I’d dreamed that he’d said it back to me. And even knowing it was just a dream, it helped me feel better about my fabulous blunder from the night before. That, and when I woke up to his cold side of the empty bed, I knew it was only temporary because I found his message on my phone seconds later.

Gotta work. Be back later. I want my hug.

Was hug a code word for sex? Because last time he asked for one that was not what happened. I smiled at the memory anyway. Even though the events over the last few days were scary, it was somehow less so because I had people now. I had Gabe and Angel who believed me. I had Dino who trusted me with his secrets over anyone else. It may not have been much in the grand scheme of things but to me it was a big deal.

Life-altering, big fucking deal.

So I had hope. Hope that Dino would be able to do what he had so confidently said he was going to do. Handle David and deal with Chaz Malone. Then we would all be able to live happily ever after and I wouldn’t have to change my name again and move far away.

Okay that sounded like a fairy tale even to me. The reality was much more terrifying and difficult to navigate, but at least now I wasn’t desperate. I wasn’t cowering. I was allowing myself the hope that everything would be all right, even if it wasn’t. I hadn’t had that before.

I’d declined the lunch date extended to me by the girls downstairs, as I had started referring to them in my head. They said they’d won the free lunch coupon to a new restaurant opening on the old west end from someone advertising in the neighborhood. Jolene said they had been on an afternoon stroll at the time. I giggled remembering how Jolene had said the word “stroll.” They were probably casing the neighborhood and watching the neighbors most likely. I probably would have enjoyed lunch with Jolene and Gerta, but I wasn’t supposed to leave the apartment. I felt bad turning them down, but I couldn’t afford to be seen right now. And I didn’t know when that would change.

But I wouldn’t be lonely, because Dino was coming back over. And I’m sure Gabe and Angel would be checking on me too, so there was really nothing to be worried about. But still, I couldn’t stop the chill that ran down my spine. I wouldn’t be safe until I knew David Ashley was gone, out of state, back to his hidey-hole in the sticks of upstate New York. Where he could go back to his small-town hero life and leave me the fuck alone.

Almost as if he knew I was thinking about him, I saw a familiar flash drive past the large front window of Angel’s apartment and around the corner, presumably to the parking lot around back. Dino’s BMW. Shit, I needed to brush my teeth and my hair! At least I wasn’t still wearing my pajamas. I had rifled through the clothes that Angel had picked out and put on a pair of cute denim capris and a hunter green three-quarter length sleeve jersey knit shirt. It was soft, and comfortable, and I couldn’t wait to let Dino pull it off of me.

Running to the bathroom for the fastest tooth brushing of my life, I had just gotten the toothpaste squeezed onto the brush when the buzzer to the apartment rang. I ran back out to the door and pushed the door entry button to let Dino into the building, and then hurriedly pushed the intercom button next to it.

“Come on up – I’m in the bathroom.” I mumbled around the toothbrush that I had tucked into my cheek like a squirrel. Hopefully he understood that. I ran back to the bathroom and shut the door behind me. I wanted Dino to come into the apartment, he didn’t need to see me spitting toothpaste into the sink. Running my tongue over my teeth to check the quality of my rush job I was satisfied that they were squeaky clean. My hair had a little more static than I would have liked, but I didn’t have any of my spray oil with me. At least the chemical straightener was still doing its job, and my hair hung down in a glossy curtain.

It would do.

I smiled as I heard the knock on the bathroom door. Impatient much?

“Hold your horses, Dino. Do you want your hug that ba-” The words turned to dust in my mouth and the world turned gray around the edges. I didn’t even have time to fill my lungs with air for a hearty scream when his hands closed around my throat.

“Oh, Gabriella, I’ve missed you so much.”

The boogeyman had found me in the middle of the day, and he had come here in Dino’s car. That meant that Dino had lost, and there was no one coming to save me.

I was going to die.

He hadn’t even hurt me yet, but I was sure of it. He had come here to kill me, because there was no way he could take me back to his home. How would he explain my absence? My name change? I was legally a completely different person than before. What was he planning on doing? And he was looking at me, huddled as far against the bathroom wall as I could press myself, with his hands lovingly caressing my throat, and the look in his eyes was complete adoration. David Ashley truly loved me. So much that he couldn’t let me go or let me love anyone else.

David Ashley was going to love me to death.

