There was only one person I trusted enough to ask for help.
It was unimaginable to think how much it was going to hurt to stand in front of William and tell him what Troy had done. It made me sick to think of him knowing the truth. The night I’d forced him away, I was sure he’d be just as disgusted with me as I was with myself. He’d see I was filthy and unclean.
But I would do anything to save this child.
I waited until Troy was asleep. He panted deeply against the back of my head. His hold was no longer tense, but loose where his arm was draped over my side. Holding my breath, I wound myself out of his hold, keeping my feet silent on the floor.
I’d packed a bag while he was at work. It would have been a whole lot easier to get out of the apartment unnoticed while Troy was at work, but I never would have walked out of town without being discovered.
On my knees, I tugged the bag from underneath the bed. Tiptoeing out into the main room, I slipped on the shoes I’d left by the couch.
I refused to listen to the fear that worked itself through my mind, the fear spurring the anxiety that had my stomach twisted in a solid knot. It screamed, he will hurt your little sister, he will find you, you will fail.
I shoved the thoughts back.
There was only one thing that mattered now.
At the front window, I peered outside through a slat in the mini-blinds, searching for any signs of life in the 10-unit complex. Light drizzled down from the yellowed bulbs hanging on the walls beside each door, and a lone streetlight near the office cast flickering shadows across the pavement. The lot was dead, just silenced cars and trash whipped up from a gust of wind.
I bit my lip and squeezed my eyes shut, focusing on making no sound as I slowly turned the dead bolt. In the silence, it rang out like a gunshot. I froze, listening for any movement from behind. When I heard none, I turned the knob and slipped out the door. I quieted my feet on the steps, forcing myself to take them one at a time and fighting against the urge to run. The second I hit the pavement, I gave in. The beat of my heart was almost deafening as I sprinted across the parking lot toward the hole in the chain-link fence at the back.
Before I could comprehend the movement, I was being dragged back by a strong arm across my chest. I struggled to break free from his hold. A knife blade pressed into my cheek, and terror widened my eyes.
Oh God, no.
His breath was hot at the side of my face. “Where are you going, baby?” The rancid words spilled out in a twisted croon and shifted to a menacing tone. “You just don’t get it, do you, Maggie? Did you really think I’d let you walk out that door?” He pressed the blade deeper into the flesh of my cheek, eliciting a prick of pain where the knife dented the skin.
Trembling in his hold, horror gripped me, so deep it penetrated to the bone.
With my body limp, he dragged me back up the stairs, my feet banging into the concrete steps as he went. He kicked the door shut behind us and threw me on the bed.
I whimpered as he slid the knife up my shirt. The tip nicked a trail up my torso as he cut it away. With a flick of his wrist, he snipped the front of my bra. Cold, damp air rushed against my skin. I inhaled, a harsh gasp burning down my throat.
Troy laughed and dragged the tip of the knife from my cheek and down my neck, where he dug the tip into the flesh at my shoulder. I cried out as he slowly pulled it through my skin, down along the inside of my arm, all the way to my wrist. The flesh opened up with a searing heat that shocked my mind. Blood gushed, a sticky wetness slipping down my skin and dripping to the bed, my mind fuzzy with fear and pain and loss. Blackness swelled.
Troy smacked me across the face. “Don’t even think about passing out on me, Maggie.”
He wielded the knife in front of my face, as if he searched for coherency, watched as my eyes flicked back and forth in sync with the movement. He grinned and slashed me from collar bone to beneath the opposite breast. It scorched from the outside in, a slow torment as I came to realize that this was it.
Troy ran the tip of the blade down. I gasped as he grazed it across my stomach, teasing at the flesh. I wept, and, for the first time, I found my voice. “Please…stop.”
He laughed in a sickening way and grabbed my chin to force me to look at him. “What are you crying for, Maggie?” The knife was pressed there, just below my belly button. “You scared I might slip?” He pressed it a little deeper. “You think I don’t know you’re trying to run away with my baby?”
