Hallway. Empty. The sound of a television from the main house, muffled through the walls. Tyler's laugh, distant and easy, the laugh of a man watching something funny while four women sat in a locked room thirty feet away.
I stepped out. Closed the door behind me. Bare feet on the hardwood because shoes made noise and the hallway was twelve steps long and every one of them mattered.
The side door. The deadbolt that stuck.
I reached for it. My hands were shaking so badly I had to use both of them, one on the deadbolt and one braced against the frame. I turned it. It stuck.
I pressed harder. Everything in my chest compressed into something small and dense.
It gave. It opened without catching. Without slamming. Without making the sound that would bring Tyler down the hallway at a pace I couldn't outrun.
The cool air hit me all at once. Darkening sky. Dirt under my feet because I was holding my shoes in my hand and the ground outside was rocks and scrub grass and I couldn't stop to put them on because stopping meant not getting away quick enough. I dropped them somewhere in the first field.
And I ran.
Open country in every direction, hills, grass, dark shapes that could have been trees or fences or nothing at all. No road visible. No lights except the ones behind me, getting smaller with every stride. My feet hit rocks, sticks, something sharp that opened the skin along my arch and sent pain up my leg. But I kept running. The pain meant I was still moving, and moving was enough.
I ran until my lungs burned and then I ran farther because lungs burning wasn't enough reason to risk stopping. I ran until the ranch lights disappeared behind a ridge, the dark complete, nothing left except my heavy breathing, the wind, and the silence of Montana at night.
I found a road.
Gravel, then asphalt. A two-lane highway that cut through the hills with no markings, no streetlights, no indication of which direction led to anything. I picked right because it was slightly downhill and downhill meant a valley and valleys usually meant towns.
I walked. Limping now, my right foot bleeding into the gravel, the bag over my shoulder with its water bottle and granola bar and whatever else was in it that I hadn't looked at because looking would have taken time and time was the one thing I didn’t have on my side right now.
The road was empty. No headlights in either direction. I walked for what felt like hours, but in reality might have only been twenty minutes. Time seemed to stop functioning normally when you're barefoot and bleeding on a highway in the dark. Every sound could be a truck coming up behind you with men who would take me back to that ranch.
Then I heard a sound. An engine, but wrong for a truck. Higher, sharper. A single headlight appearing around a bend ahead of me, growing brighter against the asphalt.
A motorcycle.
Every instinct I had left split down the middle. Half of me wanted to dive into the scrub grass at the shoulder and lie flat until it passed, because a man on a motorcycle on this road at this hour could be anyone, could be connected to the ranch, could be the kind of man who finds a bleeding woman on a highway and sees an opportunity. The other half of me understood that I was barefoot and bleeding and eight miles from nowhere in the dark, and the temperature was dropping. If the ranch had already noticed I was gone then men in trucks were driving these roads right now looking for me, and standing here alone was a death sentence of its own.
I stood in the road. I put my hands up. I decided to make myself visible because the alternative was the dark and the dark was where the ranch lived and I was done with the dark.
The bike slowed. The headlight washed over me, and for three seconds I was pinned in it, a woman standing on the side of the road with blood on her feet and a canvas duffel bag hanging from one shoulder. I didn’t even want to think about what I looked like right now.
The engine dropped to idle. The rider put a boot down.
Big. Tattooed. Arms like construction equipment, hands wrapped around the handlebars with knuckles that looked like they'd been broken more than once. He wore a leather vest overa dark shirt, and even in the headlight's glare I could read the patches on it. A motorcycle club, The Forsaken Angels. Was this the kind of man every self-defense instructor warned me about?
He looked at me and I looked at him.
And I almost ran. My legs knew it before my brain did, because the last man who'd seemed safe had driven me to a ranch in the hills and locked me in a room and everything I knew about reading people had been wrong. My judgment was the weapon he’d used against me. I'd chosen Tyler and Tyler had destroyed my life, and the idea of choosing again, of trusting again, of putting myself in the hands of a stranger who looked like violence given a body and a motorcycle, made my stomach turn so hard I nearly doubled over.
But the road behind me led to the ranch. And the road ahead of me led to nothing I could reach on bleeding feet before sunrise. And this man was here, right now, engine idling, looking at me with an expression I couldn't read in the dark.
"Please." My voice came out wrecked. Shaking, cracked, the voice of a woman who'd been holding everything together by her fingernails and had just run out of surface to grip. "Please, I need help. They're going to come looking for me. I can't go back. Please."
He didn't answer right away. His eyes moved over me, . He was taking inventory. My feet first, bare and bloody on the asphalt. Then my arms, where the bruises Tyler had left were visible below the sleeves of my t-shirt. My face, whatever he could see of it in the spill of the headlight. The bag on my shoulder. The way I was shaking, full-body tremors that I couldn't control and had stopped trying to.
I watched his hands tighten on the handlebars. His jaw shifted, something moving behind his teeth, and even from six feet away something shifted. Whatever he’d been when he pulled up, he was something else now.
He didn't ask who they were. He didn't ask where I'd come from. He didn't ask why I was barefoot and crying on a highway this late at night.
He swung his leg over the seat and stood up. He was taller than I'd expected, broader, a man who took up space just by existing. He shrugged off his jacket from underneath his cut and held it out to me.
"Put this on."