I was frozen in fear, so terrified I couldn’t even speak. I couldn’t even fight as he took me by the hand and let me out of the bathroom, halfway through the apartment and almost to the front door before I remembered that I was Jeanette motherfucking Clary and I had a choice. I pulled my hand out of his and took up my guard position, one foot slightly behind me, hands up to protect my face. Fuck you David, I won’t go anywhere.

He laughed, a real laugh. I amused the shit out of him and didn’t that just piss me off! “Gabriella, what are you doing? Come on, it’s time to go.”

“What did you do with Dino?” He didn’t like hearing that name, that’s for sure.

“You can fucking forget that guy,” he said, finally letting a little bit of his true nature show. “He’s waiting where I left him, with a bloody hole in his arm. That’s what he gets for thinking he can touch what’s mine. I’ll put more holes in him too, but not until I show him how happy we are to be reunited.” And then he smiled, and it was the scariest smile I had ever seen, turning my blood to ice in my veins. So scared, I didn’t see his arm raise back, but the strength of the slap knocked me clean off my feet and onto my ass. I landed hard on my tailbone and pain exploded up my back.

Funny thing about pain. You can either let it stop you in your tracks and paralyze you, or you can use it as fuel to push you forward. I’d already spent years frozen in place, but now? Now I was furious. Who was David Ashley to try and make me do anything? And what the hell had he done to Dino? I would kill him. Or die trying.

David was looking down at me and smiling, happy to have me on the floor and seemingly under control again. And he had an erection too. So slapping me around is still what gets you hard, huh? So predictable.

I cowered there on the floor a bit, needing a moment to get my thoughts together, and when I figured out my next move I let a little whimper out, just to hammer home my vulnerability. My ass and back burned like fire, but I was so damned pissed that I could rise above the pain. I just needed to get past David and out the door. If I got out the door I could haul ass down the stairs. And if I could get down the stairs, all I had to do was make it out the front door. And then I would be out in the open. This building was on a corner. Someone would see. That’s all I needed was for one person to see. This was the definitely the type of neighborhood where people would call the cops. And David Ashely was out of his jurisdiction. Fuck yeah.

“Oh, Gabriella, I hate when you make me do that. You know I like it better when you just do what you’re told. Tsk-tsk,” he said as he leaned over with his arm extended to give me a hand up. Yeah, that’s why you have a boner after knocking me on my ass. Fuck. You.

I didn’t say anything out loud though. No, I was too busy looking sorry as hell that I had dared defied him, just how he liked it. Just how I always had, because I’d had no other choice, because no one ever listened. No one ever believed me. Well things were different now, I didn’t need to rely on anyone else. I’d spent the last six years learning how to never take a beating from another man again. I learned how to protect myself. I also learned how to get back up when someone else had the upper hand.

As he leaned over to reach for me I scooted back on my butt, just a little bit, enough to surprise him and catch him off guard as I lifted both legs straight off the ground and cracked him as hard as I could in his kneecaps. He folded like a fucking blanket and landed on his back, half on the kitchen linoleum and half on the living room carpet. Directly in the path of the apartment door.

I sprang to my feet, and before he could roll over to his knees I planted my right foot square on his dick and used his shitty hard-on to launch myself over him, and when I hit the floor I kept on going until I got my hand on the knob. Turning, turning, slamming the door open so hard it bounced on the wall behind me.

Level one – out the apartment door.

He wouldn’t stay down, I knew it. There was no time to waste turning around to see if he was behind me. I knew he was. I could hear his feet pounding on the landing. Taking the steps two at a time I was halfway down when he hit me square in the back and we both went tumbling to the bottom floor. It wasn’t how I planned on getting there but -

Level two – down the stairs.

It didn’t even hurt, falling down that flight of stairs with the weight of a full-grown man on top of me. I didn’t have time to feel pain. And he didn’t have time to remember to be careful. Kneeling above me as I lay with my back on the ground he swore, “You fucking bitch. You asked for it, this is going to hurt.” And he pulled his arm back to punch me full in the face.

But he missed because he’s a fucking idiot and was so mad he was starting to lose control. So I bucked my hips up as hard as I could to use that forward momentum and launched him off of me, over me, onto the ground behind me. I was up and sprinting for the door in a millisecond.

Level three – out the front do- The hand that grabbed my hair twisted cruelly and pulled back so hard my legs flew out from under me and I came crashing down on my already injured tailbone. The fight went out of me for a moment as I completely succumbed to the pain, and the sobs ripped out of my throat unbidden. I had zero control. I was too stunned by the jarring pain to move. I could only lay on the ground staring at the front door as it slid further and further away. Or rather as I slid further away, in the opposite direction.

