“Mina!” Mike called, his footfalls heavy behind me.
I didn’t respond, keeping my eyes in front of me.
Then a hand was gripping my hair and yanking me off of my feet. Mike fell with me and together we crashed into the ground.
My hands grabbed his face, my nails finding purchase on his nose as I worked to push him away from me. “Get off of me!” I screamed, dread filling every inch of my body at being captured by him again.
“Stop! I just want you to come home with me, then it can all go back to the way it was,” Mike’s voice took on a whining tone as he fought to grab my wrists.
“I don’t want to go with you, you never even liked me,” I snapped, trying to free my arms from his burning grip.
“That doesn’t matter,” he growled, finally managing to pin me to the ground. His blue eyes were wild and crazy and he glared down at me.
“You and me? We have to be married,” he said with a finality that told me that he knew something I didn’t.
“Why? Why can’t you just let me go?” I was ashamed of the whimper that came out of me. “Why can’t you just let me be happy?”
“Because your fucking mother put clause upon clause in your inheritance. If we divorce or you die, I lose all access,” Mike blurted without a hint of remorse.
Confusion filled me. “There is no more inheritance. You told me it was all gone. The house, the stocks, the real estate portfolio. All of it. Gone.”
It was one of the reasons he’d gone from mentally to physically abusive over the past year and a half. Always screaming in my face about the fact that I brought nothing to our marriage. That I was useless.
“No,” Mike said, pushing my sore face into the ground. “The only thing that was gone was what I could access. Your mother was one of the richest women in the country and despite hiring me to handle her estate, she put safeguard after safeguard on the money. It took me ages to figure it out, and just when I did you whacked me over the head and ran for it.”
“What…?” I began, almost afraid to ask what he meant by that.
Mike’s face, which had been pinched with rage, smoothed into a self-satisfied grin. “The only way to access the inheritance is as a parent to a child with your bloodline, Mina.”
Horror filled me with the implications of what he was saying. That was why he’d suddenly started pushing for us to start trying for a baby. Why he’d thrown my birth control pills a few weeks before I escaped.
“So, we’re going to be Mike and Mina again, who everyone says is the perfect couple. Then we’ll have little baby Campbell and everything is going to be just the way it was. I’ll even forgive your affair with that fucking abomination,” Mike cooed, his thumb brushing down my cheek with a sick sort of affection.
Bile filled my throat as the image of the rest of my life was conjured in my mind. Being trapped in that house while Mike had free rein over the money my mother had left. I needed to get away from him or else that future would become a reality.
I didn’t know where I found the strength, but somehow I managed to bring my knee up as hard as I could between Mike’s legs, nailing him squarely in the nuts.
Mike howled and slumped down on top of me, his body curling in on itself as I rolled him away.
“See if you can have kids now, asshole,” I spat and turned to leave.
The sound of a gun being cocked echoed off of the trees around us.
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” Mike said through gritted teeth. When I turned to face him again, Mike was now holding up Ambrose’s pistol in his shaky grip. “I was trying to be nice, but you don’t need working kneecaps to have a baby, Mina.”
This was it. The end of the road. I’d fought so hard to make it even this far, and it would all be in vain.
I wondered if Cash would ever be able to get to me if I was trapped in New Hampshire. The local authorities were all human, so they wouldn’t hear him out about mates or anything of the like. Would he be all alone again? I’d promised him forever, but looking at the gun, I was sure I’d rather die than go back to Mike and live a life of hell.
I was just about to open my mouth to tell Mike to fuck off when the sound of something flapping in the distance caught my attention. A screech filled the air, loud and mangled as Mike and I looked at each other with mirroring looks of shock.
It was Cash. It had to be. I couldn’t see him, or hear him, but I couldfeelhim deep in my chest. My mate had come for me, and if the sounds I was hearing were right, he’d brought the cavalry with him.
“That abomination is named Cash,” I said, pointing at the sky. “And he’s about to kick your ass.”
Mike frowned, looking up at the sky before lifting the gun in my direction again.
But Mike never got the chance to shoot me or anyone else for that matter.
