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Bile rises in my throat, while the world spins rapidly around me. Without my permission, my body begins to move, crawling towards him on my hands and knees. I reach out with shaking hands to lift his head onto my lap.

His eyes are open, staring at nothing. Those baby blues that used to look at me like I hung the moon—the ones that had grown distant and hard over the past year are now just empty. I want to close them. I can’t look at them anymore, but my hands vibrate so violently I’m unable to do the simple task.

I don’t bother checking for a pulse; the wounds in his body, exposing muscle and bone, are too deep and too many. There’s no walking away from this.

The footsteps I’d heard from downstairs commenced again, but this time, they sound different. Before, they were slow, as if they were trying to be secretive. Now they move with purpose… and that purpose is coming closer.

My head jerks toward the sound, just as a shadow fills the doorway. A man stands there, tall, broad, and utterly still. He’s dressed entirely in black, from the mask that conceals his face to the boots on his feet and the gloves that cover his hands. I try to look for eyes, but the baseball cap that sits on top of the thin-material mask is pulled low, casting his eyes into deep shadow.

He doesn’t move, doesn’t speak, just stands there as if he were Death himself, waiting.

I freeze. It’s a response I know all too well, one I’d learned the hard way with months and months of trial and error with Caleb. When something bad is going to happen, I can’t run from him. I make myself as small as possible and wait for it to pass; fighting back only makes things worse.

My breath comes in irregular bursts that I have no control over as he begins to speak.

“Darling.” His voice is deep, rougher than I expect. His greeting feels too intimate, making my entire body jolt with fear. “I’ve been waiting far too long for this moment—fuck, I’m so sorry I waited this long. Last night was the last straw.”

Palpitations take over as I listen to him; the fact I’ve clamped down on the inside of my cheek doesn’t register until I taste the same copper that fills the room. I think back to last night, trying to remember what had been different about it. What would trigger such a response? Caleb had been drinking, nothing new there. We’d argued about money, about my job, about why I ‘never seemed to smile anymore.’

He yelled; he called me names that still sting despite hearing them so often. And then he slapped me, just the once in the middle of the night.

That wasn’t even the worst he’d ever done to me.

He’d cracked my ribs just two months after moving in with him, slamming me into the kitchen counter when I threw out his thirty-pack after a fight. So why had that been the last straw for this man?

“You’ve… You’ve been here? Watching us?” I ask in a whisper, barely able to get the question out.

“Just about every day for the past nine months. I’ve been watching him tear you apart, piece by piece. And watching you take it. I’ve waited and waited and planted opportunities for you to leave so I wouldn’t have to do this. I didn’t want to do this.”

Nine months.

All those nights Caleb insisted someone was out there, pacing the property; he’d been right. And all those times I’d told him he was being paranoid, that stress was getting to him… I’d been too blind to see it.

I rip my eyes from the shadowed man; his dark presence is drowning me. I look down at Caleb, into his eyes again, and realization settles. There really had been such a lifeless quality to him for quite some time.

“You don’t get it, do you?” The stranger’s words feel intense and harsh in my ears. “I couldn’t take it anymore. Watching you day after day, taking hit after hit from some pathetic, worthless piece of shit who didn’t deserve a fraction of the energy you were giving him. I’ve watched him break you down. It hurt me, Wynnie—that doesn’t even begin to describe it.”

The deep unease bubbles again when I hear my name spill from his mouth. It affects me almost more than the gruesome scene I walked in on. For nearly a year, he’s been learning all the details of my life, and I was oblivious. What else did he know?

A strange, unfamiliar feeling swirls, bursting out before I can stop it.

“I loved him!” I scream as my vision blurs with tears. “I loved him, and you took him away from me!”

The shadow’s laugh is humorless. “You loved a man who saw you as nothing more than a hassle? He treated you like shit, Wynnie. Caleb never had any intention to leave you. His intention was rotten to the fucking core. He was going to treat you like a punching bag until he ended up in jail or you ended up dead. The guy didn’t want a future with you. Don’t you realize that?”

Every word is a punch in the face, and they hurt worse than any Caleb had ever landed on me. I want to deny it and scream at him that he’s lying, but instead, I feel something in me unwillingly crack open with the reality of what he’s saying.

I had to have seen the signs… right?

Caleb was pulling away. He’d stopped talking about future plans, like getting a dog or hoping to have a family with me one day. A family better than either of ours ever was.

“Get out!” I scream again. I can feel my face redden with the force of my yell. I don’t care that this man can—and potentially would—snap me like a twig for screaming at him.

I need space to process and think, to call the cops, and then figure out how to live in a world that has been flipped completely upside down.

He doesn’t move. He simply stands there, impassive and unimpressed by my hysteria.

Somehow, the umbra covering his eyes seems to darken before his voice drops, thick with rasp and sternness. “You get out. Go take a damn shower, clean yourself up, and calm the fuck down. Start thinking about how you can thank me for getting you out of this. Now go, Wynnie, I’m going to clean this up.”