“Get away from my daughter!” the woman screams.
Cassandra wheels around and in one swift motion smacks Eden’s mother in the mouth. She collapses into the wall, holding her jaw, and then slides to the floor.
This is it. My anger, restrained before, explodes now. I take a step back and throw myself at the window. The glass shatters in a shower of sparkling pieces. Crash, and then the pieces flutter to the ground. A thousand tiny cuts open in my arms and my face, but I don’t care.
I charge across the room, but Cassandra has just enough time. She’s quick, the senses of a predatory. In less than a second, she flips the lighter and throws it at the couch. Flames kindle and then catch, and the couch bursts into a ball of fire. Cassandra aims the gun at me, fires twice. I hear the bullets thud into the wall, whizz out of the open window and smash into something metal. Maybe her car, maybe mine.
“Maddox—”
I smash my shoulder into her chest. She grunts and falls backward. I leap at her, punch her once in the stomach. When she keels over, I wrench the gun from her hand, eject the cartridge, and toss it behind me, out of the broken window. Flames whip around us and Eden rocks in the chair, trying to get free of the bindings. “Ah, ah, ah, Maddox!” she wails.
I kick Cassandra in the gut once, swiftly. She grunts and curls in a ball on the floor, retching. Then I turn to Eden, my only care, my only desire. I lean down, pick up the chair by the legs, and lift her still bound to the chair to the door. The hinges of the door break with a loud, violent crunch when I kick it free. I run outside, smoke in my lungs. The fire has spread from the couch to the carpet; soon the house will be a mess of ash and charred wood.
“My mom!” Eden cries when I set her down in the driveway. “Get her!”
“Yeah,” I grunt.
I run back into the house. It’s overflowing with smoke already. It’s like a road in high fog when you can hardly see the tip of your nose for the thickness of it. I move across the room by sound. The mother is groaning lightly. Cassandra is somewhere to the left, knocking into the TV as she tries to stand up. When I get to the mother, I reach down and cradle her like a baby, hold her to my chest, and sprint from the house. Eden watches me with desperate eyes as I emerge from the house. When she sees that her mother is awake and breathing, she heaves a breath.
I place her beside Eden.
“Animal!” Cassandra cries.
I turn, and there she is, her face streaked with blood. She must’ve hit something when I tackled her. I don’t know. I hardly know what happened, it all happened so fast.
Cassandra reaches into her pocket and takes out a knife, a thick, ridged machete. The house hissing with flames behind her, she steps forward. I put myself between her and Eden and her mother, shoulders spread wide, fingers twitching.
“You can’t have it like this!” she snaps. “Not like this! It won’t be like this! I won’t have it! I won’t have it! I won’t have it!”
Aiming the machete at me, she breaks into a sprint.
***
I measure the space of her strides, the angle at which she holds the knife, and the direction her eyes move. I measure all of it in a split-second. She moves her arm back—and I step forward, into the space the knife had been.
I head-butt her so hard her nose explodes in a red shower of blood, spattering my face. With a dull grunt, she falls to the ground, as though all her bones have turned to jelly. I kneel down, take the knife from her grip, and take a few steps backward. I hand the knife to the mother, who’s on her feet now, rubbing her jaw.
“Free your daughter,” I say. “You did well in there, ma’am. It’s a shame we have to meet under these circumstances.”
The mother takes the knife. “Just did what any mother would,” she says.
“Maddox,” Eden says. “You have to call the police. You have to let them know what happened.”
“Oh, yeah,” I say.
I take my cellphone from my pocket and dial 911.
“I give the operator the details and the address, and then hang up.
Slipping my phone back into my pocket, I go and stand over Cassandra, looking down at her.
Eden stands up, the severed ropes falling around her, and comes to join me. She looks down at Cassandra, her expression difficult to read.
“Are you okay?” I ask her.
“Yeah,” she mutters. “She was so close . . . so close . . . I can’t . . .” She reaches up and touches her head. Her hand comes away bloody. “I think I need a doctor.”
“Sit down,” I say. “There’ll be an ambulance here soon.”
Eden’s mother picks up the chair and carries it to us, and then takes Eden softly by the shoulder and leads her into the chair.
“Sorry, ma’am, but I don’t know your name.” I can’t call her Mrs. Chase, and I have no clue what her maiden name is.
“Call me Cynthia,” she says. “I think we’re on first-name terms, don’t you?” She smiles shakily, and then winces and brings her hand to her jaw.
A few minutes later, the air fills with sirens.
“You’ll be free now, won’t you, Maddox?” Eden says, her voice groggy.
“Yeah, I’ll be free,” I say. “What are they going to do when they see all this? All the bribes in the world won’t make something like this go away. The police will be falling over backward to apologize, I reckon. Imprisoning an innocent man isn’t good publicity.”
The three of us wait silently for the police and the ambulance. Soon uniforms are all around us, Eden is being patched up, and I’m giving a statement to a stern officer.
I’m just glad she’s okay, I think. Thank god she’s okay.