His legs are limp. He presses his palms to the ground, deplorably digging his nails into my rug as he attempts to crawl away from her.
“Nothing you don’t deserve,” Gemma says, and the tone of her voice seems so far away.
I need to see this.
I take a step out and yank at my secured wrist, opening the drawer as far as I can. It hits something in the underside of the drawer, keeping it from coming out the entire way.
Yank. Pull. Jerk.
I feel like I’m about to drag the entire wall down.
Why won’t this fucking drawer budge?!
“Wait—stop—”
The sound of Trevor’s pleas perks my ears. I turn to see Gemma grab him by his hair and lift his torso off the ground. He grunts and yells, hands flying around hers.
Mother-goddammit-fuck—
There’s a key in the handcuff.
Gemma left the key.
I hear Trevor scream again as I quickly unlock my restraint, and when the cold steel drops away from my wrist, I nearly trip scrambling to run into the next room.
Though, maybe I shouldn’t have been so eager to witness this.
Gemma is dragging Trevor by his hair across the straightaway from my bedroom to the living room. The bottom half of his body is flaccid, gliding across the floor. There’s something about her easy, confident stride—one boot effortlessly crossing front of the other—that halts me in my tracks. She isn’t bending, hauling, or appearing as if his muscular form is any weight to her.
I gulp when she eventually stops by the television stand.
He’s still yelling, still blubbering incoherently, when she picks up a pair of my shorts from the floor and balls them into his mouth. The cotton muffles him slightly, allowing her to move him without the constant screeching.
I watch in awe as she unravels the spiked choker from her hand, pulls his arms behind his back, and secures his wrists. Sheturns him over onto his back with her foot, bends down, and hauls his torso up so that he’s sitting upright against the console.
It’s all I can do to stand in the bedroom doorway and gawk.
Because despite the red eyes, the bloody nose, and the swelling lip, I know.
It’s him.
One look and I can see him in that lumberjack costume at the bar. I can hear him asking me to take a drink. I can see him standing by the wall as they pushed me around their circle. I see him leaning over my own paralyzed body on the floor, hear the mutter of his laugh, his voice telling his friends how much he’s going to think about my lying there again—
Fury laces my veins.
Pain pierces my gut.
I’m in a trance, unable to entirely take a breath as I peer down at the worthless specimen before me.
The girl I was lying on that grimy floor is pounding on my chest. She’s screaming to be set free, to move and speak and shout without a muzzle or restraint, without drugs coursing through her veins that leave her in a void.
Thisis what it means to feel everything.
This pain… this restless agony… this grief and anger for the girl who couldn’t fight.
None of them deserve my forgiveness or mercy.
Tears streak down Trevor’s face, his head shaking as he tries and fails to speak. I white-knuckle the gun’s handle.
