I stayed with Rae after she passed out cold, even when she began to softly snore, brushing my fingers over her forehead, down her cheeks, across her chin, marveling at her raven-haired beauty. In total awe of this strong woman carrying life within her, I happily watched her sleep rather than rushing back down to a house full of people I couldn’t care less about.
By the time I finally rejoined my guests downstairs, the party was dying down. When the last guest leaves, I stand out on the colonnade with a glass of bourbon, leaning against a column while I watch the Spanish moss sway in the breeze from off the river. The hand not cupping the glass of liquor is placed in my pocket, playing with the small box I’ve had in my possession since I was fourteen. My mother’s emerald ring, the one she gave me on her deathbed.
“Make sure you give it to someone special, cher.” She struggled to get the words out of her dry throat, barely able to move and weighing ninety pounds, concerned about me. “Your forever,” she breathed out.
She never breathed back in. And my world died with her—until Reagan, my forever.
A stabbing pain shoots across my head, and my vision tunnels, flickering out like a vintage TV.
When I come to, I’m in a fog, my eyesight coming in and out of focus. My heart pounds viciously in my head. I make to move my hand to my forehead, but I can’t. They’ve been subdued to the armrests of a chair.
I speak, but it’s quieted by an unknown material shoved into my mouth.
What the fuck?
When my vision stops going in and out, I realize I’m in the bedroom, and I’m not alone. A black mass stands at the edge of the bed, staring down at it—at Reagan. Asleep. Unaware. Defenseless.
Before I can warn her, the mass threatens, “If you scream, I’ll open her pretty throat.”
As my eyes adapt to the dark, I notice the glint of light off a blade in his hand.
I know that voice.
Fuck.
Shaw.
I want to rip through my restraints, warn her, something. But he’ll gut her before I even have the chance.
He reaches out and touches her face.
“Beautiful, isn’t she?” His fingers move down her chin, her neck, her cleavage. “My father always knew how to pick a thoroughbred.”
He’s comparing his wife, the woman I love, to a fucking racehorse. She really is nothing more than a possession to him, something to amuse him, to have, to break.
He runs the tip of his knife along her bare arm, over her hip and down her leg. Usually a light sleeper, I’m surprised she hasn’t stirred from the sound of his voice, from the touch of sharp metal.
“I drugged her,” he states, answering my thought. “She can’t hear me—or you for that matter. But, know, if you say a fuckin’ word, I’ll kill her all the same.”
“She’s so peaceful,” he skims the cleavage of her breasts with the blade until it reaches the space between, where her heart is, “as if she were already dead.”
It takes every ounce of my willpower not to flip out. I need to remain calm and figure a way out of this. While he focuses on her, I slowly work my arms, attempting to pull and stretch the cloth binding my wrists. When his eyes shift onto me, I stop.
“I can’t, for the life of me, understand why you insist on takin’ my things, cousin. First, my birthright.” He waves the knife around. “Then Charlotte. And now my wife? When will you learn to keep your hands off things that don’t belong to you?”
I apologize through my gag.
“What was that?” he asks, setting the knife to his ear, as if cupping it with his hand to hear me better. “You apologize?” He starts walking toward me, the tip pointed in my direction, and leans right into my face, holding the blade dangerously close to my throat. “Do you think that’s what I want from you? An apology?”
“What do you want?” I mumble from my over-stuffed mouth.
His alcohol-laced breath wafts into my nostrils, burning them with the putrid scent of stomach acid and gut-rotting booze.
“Blood, cousin. Blood.”
Without looking at the clock, I know some time has passed. There’s no longer any noise coming from downstairs. No music. No people. Only quiet. It makes the old manor feel eerily empty.
I’m confused at first. What woke me? Was it the silence itself? That’s when Greier’s arms scoop around me. They’re warm and strong. Really strong. They’re squeezing me.
“Miss me, dear wife?” My spine fuses into a pole when the familiar drawl of Shaw’s voice brushes across the back of my neck. Every hair on my body stands at attention.
“No,” I whisper, denying the idea he’s really here with me. I’m dreaming. This is a nightmare I’m going to wake from any second. He isn’t here. He isn’t here.