Suddenly the knife was at my hip, burrowing deep in the flesh. His hand flexed on my chin, and he mashed his mouth into the skin next to my lips. “I’ll kill you, Maggie.” Troy crushed me with his weight, chest to chest, a heavy grunt from his mouth as he tore the knife down the outside of my leg. I cried out in pain and relief when he stumbled back from the bed, still gripping the knife in his hand. He tossed it nonchalantly to the dresser, as if it were his wallet at the end of the day.
He glanced back at me. “We clear?”
Squeezing my eyes shut, tears seeped from the corners and ran into my hair.
I nodded in surrender.
Maggie ~ Present Day
Fear was powerful—crippling. Troy knew just how to manipulate me with what mattered most. He’d forced on me the one thing I’d feared most in my life, then used my sister and son as pawns.
For my son, I had forged on and had lived for him, making the best life for us that I could. In the end, it was a life that was destroying us both.
Lying there in the aftermath Troy had left behind, I thought of William, the secret of my heart. Maybe it was his sudden reappearance that made me brave. He’d always made me feel that way, like a different person—a stronger person.
Or maybe he just made me see who I really was.
Chapter Eighteen
William ~ Present Day
My lids fluttered with the slurred voices shouting next to my head. A white hot spark of light struck at the center of my brain, and sickness pushed up my throat. Spasms twitched my muscles.
Maggie.
“William!”
I sensed the frantic presence beside me. Blake was on his knees, his voice murky. A hollow twang echoed through my ears, swathed across the back of my head like a too-hot blanket I couldn’t shake. Feet clamored around my body. The sound of sirens approached in the distance, my senses detached.
“Oh shit…Will.”
Blake’s panic was palpable, furrowing beneath my skin, cutting and slicing me to the core. Somewhere in the fog I recognized the panic was my own.
Troy knew.
I moaned deep, a gravelly cry that escaped from my spirit.
He knew.
Wrenching forward, I attempted to climb to my hands and knees. I collapsed back down into the blood that had pooled around my head, metallic stinging a path up my nose.
A hand was on my back, an attempt at comfort.
“Don’t move, Will.” The voice was strained. “Please, man, just hold still.”
I lay limp, forcing the air from my too-tight lungs. Dread shackled my limbs and pinned me to the hard ground.
He knew.
A ripple broke apart the crowd when the ambulance pulled into the parking lot. Paramedics prodded, fired questions I could barely discern, and placed me on a backboard as the residual of Troy’s hatred seeped into my pores, pricked along my skin—something palpable—wicked and debased.
He knew.
My eyes rolled back, a shuddered groan from my chest. Blake was at my side as they wheeled me to the back of the ambulance. “You’re fine, Will. You’re going to be fine.”
“Blake,” a mumbled word from my mouth.
“I know, Will. I know.”
~
Dense forest suffocated, pressed in, held him back. William panted. A streak of blond raced from behind one tree to the next. Faint laughter drifted through the stifling air, taunted and tickled his ears.
Panic welled.
“Wait,” William begged, stretching out a
hand. Please.
William pounded through the forest, branches lashing his face.
The child ran, giggling with the game he played.
A surge of protectiveness built and overflowed. William chased him, only feet behind. The boy laughed, a tinkling laugh as he darted up the hill, ducked under trees. “Come and get me.” Playful brown eyes looked back at him. William tasted his joy. Wanted more.
The boy mounted the short incline, emerged in a clearing at the summit.
Frantic, William rushed, desperate to hold his son.
Please.
“Please,” I whispered as I lay on my side on the ER bed. Fear crawled along my flesh, whispered in my ear.
I no longer knew if it was mine or the child’s.
I blinked away the stupor from the painkiller they’d administered when I first arrived. Twelve stitches behind my left ear, and my head was throbbing like it was being drilled by a jackhammer.