He was pulling me towards the back door. By my hair. To the parking lot that butted up against nothing but trees and shrubbery. A perfect secluded backyard for a half-filled apartment building full of elderly people. The perfect place to be abducted in privacy for me. No, I’d wanted the front door, not the back. Panic and desperation blew away the fog in my brain and I bucked up again, loosening his hold on my hair. As he let go I rolled quickly out of reach, making him swear again.

“Goddamn it, Gabriella, stay still. If you would have just done what you were told I would have let you sit in the car. Now I’ll have to fucking tie you up and it’s all your fault.” He was screaming now, which was new. He’d never raised his voice to me before, just did everything in that same creepy methodical way whether he was petting my hair or holding me down and leaving bloody bite marks on my skin. Even doing some heinous shit, David had never lost his temper before. Now he was going completely nuts.

I really felt like that was a win for me. At least that was what I told myself, letting it run through my mind like a mantra as I rolled again and got shakily to my feet. There was some damage there, I think I might have broken my tailbone, but I couldn’t worry about it. I could think about it later, when I was pretty sure I wasn’t about to die.

“Gabriella. Come.” David spit the words out at me angrily.

“Fuck. Off,” I threw the words back at him.

My mistake was turning around. I was so close to level three, and I just wanted to make it to that door and out the other side. But as soon as I let myself turn I felt the pressure as David grabbed me by the back of the head and the wall came rushing in to greet the side of my face.

Boss level.

Darkness.

I must have only blacked out for a second because when I opened my eyes again I was halfway out the back door. David was struggling with having to drag me by my shoulders and get the door to stay open. The thing that most industrial doors had that kept them from slamming shut was broken, and every time he tried to swing the door open to drag me out, it kept coming back and slapping him in the ass. If I wasn’t being dragged to my death I would have found it funny. As it was, I lacked the strength to even open my eyes all the way, much less struggle.

Now I would be dragged into the car and to my end. To Dino’s car, although how David had gotten his hands on it I didn’t want to guess. I didn’t want anything bad to happen to Dino. I loved Dino. And now he was possibly all fucked up because David was a sociopath who only had one fixation for some reason and it was me. Even after all these years it was me. There wasn’t anything special about me that made men go crazy. After all this time and the self-help books and the YouTube videos about victims dealing with recovery I had learned by now that it wasn’t anything I did. David was how he was because something was broken inside of him. The difference between David and other dangerous sociopaths was that he didn’t have other triggers. For some reason I was the only one. But trying to figure out the “why me” part of things was also a form of self-punishment, so I decided a long time ago not to waste my time trying to figure it out.

I was so tired of hurting. Tired of running. Tired of hiding.

Fuck David Ashely and his psychosis.

I wanted my life back.

I wanted to go shopping with Angel and make sure Gabe kept his calendar organized and that he started up the new protection business that I know he had been mulling over because heading the investment firm was just so boring.

I wanted to go on dates with Dino. I wanted to say his first and last name together and I wanted to meet his Grandma and tell her what a good man her grandson was even though I bet she already knew.

I wanted to drink all the margaritas I wanted with Gerta and Jolene and not worry about having complete self-control. I wanted to laugh and drink and eat too many carbs.

I wanted David Ashley to get his fucking hands off me and make it so he could never ever put them on me again.

Taking advantage of his difficulty with the door, I gave up struggling to make it to the front door of the building and decided if he wanted to go out the back door then I would help him. I didn’t have the strength to get to my feet, but I still wrapped my arms around his legs and pulled them forward, so his knees bent, and he lost his balance falling over me and onto his ass.

I tried to get up. I really did, but the injury in my back and tailbone finally decided to take matters out of my hands. It wasn’t that it hurt so bad to stand up, my legs literally wouldn’t do it. I could only scoot backward, moving further into the parking lot. Closer to where David had been dragging me in the first place. My throat was too hoarse to scream. I tried, but nothing would come out but dry gasps. Tiny noises that were covered up by the passing city traffic on the other side of the building.

David got to his feet and smiled, wiping the gravel that had embedded itself into his palms onto his jeans. The little pebbles scattered, making little tumbling sounds as they fell. It was a very weird thing to notice, and I probably did because I was finally going insane. “You are going into that car, Gabriella. Then I am going to rip you up right in front of your boyfriend so you can scream it out together. Just remember, you brought this on yourself.”

