“This isn’t the same,” I said. “I never forced Sylvia. I never hurt her.”
He rounded on me, his expression fierce. “Don’t say her name. You don’t get to say her name.”
Christa’s bra was dingy against her skin.
Rolf leered at her. He slid one of the straps over her shoulder, uncovering her breast.
“Wait,” she said, her voice high pitched. “Please don’t. I swear, if you just let me—”
He backhanded her with a loud crack. “Shut up, bitch.”
She cried out.
The world was swimming in front of me, greens and browns running into each other. I tried again to get to my feet, but my muscles felt like wet strands of spaghetti. I lost my balance. The ground leaped up at me.
Rolf stalked over to me.
I caught myself on my palms. Pain seared through me. I groaned.
Rolf kicked me, his foot connecting with my chin.
My head snapped back. I swayed and fell in a heap.
He laughed again. “Just watch, Drake.”
I needed to get up.
I looked at Christa again. Her eyes were shining. Unshed tears glittered on her lashes.
Shit.
I looked at Rolf.
He leered at me, and then he went back to her.
Get up, I ordered myself.
But my muscles didn’t listen.
My vision blurred.
I blinked hard, struggling to see clearly.
Rolf was wrong when he said that the shot was only going to incapacitate me. I could tell that now. I was going dark.
I made a noise in the back of my throat, a screeching sound of agony. I thought if I just yelled hard enough, I’d be able to force my body to move.
But I couldn’t even see.
In front of me, Rolf and Christa were only bright blobs. I was losing consciousness. When I woke up, I’d be healed. But who knew how long I’d be out. It seemed to be taking longer and longer these days.
Christa cried out in pain and fear.
I couldn’t see her. “Stop,” I said. My voice sounded like I was trying to talk with a mouth full of gravel.
“Don’t worry, sweetheart,” said Rolf. “I’ll show you what you’ve been missing.”
That was the last thing I heard.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
I fought through the gray threads of unconsciousness, pushing myself to wake up. Christa needed me. I had to wake up. I had to stop Rolf.
Maybe, once he’d seen that I was dark, he’d stopped. He wanted me to watch, after all, didn’t he? Maybe he hadn’t done it.
My eyelids felt like they were weighted down with concrete slabs.
I struggled to open them, straining…
And then they burst open.
Christa was still tied to the tree, but she wasn’t dressed anymore. Her shirt was in tatters against her body, ripped and red stained. Her breasts were bare. She wasn’t wearing pants or shoes.
She was bleeding.
The wound on her forehead was still dripping blood over her face and body.
But there were more wounds now. Her lips were swollen and broken. There were scratches and bruises all over her torso.
She was naked, but there was nothing erotic about it.
She only looked vulnerable and weak and hurt.
And small. So goddamned small.
I screamed. It tore out of me, throaty and scraping.
That was when I realized that I was tied up. My hands were bound behind my back. My legs were tied at the ankles.
Rolf knelt down in front of me. “How much did you see, Drake?”
“Fuck you,” I said.
“I was balls deep in her cunt before I looked back and realized you’d passed out. I wondered why you were being so quiet.”
No. No. My stomach lurched.
I looked back at Christa. She wasn’t looking at anything. She was staring out into space, her eyes dull and glassy.
It reminded me of the time that I’d pulled Sloane out of that room, all those years ago. That had been the same look on Sloane’s face.
But with Sloane, I’d gotten there in time. I’d stopped it. And she was okay.
I shook my head. “No.”
“Yes,” he said.
My body started to shake. “I’m going to kill you,” I told him.
He gave me a sympathetic look. “Oh, I don’t think so.”
I clenched my teeth. “I’m going to rip you apart.”
He shook his head. “You’re beaten now, Drake.” He tapped my chest. “That feeling in there? That’s how it feels to lose. You lose. I win.”
I strained against the ropes that held me. Right then, I felt so angry that I was fairly sure I could rip them off.
But they held. The knots dug painfully into my wrists.
I screamed again.
Rolf got up. He walked back to Christa.
He picked up one of the shotguns from the ground where he’d gathered them. He put it under her chin.
She whimpered, shying away from the gun.
“Quiet,” he crooned. “This’ll only hurt for a minute, sweetheart. And then everything will be over. You want it over, don’t you?”
She convulsed.
“Stop!” I rolled onto my belly and began to inch my way over the ground toward him.
He turned to me, his expression thoughtful. “If I do it now, the fun’s done, isn’t it?”
“Rolf, just let her go.”
He lowered the gun. He rubbed his chin. “Yeah, it might be more fun to catch the two of you again. She’s a nice piece of ass, your girl.” He smiled.
* * *
He untied Christa, and he took the guns. And then he strolled away.
Whistling.
I watched him go, my whole body shaking. My stomach churned, and I was convinced that at any minute I was going to throw up.
But I didn’t.
Instead, I started a slow, painful crawl towards Christa, using the muscles in my stomach and my shoulders to inch over the ground, like a centipede squirming.
