He pushes me toward the woods, but our legs tangle together, both of us stumbling to the dirt, not far into the trees. The cloth falls out of his hand as he fights, trying to keep his hold on me. I do everything to keep him off me, but Curtis is stronger than he looks; my kicking and screaming don’t seem to do much.
“Shut the fuck up!” he manages to roll on top of me, fighting to keep me down. I thrust upward, doing everything I can to get free, while opening my mouth to scream. The rag is gone, but he’s holding his newly gloved hand over my mouth now, and I’m scared to death there’s enough on it that he can still make me pass out. “I’ve watched you, seen how much you’ve changed since you’ve been here. You were nice at first, but then you thought you were too good for me. Now you think you’re too good for all men, holding your anti-male rallies, and now even fucking a girl! I’m tired of women like you.”
His other hand goes to my throat, and I know that if I don’t do something now, I’m dead. This guy will strangle me, drag me farther into the woods, and I’ll become another statistic.
Fuck that.
I do the first thing I can think of, not even trying to rip his hand from my throat. I grab his dick, squeezing it as tightly as I can, not letting up when it’s Curtis who cries out this time.
“You fucking bitch!” he seethes, looking like a completely different person from the Curtis I thought I knew.
He has no choice but to pull his hand from my throat, though I still have his dick. I push him off me, squeezing with everything inside me.
Curtis cries out again, rolling himself into a ball, as I shove to my feet, pulling my foot back and kicking him in the stomach.
He grabs a handful of dirt, managing to throw it into my eyes, and everything becomes blurry. But the second I turn to run, there are arms around me, another person is suddenly there, smelling like oranges and sunshine, and I know exactly who it is.
Aislin.
“I got you, baby. You did good. You did so fucking good,” she says. “You’re good. Stay right here.”
“Okay.” My eyes are stinging, and I wipe them just as I hear Curtis cry out.
I turn, just in time to see Ash kick him over and over and over again.
It’s scary.
It’s badass.
“There’s some kind of rag or something. I think he was trying to chloroform me,” I tell her.
“Look in his bag,” she says, and I do, seeing the bottle. There are more gloves in there, so I pull some on, trying not to get any of the liquid in the bottle on me. There are other rags inside, and I do my best with shaking hands, scared like hell I’m going toget some on myself, but I pour it on the cloth while my girlfriend beats his ass.
He’s crying, dirty and bloody, when I get back to him.
“Here, give it to me,” Ash says.
“No. I’m doing this.” I kick him one more time, then place the rag over his mouth. His eyes are wide, and he’s struggling, but he doesn’t have much fight left in him, not after what we both did to him. Curtis has no choice but to breathe in the chloroform, clutching at my hands.
Ash steps up beside me. We watch as he lies there, bloody from having his ass kicked and gasping for breath, getting weaker and weaker until eventually, he passes out.
It’s an out-of-body experience after that. Ash directs me to grab both his and my things, and I do. She tries to drag him farther into the woods.
“I don’t want you to have to do this,” she says.
“He attacked me. He wanted to kill me. I’m…no.” I shake my head. “I’m in this.”
I take his other arm, and we drag him away, deeper into the trees, my heart racing the whole time. Ash immediately calls Tiernan.
She’s talking in a low voice to him, but I know they’re coming, and from what I can make of the conversation, Dean is staying behind to do his thing if there’s any camera footage.
The second the call ends, Ash is holding me tightly again. “I’m scared, but I’m not. It’s like I can’t cry. I can’t feel anything. I could have died tonight and—”
“It’s the adrenaline. When it wears off, you’ll crash. I was so fucking scared,” she says.
“How did you know?”
“When you said what time you were leaving, I was going to meet you. I got there and couldn’t find you. I looked at our location app and saw where you were.”