I waited until he was on top of me before I used the last of my strength to kick him right in the fucking face. My foot met the bones of his nose in a glorious crunch, and his scream of pain was better than any cry for help I could have uttered. But he recovered too quickly, and with blood streaming down his face from his quite obviously broken nose he brought his leg up and then straight down on my inner thigh, grinding his heel in the soft tissue of my groin. There was no more moving for me after that. I had used my last life on this boss level, and there was nothing I could do but stare at the back of the apartment as he dragged me by my shoulders across the parking lot, closer to the car, further away from freedom.

A glint in the lower left window caught my eye. A curtain that had moved just a little bit. Gerta and Jolene weren’t around, they couldn’t have been back from lunch already, could they? I didn’t want them to see this. I didn’t want them to witness anything that would involve them or get them hurt in any way. Because David would hurt them. He wasn’t even trying to hide how fucked up he was, beating the shit out of me and cursing at me in broad daylight. It was an empty parking lot, hidden by some trees, but still.

He was still grunting and pulling at my shoulders, running out of steam himself but still dragging me steadily towards the car when I noticed the glass of the lower left window start sliding open slowly. In my dazed state it was funny to me, because windows should open bottom to top, but this window slid open from side to side. I saw an old man with a white crew cut and a stained-up white t-shirt, and then I saw the barrel of the rifle as he eased the tip of it out the window and fired. Even though I saw him doing it, the pop pop surprised me. I couldn’t move though, I had nothing left in me, even when David’s body thudded against the side of the car and slid down on top of me.

Was he dead? I didn’t know. Maybe I hallucinated the dingy grandpa vigilante shooting out the window, and in my deluded state I didn’t notice I had been stuffed into the car and was on my way to my doom. But no, the heavy weight was relieved as David was unceremoniously shoved off of me and the heel of a busted gray house slipper appeared in front of my face as it kicked David’s body the rest of the way off of me and rolled over onto its back.

Oh shit, yeah, he was dead.

And I wasn’t even scared, I mean, nobody wants to be trapped under a dead body, but I could only feel relief that he was fucking gone. My decrepit hero stood in front of me, shuffling from one slippered foot to the other while I just laid there on the ground looking up at him, probably smiling like an idiot.

“I don’t hear very well.” He also had a problem with close conversation because he was definitely using his outside voice.

“Yeah?” It was a weird conversation starter considering, but he had just saved my life, so I wasn’t going to pick apart his vocabulary.

“Yeah,” he said as he looked down at me with concern on his face. “I didn’t know until I saw him trying to get you out the door. I felt it banging against the wall because my apartment is right there.” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder to the still open window on the first floor. “It looked like you guys had been going at it for a while, but I couldn’t hear, or else I would have shot him sooner.” He leaned down to give me a hand up, but I couldn’t take it.

“I can’t get up, I think I need an ambulance,” I said shakily, and almost on cue I heard the sirens blaring up the street. Well how’s that for timing, I thought to myself. They can’t possibly be coming here.

But the closer the sounds came the more I wasn’t sure about that. And right before I saw the red and blue lights reflected on the windows as they came screaming around the corner, a black Escalade pulled into the parking lot. The vehicle barely came to a stop before Gabe flung himself out the driver’s side door. I heard his feet pounding against the pavement and felt the rumbling of his approach through the asphalt under my back.

“Gary,” Gabe exclaimed as he came to a skidding halt next to me and started feeling around my arms and legs for injuries. I swatted at his hands, fuck I was tired, I just wanted to close my eyes. “What happened, Gary?”

“Castle laws, Gabe,” I heard the older man shout. “This is my home, and the people in it are my family. He was trying to hurt my family, so I shot him. Two times.”

Tears pricked the backs of my eyelids. That stranger called me family. Although I was familiar with the castle law and this one was just a tiny bit of a stretch, I bet Gabe would find a lawyer that would make it work.

I couldn’t keep my eyes open any more, the adrenaline was leaving my body and I was crashing hard. Too much pain, too much exhaustion, my consciousness was being stolen from me even as I heard the police pull into the parking lot as well.

“They are probably going to take my gun,” the old man said sadly.

“Gary, you are my hero,” I heard Gabe reply, his voice thick with emotion. “If they take your gun I will buy you another one. A better one.”

“I’ll buy you two,” I yelled with the last of my strength, making sure Gary could hear me, and then I passed blissfully into the black.