Christa slid down the tree and wrapped her arms around her knees. She wasn’t looking at me. She was staring out into space.
I needed to do something. I needed to say something.
All I could do was crawl.
It seemed to take hours. Excruciatingly long minutes in which it seemed I was making no progress whatsoever.
But eventually, I was next to her.
She still wasn’t looking at me. She looked blankly out over the forest. Blood was still trickling down over her face. It was in her hair. It was clumped on her eyelashes. She blinked, but she didn’t wipe it away.
Fuck.
“Christa,” I rasped.
No response.
“Look at me.” My voice cracked.
Her head swung around. Her movement was jerky and imprecise, like she was a puppet and someone else was pulling her strings.
I looked deep into her eyes. “I’m sorry.”
She gazed at me dully.
Fuck.
My chest felt tight, like I was going to start crying. I couldn’t even remember the last time I’d cried.
This wasn’t supposed to be about her. This was supposed to be about me and Rolf.
He’d done it again. Last time, I was the one who’d messed up. I was the one who’d told Sylvia about his little hobby. She was the one who paid the price.
Now, he’d hurt Christa.
Really hurt her. She was bleeding all over the place. She was bruised and broken. She was shattered.
And I needed to be strong or something, but I was pretty sure that I was falling apart too.
“I’m sorry,” I said again, and my voice was thick.
She shut her eyes.
This was all wrong. Rolf deserved to pay. I’d wanted to make him pay for what he’d done to Sylvia. But somehow, it wasn’t Rolf that was paying. It was Christa. She was just a girl. She liked to drink beer and dance and laugh, and this was all
wrong.
I was supposed to protect her. I was supposed to get her out of this.
But I’d failed.
Miserably.
And now…
Fuck.
I couldn’t fix this. Even if I managed to find Rolf and kill him, it wouldn’t fix things. It wouldn’t fix Christa. This would haunt her forever. She wasn’t ever going to be the carefree girl that I’d met in that bar, flashing her fake ID and flirting with me. She was broken. And it was my fault.
I lowered my face, resting my forehead against the forest floor.
And guilt surged through me.
The guilt I ran from every day of my life was flooding me, and I couldn’t do anything to stop it.
None of my glib ways of shrugging things off worked for me right now. I couldn’t think, So what if I am a horrible person? Because the answer was right in front of my face. You are horrible, and because of that, Christa’s completely fucked up.
“I did this,” I muttered into the dirt. “Griffin told me to leave it alone. Sloane said I should wait until after the wedding. But I couldn’t let it go. I had to go after Rolf. If I’d left him alone, then none of this would have happened to you.”
Overhead, birds chirped as they flew through the sky. They were oblivious. Carefree.
“You should never have been part of this,” I said.
“No,” she said.
I raised my face to look at her.
She looked through me.
I shook my head. “You shouldn’t be here. This shouldn’t have happened to you.”
She hugged herself. “I want to go home.”
And then I did start crying. I turned my face away from her, and I sobbed into the dirt.
* * *
Christa’s hands fluttered over me. “Silas, you’re tied up.”
I twisted to face her. I’d been lying there for a long time without trying anything. When I stopped crying, everything had seemed hopeless. There hadn’t seemed to be a reason to do anything at all. So, I’d given up.
Her fingers worked at the knots on my wrists. “I’m sorry. I should have untied you before. I don’t why I didn’t—”
“Stop apologizing,” I said.
Her breasts were bare and streaked with blood, and I didn’t want to see them like that. I shut my eyes. I felt sick again.
“I just—I just—I just felt out of it.”
“Christa…” What was I supposed to say?
I felt the pressure of the ropes ease. My hands were free.
I rolled over and sat up, stretching and massaging my wrists. I took off the hunter’s jacket I was wearing and gave it to Christa. “Put this on.”
She shrugged into it and then pulled it tightly closed over her skin.
I started to work on the knots on my feet.
“I think my pants are okay,” she said. “He ripped my shirt, but he couldn’t rip my jeans. So, I think they’re here somewhere. I just need to find them.”
“No, hold up,” I said. “I’ll find them. Give me a second to get these knots.”
She got up, still holding the jacket tightly closed. “No, it’s okay. You weren’t even awake when it was happening. You don’t know where he put them.”
God, why was she being so calm now?
I wasn’t sure which was worse. Her blank, out-of-it stare from earlier, or her talking about it so matter-of-factly.
I shuddered. This was bad. This was so bad.
She wandered a few feet away and then knelt down in the grass. She fished her pants up and held them up. “See? Here they are. My underwear are a lost cause, but that’s okay. I don’t need underwear.”
“Christa, you don’t need to act like—”
“Yes, I do.” She glared at me.
I winced.
She started to put her jeans back on.
I looked away. I felt like I never wanted to see her body uncovered ever again. I went back to the knots on my feet, concentrating on unraveling the rope. When I untied myself, I looked back up, and Christa was sitting on the grass, tugging on her shoes.
“Do you think we’ll be able to find our way back to the cave?” she said.
“I…” I hadn’t thought about it. We’d been following the hunter for hours before he saw us, and we’d got all over the woods behind him.