I clench my eyelids shut, repeating it again and again.
“Well, I missed you, baby.”
The back of his hand sweeps across my cheek. I shrink, balling into fetal position, readying for his tender touch to turn violent.
“I love the way you cower,” he says in a whisper, as if it were sweet nothings. His lips drag against my ear. His hand wraps around my neck, tightening until it constricts my vocal cords. I couldn’t scream for help even if I had the nerve.
Oh, God.
Where is Greier?
I cry through a pinched throat. Not out of terror for my own life but for his.
Is he dead?
If he is, I want to die, too.
“Beautiful,” Shaw breathes, nipping at my ear. His erection presses into the back of my thigh as he palms my breast with the hand not choking the air out of me.
“Greier,” I whimper.
“Is that who you’re thinking about?” he asks with a hiss. “Don’t worry, baby. He’s not far.”
His hand moves to the back of my neck. He wrenches me into a sitting position, and that’s when I see him. Greier, tied to a chair, his mouth stuffed with cloth. His eyes trained on me with tears threatening to jump from their little ledges. I wail out his name.
He fights with everything he has, causing the heavy chair to jump and shake. He shouts and curses through his gag, but his words are indistinguishable. He’s bloody and beaten, but he’s breathing.
I hide my face in the mattress, but Shaw grabs hold of it, commanding me to look at Greier with a forceful hand.
“Do you see what you’ve done?” he asks, smashing his mouth against my ear, his hot breath making my skin clammy. “If you played the good wife, your lover wouldn’t be at death’s door. Now, I’m going to teach you a lesson he’ll never forget.”
Suddenly, I’m on my stomach, and his weight is anchoring me to the mattress. Positioned across the bed, I still see Greier. Shaw’s palm presses into the side of my face, preventing me from looking away, forcing me to bare the torment in his eyes. His legs spread mine as he unzips his trousers. He fumbles with the skirt of my dress, attempting to bring it around my waist.
“I never presumed you an exhibitionist,” he says with a gravelly throat. “But then again, I never knew I was marrying a whore.”
Something clicks inside me.
“I hadn’t realized I married a fucking monster,” I spew like venom, struggling to roll out from beneath him, but his size proves to be too much for me. I’m stuck.
“Let me go,” I command with a strained voice, “you sociopath.”
In a flash, his fist is coming down on my head over and over.
“Be…a…good…fucking…girl,” Shaw orders, punctuating each word with a blow to my skull.
I wrestle with myself to keep from crying out, from giving him what he wants. My anguish. My screams. My fears. But I won’t give myself to him, not even my pain.
When the blows to my head stop, I see it, the knife on the mattress, within grasp if I stretch my arm enough. He continues assaulting me, aggressively unhooking my garters and tugging at my panties. With his attention on my lower body, I carefully reach for the glinting blade. I fully extend my arm, but it’s not enough, grazing the handle by the skin of my fingertips.
Come on.
Come on.
My panties are now at my knees, inching down my calves until they’re tangled with my ankles. I chance a glimpse back at what’s happening. He’s too focused on relieving himself of his pants to notice me reaching for the weapon. Forcing my legs apart, he presses the weight of his body into my back, pinning me.
“First, I’m going to make your boyfriend watch.” His lips drag across the shell of my ear. “Then I’m going to bash his brains in.”
He readies to enter me, rearing his hips back, prying my thighs open wider, angling himself.
My hand wraps around the grip of the knife, and I wildly slash over my shoulder. The unmistakable sensation of metal sinking into flesh reverberates in the handle, and I twist. He screams, and I yank it from whatever it sunk into. Clambering off the bed and me, he provides my escape. I sprint to Grey, release his gag, and begin sawing at the restraints with the bloodied blade, still swimming through the fog of drugs.
“Get out of here,” he whisper-hisses.
Shaw hollers in the background while I work at the cloth binding Greier’s wrist to the armrest. My stomach flutters when it splits. He jerks at the fabric, tearing it the rest of the way.
“Run,” Greier orders, working his other hand out. “I’ve got this. Run. Get help.”
