I hear her scrambling backward, her hands slipping in what must be Zeke’s blood. “Stay away from me, Brandon, I swear to God!”
“You thought you could just leave me?” He cackles. “Thought you could spread your lies, turn everyone against me, get me locked up?”
“Leave her alone!” I scream as loud as I can, though it leaves my bruised throat as scarcely more than a whisper. “Brandon! I’m the one who hit you! Take it out on me!”
He doesn’t even acknowledge I’ve spoken.
I struggle to my feet, re-grip Excalibur, and pray that there’s still enough magic left in this walking stick to save us. Then I lunge forward and swing.
It arcs through the air, fueled by every ounce of strength I can muster, driven by the sound of Brandon’s voice and my unbridled fury. The cane connects with something solid—his shoulder, maybe his back—and the impact shudders up through my wrists.
Brandon roars. Not a scream of pain but a bellow of surprise and outrage, like a bull that’s been stung by something way too small to matter. I hear Yasmin scramble away from him, her breath hitching with sobs.
“You fucking bitch!” He wheels on me.
I back up fast, keeping Excalibur raised between us like a sword. “You want to hurt people?” I say. “You go through me first.”
I mean it. Every word. Even though my hands are trembling so badly the cane quivers against nothing.
But in the end, I never really stood a chance.
Brandon charges.
I swing Excalibur again with everything I have, but this time, he’s more than ready.
His hand clamps around the shaft mid-arc and wrenches it from my grip with a twisting force that sends white-hot pain shooting through my wrists.
He tosses it aside and the cane clanks somewhere far away, useless, lost.
Then his palms slam into my chest and I’m airborne.
My back connects with the coffee table. Glass shatters beneath me and the edge catches my hip as I tumble sideways to land face-first on the floor. Shards bite into my palms. Warm blood wells between my fingers.
I scramble backward, opening more lacerations in my hands, but I don’t know up from down anymore. The room’s geography has been scrambled by panic and pain.
Brandon’s boots thud closer. Closer.
My hand finds something smooth and heavy. A lamp, funnily enough. I hurl it toward the sound of his breathing.
It misses.
“Mom!” I scream, grabbing a book, throwing it wild. “Sage! Get out! Call someone!”
A decorative bowl. Another miss.
“Help us! Someone help us!”
But my mother is taped to a chair and Sage is trapped on the floor and Zeke is bleeding out and nobody is coming.
Nobody is coming.
When Brandon is close enough, I go to rake my nails across his face. If I’m lucky, I’ll gouge his eyes and plunge him into the same darkness that’s become my home. I feel skin tear beneath my fingertips, feel the wet give of something soft, and Brandon screams.
He recoils, his grip loosening for just a fraction of a second.
He staggers, stunned, and I hit him again with anything I can grab. A porcelain vase shatters against his skull with a sound like breaking ice. A coffee table book. A shoe.
“Stay down!” I scream. “Stay the fuck down!”
I hear him groaning, the liquid plash of blood in his throat or his sinuses or wherever I’ve managed to wound him. My chest heaves. Glass crunches beneath my feet as I stand over him, trembling, victorious.
It’s over. It has to be over.
I try to catch my breath and force my racing heart to slow down. The room is thick with the metallic stench of blood and the acrid bite of fear-sweat. Somewhere behind me, Mom is making muffled sounds through her gag, and Sage is still struggling on the floor.
But then Brandon’s groaning stops.
And I hear him laugh.
It’s a wet, ugly sound, phlegmy and wrong, like something crawling up from a drain. “Well, well,” he slurs through what I hope is a mouthful of broken teeth. “Looks like Yas has been busy.”
I don’t understand at first.
Then I hear Yasmin’s strangled breath. The whisper of fabric as she wraps her arms around her midsection.
Oh, God.
He’s figured out she’s pregnant.
The shuffle of his body against the floor tells me he’s scooting away from me, putting distance between us. Meanwhile, I’m blind and disarmed and utterly fucking lost in my own living room. I dive toward where I last heard him, hands grasping at empty air, but he’s already somewhere else.
“You know,” Brandon muses thoughtfully, “I always wondered what it would be like to be a father.”
No.
“Brandon, don’t!” I keep stumbling forward, but I’ve lost my bearings completely in the mayhem. Everything’s shifted. The coffee table is somewhere else. So’s the couch. Nothing is where it should be and every second I waste searching is a second he’s getting closer to her.
“But not with another man’s baby,” he continues, his voice moving away from me, toward Yasmin. “Never that.”
“Please.” Yasmin’s voice breaks. “Brandon, please, I’ll do anything…”
“STOP!” I scream, throwing myself again toward the sound of him, but I’m exhausted and bleeding and he sidesteps me like I’m nothing. I crash into the wall instead.
Behind me, Yasmin starts to cry.
The sound that comes next will live inside me forever.
A dull, meaty thwack. Fist meeting flesh, the soft swell of Yasmin’s belly. Her scream dies in her throat, decaying into a choked gasp that’s somehow worse than any shriek.
“No!” I throw myself toward them once again. My hands find Brandon’s back and I climb him like an animal, clawing at his face, his eyes, sinking my teeth into the meat of his shoulder and ripping out chunks of flesh.
He roars and throws me off like I’m weightless.
I hit the floor on my side, hard enough that all the air evacuates my lungs in one violent rush. Glass bites deeper into my palms. I can’t breathe. Can’t move.
I can only lie there and listen as the life I thought we’d live is torn from us, one piece at a time.