The hunter.
I leapt to my feet and hurried over to look for his body.
It was still there. Rolf had stripped away his gun, but he hadn’t taken the body. The hunter was wearing a backpack like the other one had. I pulled it away from the guy and slung it over my shoulder.
“Maybe we shouldn’t even go back there,” she said. “Maybe he’s out there watching us. Maybe he’s going to follow us wherever we go.”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “Tracking us is part of the fun, I think.”
She grimaced.
“Not that I think it’s fun,” I said.
She fumbled with buttons on the front of the jacket. Her hands were trembling.
I went to her. “Here, let me—”
“Don’t.” She held up her hands to ward me away.
I backed off. I was half-afraid to touch her anyway.
“We can follow the stream,” she said. “The stream will take us back to the cave, right?”
I swallowed. I nodded.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
We made it back to the cave fairly easily. Christa was right. We only needed to follow the stream. But when we got there, Christa didn’t want to go inside.
“I’m all… sticky,” she said. “From—from blood mostly.”
I shivered again, involuntarily. I didn’t want to think about what other kinds of fluids could be making her feel sticky.
“I want to go wash off in the stream,” she said.
“Okay,” I said. Good, that would help her. She wouldn’t have to be so uncomfortable, and she could cleanse herself of any trace of him that was still on her or… in her, or—Fuck. “Well, you should do that. I’ll stay here and go through the guy’s backpack and see what’s in there.”
“No, I don’t want to go there alone,” she said.
“Oh,” I said. “Well, okay. I can come.”
She nodded. “Good.”
I stowed the backpack inside the cave, and together we trudged through the woods to the stream.
At the edge, she started to unbutton the jacket.
I looked away.
“What’s the matter?” she said. “You don’t want to look at me anymore?”
I flinched.
She laughed bitterly. “That’s kind of funny, don’t you think?”
I forced myself to turn back to her. “Nothing about any of this is funny.”
She yanked the jacket over her head and tossed it on the ground. “I’m fine, Silas.”
Her body was bruised and bloody. She was so skinny. She looked like a war refugee.
Bile rose in my throat. “You’re not fine.”
“I am,” she said, unbuttoning her jeans. “I’m fine. I’m going to be okay.”
“No,” I said. “You’re not.”
She wriggled out of her pants.
I couldn’t stand the sight of her. I felt ill. My stomach reeled. I turned away from her and vomited.
“Wow,” she said. “That’s a new one. I’ve never had anyone react that way to me getting undressed.”
I wiped my mouth. This was all so fucked up.
When I turned back around, Christa had waded into the stream. It was shallow. It only came up to her knees. She knelt down, huddling in the water, and she started to scrub herself with her hands.
“See, it’s not a big deal, Silas,” she said. “I can handle it. It’s just like any other time that I’ve had sex with someone.”
“Christa.” I shook my head. “Don’t.”
“I’m glad you didn’t see it,” she said. “That would have made it weirder and worse, I think. It was better that you didn’t see.”
“I should have s
topped it,” I said.
“You couldn’t,” she said. “You were dead. You died on me.”
I hung my head. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s not that big a deal,” she said.
“Stop saying that.”
“Look, let me tell you about the time that I lost my virginity, okay?”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
She splashed water over her shoulders. “I was fourteen years old. I was with the track team at a state tournament, and we were staying in a hotel, and there was a hot tub there. And it was late, and we were supposed to be in bed, but we snuck down to the hot tub. I was the only girl. It was me and Jared and Ezra and Jamie.”
Wait a second. I already had an idea of where this was going. “Christa, you don’t have to—”
“It was my idea for us to be naked,” she said. “It was all my idea. I mean, there was only one of me, and there were three of them, and we were all kind of curious, and I started all it, because it was cool to have all of them so interested in me. Three of them. They were all focused on me. And I liked that. It felt…”
I kicked at a rock on the shore. “Powerful.”
She looked up at me, as if she was surprised that I would understand. “Yeah.” She nodded.
“Motherfucker,” I said.
She scrubbed at the blood on her forehead. “Well, it was kind of awful, because I was a virgin, and it just kept going on and on, and the hot tub sort of washed away all my natural wetness, and it hurt. It really hurt. But I started it all, so I couldn’t back out. I just had to… let it… And I did.”
“Christa…” My hands were shaking.
“Anyway,” she said, rubbing at the blood on her torso, “all I’m saying is that this was just like that. It hurt, and it was awful. And Rolf hit me and stuff, and he said horrible things. But I’m okay. I can handle it. This isn’t that much worse than anything I’ve been through before. So, I’m fine. I’m totally fine.”
Why did she keep saying that?
Right next to me, an old tree had a tangle of roots in the stream. It had a wide, gnarled trunk.
I balled my hand into a fist.
I slammed my fist into the tree trunk.
It hurt. The tremors of the impact traveled up my arm.
I gritted my teeth. I hit the tree trunk again as hard as I could. It hurt less that time, somehow, but my knuckles started bleeding.
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