“I’m not leaving you,” I insist, unknotting the rope tied about his left ankle.
“The baby,” he says, snapping me back into reality. Our baby. I need to protect our baby. “Run to Mame’s. Send Beau. Call the police,” he directs me, freeing his other leg. “Now.”
Terrified it’ll be the last time, I kiss him hard and quick on his lips, a lifetime of kisses before I reluctantly leave him in the room with my psychotic husband. As I break for the stairs, Shaw screams out, “Reagan!” with an almost demonic growl in his voice, his large footsteps coming after me. I skip every other step on my descent, his phantom fingers swiping at the back of my neck. I scramble down the foyer toward the back door, my feet betraying me as they slip on the waxed floors, wasting precious seconds. Almost busting through the screen door, I cross the deep terrace and book it to Mame’s bungalow in the back, on the edge of the bayou, every window blacked out. Willing it unlocked, I attempt to rip the door off its hinges, but it doesn’t budge. I pound and kick on it, shouting and hollering and producing as much noise as possible.
“Mame!” My fists beat at the hard surface until my knuckles threaten to split. “Beau! Open the door!”
A light flicks on in the living room, and the door swings open wide, slamming into the wall behind it.
“What’s going on?” Beau asks, dazed and mildly irritated, but mostly concerned why I’m frantically attacking his door at this hour.
Mame pokes her head out from the hallway behind him, her face white, and her hand clutching her robe in terror.
“Greier,” I choke out, breathless, unable to form a complete sentence. “Shaw. House.”
When the smog evaporates from Beau’s eyes, he reaches behind the door for a rifle and bounds past me, ordering us to stay here.
Staying behind, helpless? Not on his or Greier’s fucking life. That wasn’t part of his instructions.
Following in Beau’s wake, I shout back to Mame, “Call the police!”
I cross the park-sized lawn separating Mame’s from the main house. Beau, a hundred feet ahead of me, spans the yard in half the time with his giant-like strides. Quickening my pace with a skip in my step, I catch him when the darkened antebellum comes into view.
“Go back,” he demands.
“No,” I reply firmly.
He puts himself between the house and me. “Stay out here then. I’m not askin’. If you see Shaw, get back to my ma’s and barricade yourself inside until Sheriff Wilkes arrives.”
Before I contest, he leaves me on the grass beyond the porch steps, moving stealthily into the house, exhibiting his military experience.
I wait for any sign of life, but the main house is deathly stagnant. Seconds crawl at a glacial pace; minutes seem to stand still all together. Like pancake batter in my throat, the dense swamp air is impossible to swallow.
Quick in succession, two gunshots shatter the noiseless night like a sledgehammer to my glass heart, feeding into my greatest fear. Losing Grey.
“Greier!” I shriek, my hands flying to my mouth as a future without him cruelly stabs me in the brain.
Moving toward the house without thought of my own safety, a firm hand jerks me back by the wrist. I check behind me.
Mame.
“Are you crazy?” she asks as if it isn’t obvious.
“Yes,” I answer, tears marking my cheeks with wet trails of pain. “Now let me go. Grey may be hurt.”
“Not on your life,” she says, towing me further from the house, which has gone very silent again. “Or that baby’s.”
“Please, Mame,” I cry, pleading her with my watery eyes. My chin quivers, and my nostrils flare. “I can’t live without him.” I weakly wrench my wrists, now both locked in her worn hands.
“No, cher.” She reaches up to my face and cups it in her palms. “Greier wouldn’t want you riskin’ your life.”
Her gaze trains on something over my shoulder, and she releases me with a gasp.
When my eyes follow hers, a shadowy silhouette appears in the darkened doorway. My face goes ashen, and my heart nosedives to my feet.
