AllFreeNovel
Share Us
When he reached toward me, I assumed it was to take a turn playing with my new toy, but instead, his hand landed on my arm.
I froze. He’d never touched me before. The only person I was accustomed to touching me was my mother, when she’d hug me every time I entered or left a room or when she’d stroke my hair as she read me a bedtime story, ensuring me that someday, I’d write the stories I’d read to my own children.
Still, I talked myself down from the panic, even at ten years old. He was a friend. He was kind. He was safe.
Then his hand drifted up my arm and caressed my cheek, turning my stomach. My body temperature spiked, and the panic was raw and real as my heart thundered.
This touch did not feel friendly or safe.
“Do you like when I touch you?”
Behind him, my bedroom door slammed open, ricocheting off the wall as my mom stomped into the room, dark eyes blazing like simmering coals.
He immediately retreated, dropping both hands into his lap and scooting as far away from me on the mattress as he could. I waited for the bile to spray over him as my mother witnessed what he’d been doing to me, saw me with my shirt off as he touched me.
“What the hell is going on?” The screech that left her mouth was like nothing I’d ever heard before. Animalistic. Primal.
“Nothing. We were just checking out Saint’s new toy.” His gaze swung back to me, and the bile rose in my throat. “Right, champ?”
“Don’t fucking look at him!” she screamed, yanking him from the bed with a kind of strength I didn’t know she possessed.
He stood two inches shorter than her, but he was still stronger.
Yet in that moment, he wasn’t.
From my bed, I watched as my mother held a knife to the monster’s throat and sliced him open. Then she dropped the blade, clutched her hands into fists, and beat him until they both came back bloody.
His eyes shut and he stopped moving. She stood, eyes wide and hands shaking. In disbelief. Horror.
Her instincts had kicked in. To protect me. And she’d taken a man’s life.
My mother’s wide gaze swung to me. “Saint, I need you to?—”
Before she could finish, the man’s eyes sprung open.
He launched at her, moving faster than I could catch my breath. In a blink, he had her pinned to the wall with his hands around her throat.
“Mom?” I called, and though her mouth hung open, she couldn’t answer.
Her nails slashed at his hands, but she wasn’t breathing.
She hadn’t sliced him deep enough. The wound at his throat was superficial, bright red but hardly bleeding.
Her cheeks were morphing to a deep shade of crimson as her body fought for the oxygen he wouldn’t let her have.
He was killing her.
My mother’s knife glinted on my bedroom floor.
I slipped off the bed, wrapped my hand around the handle, and plunged it into his back.
He cursed and his hands around my mother’s throat loosened just enough for her to gasp in a breath.
I stabbed him again. And again. His blood spilled onto my hand.
He tried to run from me, and that was the first time I ever felt bigger than a grown man. More powerful.
My mother collapsed to the floor, clutching at her neck as she tried to suck air into her lungs and regain her strength.