The dim room lightened when the door swung open, dimmed again. Blake pushed aside the drape enclosure. “Got your discharge papers.”
I sat up. Dizziness hit me and I gripped my head. “Damn it.”
“You okay?” Blake’s boots filled up my view. “I can call the nurse.”
“No, I’m fine. Just give me a second.”
When I gathered myself, Blake helped me up by my upper arm. Our footsteps echoed over the linoleum floor, the ER quiet as we exited out the door. Morning teased at the sky, a dull, cloudless gray.
I climbed into the cab of Blake’s truck, closed my eyes, and rested my head back.
When Blake headed down his street, he slowed just as soon as he had accelerated. I looked up to see Maggie’s van parked in front of her sister’s house as we passed by. Blood rushed from my head and weighted my arms. I sat up, whispered, “Maggie,” as I strained to see through the rear window.
I knew then that the violence Troy had inflicted on me had spilled over to Maggie. And she had left.
I was out the door before Blake came to a full stop in the driveway, running up the street. I slowed to a walk when I reached their drive. Amber’s husband sat on a chair on the porch. Fatigue was evidenced in the weariness of his eyes and untamed bedhead. He jerked upright when he heard my footsteps.
I’d seen him a few times in passing, and his face lit in subtle recognition, though he stood and took on a protective stance. He leaned with one hand on the porch column as if blocking the way, his eyes fixed in warning. “I think you’d better stop right where you are, because I don’t see that you have any business coming up this way.”
Stopping midstride, my attention went behind him to the door he guarded, and I swallowed, shook. My family was in there. “I need to see Maggie.”
Confusion tripped his expression before his face hardened again. “They’ve had enough trouble without you coming over here trying to stir up more. I don’t know what your game is, but I’m telling you right now”—he pointed a finger at me—“as long as they’re staying with me, no one is getting through that door.”
“I—”
“You need to leave. I don’t wanna see you coming around here again.”
I wanted to yell at him to look my face, to see what business I had here. Instead I retreated a step. “Just…tell Maggie William was here.”
~
It was unbearable, the waiting, the not knowing. Nearly a week had passed. Each second slipped by in a blur, hours and minutes and days no longer ticking at a steady pace, time suspended, prolonged, stretched out so far I had snapped. When I called Tom yesterday for the fifth time this week, he’d again asked me to give him more time. So far, he’d come up with nothing. He said the statement I’d made to the police after what happened in the parking lot of the bar last week had little bearing as it was purely suspicion and no charges had been pressed. He promised he would continue to dig.
Half-deranged, I’d become an almost permanent fixture in Blake’s front yard, watching, waiting. There’d not been one glimpse of Maggie or Jonathan the entire week, although twice I’d seen Troy drive down the street.
The nights, like now, were the worst. I glanced to the small clock that said it was just after midnight.
The wooden floors were cool beneath my feet, a distinct contradiction to my heated skin. Outside the windows, the night felt almost alive. The moon peered down, casting shadows across the floor, branches brushing along the walls. Insects droned. It all added to the anxiety that had every nerve coiled so tight I thought I would implode.
Slowly, I’d fallen, given in. I’d begun to welcome the dreams when Jonathan would barrel into my life and steal my breath. In them, I grasped at my sanity, the boy my reality.
Here, walking the floors, I was sure I’d gone mad.
I succumbed to the exhaustion and collapsed on the unmade bed.
Roused by the quiet knocks at the door, I raised my head and squinted into the shadows of the room. The moon had sunk lower, bled as an alabaster haze across the floorboards. Another tap, an echo that jarred my memory and took me back to the place where she was mine.
Scrambling to tug on a pair of jeans from the floor, I crossed the room in two steps. My pulse was erratic as I was hit with an awareness of what was waiting for me on the other side of the door.
I turned the lock and pulled it wide open.