She kisses me with urgency, her quaking lips struggling to break from mine. Our likely goodbye is cut short when she tears her mouth away. I watch her disappear around the doorway with a dreadful pang in my stomach, hoping it’s not the last time I see her. But even that is short-lived when my attention is pried from the empty doorway by Shaw’s guttural voice tearing through the room. Eyes filled with rage, he makes for the door, clearing the bed like a man possessed. I spring into action and tackle him to the ground, but he continues to claw his way toward the hallway. Noticing the wound on his shoulder, I shove my thumb into it, desperate to stop him by any means necessary. He screams in pain, and I flip him onto his back in a fleeting moment of distraction. Kneeling over him, my fist makes contact with his golden-boy face over and over, bloodying it to a satisfying pulp. Visions of him, ripping off Reagan’s panties, on top of her, readying to violate her, fuel my rage as I pulverize him. Payback for putting his fucking hands on the mother of my child. Teeth stained red, he laughs like the fucking psycho he is.
Out of breath, I rise over him. Still laughing, I grab his throat with my hand, pressing my weight into it. Now, the only noises coming from him are wet, strangled gurgles.
“She’s pregnant—with my child.”
That gets his fucking attention. An array of expressions manipulate his face, each one a deeper shade of pissed.
He spits at me. Missing, it lands on the once white rug, now pink with the blood of our family.
“You lie,” he growls through red, gritted teeth.
Slowly, my head shifts from side to side, a teasing grin goading him on. I want his jealousy to consume him, eat him up inside. I want him to understand she’s no longer his. She never was.
“You got my wife pregnant?”
With a mind of its own, my hand grows firmer around his throat until his voice box starts to crush under the strain.
“Your wife?” I ask, forcing myself not to strangle the life out of him. “Your wife? She’s fucking mine. She gave herself to me. Unlike you, I didn’t pay for her affection, cousin.”
“I’ll kill you,” he chokes through his clamped esophagus, his fingers clawing at my hands, “then I’ll kill her and that bastard inside her.”
He thrashes beneath me as the life starts to fade from his eyes, his face reddening. His palm pushes up into my chin, attempting to pry me away. When it does stop me, his right hook catches me in the jaw, and he manages to buck me off. He coughs and wheezes, clambering for the knife near the chair where I left it. I snatch his ankle in my hand, and he kicks me in the face with the heel of his shoe. With me distracted, he retrieves the weapon from the floor and rises, pointing the business end in my direction, murder in his eyes. When he strides forward, I reach behind my back and retrieve the hidden gun from its place holstered in my waistband, aiming the barrel at him.
“Move closer, and I’ll fucking shoot your face out from between your ears.”
He tests me, and I point the pistol at the floor to the right of his feet and squeeze the trigger. He halts in his tracks, twisting the handle of the knife in his twitching hand, and glares up at me from the shadow under his brow. His jaw ticks, and his mouth sets in a tense frown.
I aim the gun at his chest, prepared to filch his life if he sneezes wrong.
“You should’ve left her alone. You should’ve given her up. You don’t love Rae. You don’t even like her.”
“What the fuck does love have to do with it?” A deadened laugh flops lifelessly from of his mouth. “I. Own. Her.”
“Grey?” a whispered voice comes from the stairs.
Worried Rae came back for me; my attention is broken away from my cousin. I only hear my name, not who’s calling it.
It’s a fatal mistake.
Before I realize my fuck up, I’m staring down the barrel of my own gun.
I raise my hands to him in a defensive manner, remaining as level-headed as someone can with a lethal weapon threatening their life. “Don’t be stupid, Shaw. Let’s talk about this. You don’t want to do anything more you’ll regret.”
“No,” he jolts the gun, “not this time. You’re not getting what you want this time.”
“Shaw,” Beau barks from the doorway, his backlit reflection in the window behind Shaw, rifle trained on the space between Shaw’s eyes. “Put the fucking gun on the ground.”
“I’m righting the wrongs of our family,” he says, clicking the hammer back, ignoring Beau. “Goodbye, cousin.”
In a blur of bullets and blood, white-hot pain shoots through my shoulder, and Shaw lies dead on the floor, his brains painting the wall behind him.
