“Put me down! Someone help me!” She squirms over my shoulder as she begs to be let free. No matter how hard she twists or flails, she can’t get away. I easily navigate the dark woods, wary of the underbrush and careful not to let any tree branches I push past snap back to whip against her.

I’ve walked through these tall evergreens so many times that my body has formed a muscle memory. It’s almost become a reflex to know when to hop or duck. The night makes it more difficult to navigate, but after countless operations carried out in darkness in the military, my body and my eyes have gotten used to it.

I don’t know what my plan is. I’m just trying to put as much distance between her and that rapist as possible. The helplessness I saw in her eyes as he tried to strip her, the desperation I heard in her voice as he tried to force his cock on her, it awakened a sleeping beast inside me. One I thought I’d left behind. That fucker is lucky I struck him with the dull side of my axe. I’ll admit, I briefly considered letting my sharp blade bite into his skull, ridding the world of another terrible man it would never miss.

I step under some low hanging branches, twisting easily so that she isn’t struck by them. Her feeble attempts to break free from my grasp are a minor inconvenience, barely registering in my senses. The only way she’s going to reach the ground is if I put her there. After years in the military doing exercises where I had to carry men of my own weight and size over my shoulder like this, she’s like a feather.

“Let me go!”

A loud feather.

She punches me between the shoulder blades weakly.

A pesky feather.

“Please,” she sobs, sniffling loudly.

A scared feather.

I stop in my tracks and realize how terrified she must be. First some asshole tries to rape her and then I whisk her away into the forest. I know she saw my face, and if she’s here to track me down, it’s a face I’m sure she’s spent hours studying. I don’t know if she has seen photos of the crime scene. I don’t know what kind of psychological profile she’s been given. She probably thinks I’m going to do a lot worse to her than he was going to.

Sighing deeply, I gently set her on her feet and grab her arms as she attempts to dash away like a frightened doe.

“Listen to me,” I hold her tight and she meets my eyes with pure terror, “I’m not the bad guy here, okay? I’m trying to save you. You think that guy was gonna give you a big kiss and call it a night? You wanna be back there with him?”

“No,” she sobs, her body is shaking as big tears stream over her cheeks. “I don’t want to ever see him again,” she manages to form barely coherent words as her body convulses with fear and tears pour out of her. “I just want to get out of here.”

My heart squeezes as she brings herself to meet my eyes. It’s hard not to feel like a monster when you see yourself reflected that way. Her eyebrows reach skyward as she blinks her eyes. I can see now that they’re green. They’re so bright, it startles me. They’re the hopeful green of a spring bud exploding into the first leaf of the season. That green that breathes life back into your slumbering soul after the Arctic wasteland outside your door almost made you give up hope. The green that lets you know better days are ahead as the ice and snow melts away and taking the oppressive winter gloom along with it.

She looks so terrified, I instinctively want to wrap my arms around her and tell her she’ll be okay, but I know that would do nothing to calm her down. In fact, it would make everything much, much worse.

“Listen, there’s no way you can get back to the town without me taking you there. I’ve been watching you guys all day walking around in circles, it was pathetic.”

“You... you were following us?” She swallows hard and looks up at me. Her eyes just barely flicker over my face, moving faster than a hummingbird’s wing before she looks away.

“Yep, wasn’t too hard with all the thrashing and loud talking. If you two ever had to hunt to live you’d both have starved a long time ago,” I roll my eyes.

She trembles violently as I hold her and I know from the warm summer night that it has nothing to do with being cold. Her shoulders shake as the tears she can’t contain anymore fall from her face.

“Hey, listen to me, I won’t hurt you. I’m a good guy, okay? You can trust me,” I try to look into her eyes, but she won’t raise her head. I can see her chin quivering as even more tears spill over her face.

Fuck, I hate when women cry. There’s something about it that makes you feel like you’ve failed as a man. Just watching their soft features streaked with tears makes the biggest, toughest guys feel helpless.

“I won’t go with you,” she whispers, but her voice is crystal clear. “You’re not a good guy, you’re a murderer,” her voice steadies and she meets my eyes finally. “You killed an innocent young man in cold blood! He had his whole life ahead of him and you shot him. That’s not something a good guy does,” I can hear her trying to quell the fear overtaking her as her voice cracks.

Innocent?

The word burns across my mind like the lapping orange flames of wildfire. My body tenses up and my grip on her shoulders tightens as I see the image from the video in my mind. I see him fucking her, humping her like a dog. Rage boils up from my belly, blistering up to the back of my throat.

“You’re right, I fucking shot him! And let me tell you something,” I lower my face only inches from hers and can feel my lips pull back into a snarl, “he deserved much worse than that! If I had more time to plan it out, I would’ve been more fucking creative with that asshole, you understand?” my voice roars and her eyes grow wide.

In the dark, I can see her leg move, but it takes me too long to register what she’s doing. Not until her foot hits my nuts and the first sickening wave of pain drops my hands from her shoulders. I hunch over, wincing and fall to my knees as the dreaded second wave of pain builds up over me, like I’m a surfer riding a wall of water as tall as a building, hoping somehow the wave won’t break and crash over me. But it does. It always does.

Every man has taken a shot to the balls at some point in his life, whether it was when they were a clumsy boy awkwardly falling onto his bike seat, or as a teen missing a football pass. We’re all familiar with the debilitating agony. It doesn’t matter how many times it’s happened, nothing can prepare you for the intense, stabbing fire underlined by the dull, throbbing ache. It’s been a long damned time since I’ve taken a direct shot like that.

The girl is off and running through the darkness, stupidly she’s heading toward my cabin, not towards town. I knew she couldn’t get out of here without me. As the beads of sweat build on my brow, I have more than half a mind to let her run off until she runs into a bear or dies of starvation.

As the awful sensation begins to quell, I know I won’t let that happen. She’s in survival mode, I can’t blame her for trying to protect herself, no matter how misguided her instincts may be.

Finally the agony dissipates in my gut and, sucking a deep breath through my nose, I get my feet back under me. I can’t let her die out here. She doesn’t deserve that.

Taking off in the direction that she ran, I follow her once again, through the forest.