She was there, standing in the dark, hugging herself. A breeze rustled through the strands of her hair. They fluttered up around the silhouette of her face.
As she slowly came into focus, my gaze traced the lines of her face, the angle of her jaw, the fullness of her lips, finally resting on the softness in her eyes. There were no pretenses there, just distinct vulnerability and a wealth of emotion. No walls, completely exposed.
For the longest moment, we just stared, giving time a minute to catch up to us.
Maggie’s eyes fell closed when she spoke. “Make me remember what it feels like to be loved.” It raked from her throat as a petition, as if there were any possibility that I could ever turn her away.
I took one step forward and wrapped my arm around her waist, my hand splayed across the small of her back. One touch and I was gone. Fire clipped through my veins, fervent need, this buried too deep for too long. I wound my fingers through her silky hair and palmed the back of her neck as I quickly pulled her inside and covered her mouth with mine.
Everything lit in a torrent of need when I tasted what I’d lost.
Her hands trembled as she held my face, and she kissed me back. There was no resistance, but complete surrender to the indestructible bond that had been created between us so long ago. The kiss was filled with a passion and loss that almost brought me to my knees, but her hold against my face spoke of the buried hope we’d always clung to.
“Maggie,” I begged as I edged back for a breath, then dove into her again. Maggie.
I loved her. Oh God...I loved her. She was everything, ripped me apart and made me whole.
Maggie whimpered and dug her fingers into my neck in a bid to bring us closer. She kissed me back with every ounce of desperation I felt, our worlds blurring and becoming one.
We collided, body and soul, mouths and hands and whispered pleas.
Stumbling, we knocked into the wall. I was pressing and Maggie was begging. A demanding rumble erupted deep in my chest. Our spirits were frantic, a frenzied thirst as we struggled to reclaim what we’d had.
“Jonathan?” I mumbled at her mouth as my fingers threaded through her hair.
“He’s sleeping…at my sister’s. I snuck out after everyone was asleep.”
Her heated palms caressed up my arms and over my shoulders, and then rushed down to tug at the fly of my jeans. Her eyes flicked up to meet mine as she pulled the buttons free, her expression full of the same hunger that had never been satisfied in me since the last time she’d touched me.
I sucked in a sharp gasp of air, my stomach clenching in hesitation and overwhelming desire as my hands wrapped around her wrists. “Maggie...stop.”<
br />
We needed to slow down, talk.
She rested her forehead against my chest, shaking her head, before she pulled back just enough to look at me. “Please William…let me feel you. I need to feel you.”
At her words, I came undone, unable to stop myself. Sure I didn’t want to. “Maggie.” My answer was clear in the tone of my voice.
Maggie fumbled through the rest of the buttons and freed me of my jeans and underwear, and she pushed them down my legs, her hands sliding back up my skin. I stepped from them and peeled her t-shirt over her head as I did. Her hair tumbled over her shoulders. My attention went straight to where it brushed along a scar that began as a thick coil at her collarbone and thinned as it angled across her chest.
A lash of fury whipped through my senses and spun my head when I saw another scar ridging the length of the inside of her right arm. My eyes flashed to Maggie’s face, and that shattered place in my heart expanded.
“What did he do to you?”
Oh my God. I didn’t want to imagine what she’d gone through when he’d inflicted these injuries, how terrified she must have been. And I’d left her.
Tender eyes that had held so much sorrow now bore so much more, shrouded secrets, loss and pain. She ran her fingers down my cheek. “Don’t.”
She pressed herself to my body as if she could sink inside, as if she could feel the guilt rolling through me.
I frantically covered her with mine, as if I could somehow protect her from what she’d endured.
Each movement became charged, our mouths urgent. Maggie dug her fingers into my shoulders to draw me near. A tiny sting pricked at my flesh where her nails cut into my skin. It felt like heaven—like something real. I wrapped my arm around her back to hold her close, and the other I slid between us to palm her breast over her bra.
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