Staggering through the screen door, clutching his shoulder, Greier collapses face first into the porch. I bound toward him, crying out his name, and drop to my knees beside his motionless body, his eyes closed over. I struggle to flip him on his back, checking his chest for the rise and fall of a breath. If he is breathing, it’s too shallow for my eyes to detect. My numb fingers search his neck for a quiver of a pulse. I sense a faint flutter, but I’m not sure if I’m feeling my own heartbeat drumming a violent rhythm through the tips. I’m buzzing with adrenaline.
“Greier?” I whimper out, my eyes scanning his body for any sign of life.
Not even a muscle twitch.
“Grey?” I ask, my voice becoming louder, more urgent.
Nothing.
“Grey baby?”
He’s unresponsive.
“Please wake up.” I tow his upper body into my lap and stroke his face. “Please, baby, stay with me.”
Suddenly, his eyes spring open, and he gasps a much-too-large breath into his empty lungs, choking and coughing on it.
It’s the most beautiful sound in the world.
When he’s able to take in a proper breath, I ask, “Are you alright?”
“Depends on your definition of alright,” he jokes inappropriately, his specialty, the pain of the bullet wound evident in his gravelly voice. “Think I knocked the wind out of myself.”
I lean over him and mercilessly smother his face with kisses, his presence like a shot of euphoria in my veins. I fling my arms around him, and he groans in anguish, snapping me out of my overjoyed hysteria.
“Wouldn’t you like to know where your husband is?” Beau’s solemn voice asks from the doorway, the rifle gripped in his hand.
Mame mutters, “Thank heavens,” from the grass.
“Don’t,” Greier tells him. “She doesn’t need to hear this.”
“Where?” I inquire, feeling stupid I didn’t consider he may be lurking around somewhere.
“Dead,” he replies, stone-faced.
Sorrow for the loss of a human life—as despicable as it may’ve been—washes across me like a wave on the shore, coming and going with the ease of a breath, replaced with weightlessness. Maybe, in some way, it’s wrong to experience such joy and relief when my husband’s body hasn’t even begun to cool. But it’s what I feel, and I’ll never deny what I feel again—especially when it comes to Greier. He’s alive, and I won’t take that for granted for a minute. He’s the only thing that matters to me. The world could go to hell around us. As long as he’s by my side, I’m in heaven.
“How’s your shoulder?” I carefully peel his hand from the wound enough to examine the severity of the bullet’s bite. It isn’t pretty but doesn’t seem fatal. He isn’t bleeding out or anything.
“I’ll survive,” Grey promises me, linking his fingers with mine. I didn’t even realize I continued to hold his hand after I removed it from the wound. I stare at it eclipsing mine, caked with his drying blood. “Did he hurt you or the baby?”
He’s more concerned about us than himself. He’s saintly like that.
“We’re fine,” I assure him.
In the near distance, sirens wail in the night, growing louder and more urgent.
“Beau,” Greier says, “take your mom back to your place. We’ll send the cops to you. Rae, lets meet the police down at the gate.”
Assisting him upright, a drawn-out groan rumbles low in his throat. He takes a deep breath, attempting to control the agony radiating from his shoulder. It must be on fire.
“Don’t you think I should help you?” Beau suggests, stepping toward him.
“No, they’re gonna take me to the hospital,” he pauses from a bout of unbearable pain, continuing when it passes, “and I want Rae with me. She’ll give her statement when they come to get mine. You stay here and man the fort, make sure they find everything they need.”
Such as the lifeless corpse decorating the room upstairs.
“What do you want me to tell ‘em?” he asks.
Carefully, I help my wounded hero off the ground.
“The truth,” Grey answers, flinging his good arm around my neck. “We’ve got nothing to hide.”
Beau nods, his face devoid of any emotion, and then walks over to his mother, shocked into a state of silence.
Rounding the main house, we walk down the tree-lined avenue, both worse for wear, toward the red and blue lights strobing beyond the front gate, bright searchlights glaring at us. Arm draped around my shoulders, he keeps me close. I burrow into his side, noting the way we fit together, trying to crawl deep within him.
“It’s over, Rae,” Greier mutters against the top of my head, his voice scratchy through his dry throat. “Nothing can stop us from being together now.”
“Yeah,” I agree, turning my face into his chest. “And nothing ever will again.”