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Briella
THEY DON’T JUST HURT HIM. THEY DESTROY HIM.
Citizen Soldier Playlist
“Who I Am”
“Thank You For Hating Me”
Inever thought I’d be the girl running through a dark forest on Halloween night while being chased by an unhinged lunatic. But here I am.
The worst part? The lunatic is my ex. And…my former captor, my handler.
Run. Run. Run.
The word pounds in my skull like a desperate drumbeat matching the rapid thud of my footsteps as I run on muddy ground. Towering redwoods loom around me, their massive trunks stretching high into the night. I’ve run far from the Halloween-themed amusement trail. The moment I saw him, my heart shook before lunging inside my chest, trying to hide.
Moonlight barely filters through the dense canopy, casting shadows over the fallen leaves and damp earth. I smell pine and moss with bonfire smoke in the distance. How far have I run? It feels like five miles now.
My pretty, gauzy dress, meant for the festival,notfor running, snags on a thorn bush, and I wrench the fabric with a trembling hand. It rips, exposing a strip of my thigh to the cold bite of the autumn wind.
“Briella.”
A voice.His voice. Joah.
I press my back against a thick tree and cover my mouth, muffling my gasps. I hear him about a hundred yards away.
The voice slides through the trees, soft, coaxing, deadly. I’m frozen, like a rabbit caught in a snare, muscles locked in terror. My stomach clenches. My nails dig into my cheeks.
“You know you can’t run forever, sweetheart.” Closer now. The crunching of his footsteps resonates in my chest. “You know where you belong.”
My body fights itself. My mind screams for me to move, my fear pinning me down. I can’t go back.
A twig snaps. Close. He’s too close.
I bolt.
“I see you, sweetheart!”
I don’t look back.
I stumble forward, nearly falling from the twisted roots like skeletal fingers from the ground. The wind howls through the branches, drowning out everything but the pounding of my heart and the relentless footsteps chasing me. My breath saws in and out of my lungs, ragged, burning. The damp, loamy scent of the trees drifts all around me.
But I still smell Easthaven.
Antiseptic and old paper. Blood and holy water. The prayers, the needles, the hands that held me down as they tried to ‘fix’ me. The electric shocks if I fought back. The nights Joah came into my room when I was wearing a straitjacket and couldn’t fight at all.
I begged for death, for silence, for anything but more of the same.
I remember the walls. The color of old bones, yellowed with time and decay. I used to press my ear to the cracks in the brickwall, swearing I could hear the voices of ghosts, the ones who came before me, the ones who never got out.
All around me, there is an eerie, unnatural silence.
Branches claw at my arms, my bare legs. The shadows and the trees watch me as I flee. My lungs ache. My throat is raw. But I don’t stop. I can’t.
And then?—
