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I felt the tears tease my eyes and blinked them furiously away as I made my way back toward the cabin, confident the dogs would see themselves home when they were ready. I sat down at Wolf's laptop and I fell into the black hole the dark web afforded me, purposely avoiding that one thread, that one forum, that one post that was what drove me over the edge in the first place, the post that made me decide to throw away everyone I cared about and build bombs in an abandoned store front in the industrial part of town then destroy a building in the hopes that it could destroy the things inside me that made me wake up screaming, that made me untouchable, that made me a grenade with a missing pin.
I couldn't go there again.
I was barely hanging onto my sanity as it was.
So I went on and I found my plans for escape. I found the motel in the mountains where I planned to set up camp for a few weeks before moving onto something more permanent. I hacked into the city cameras to see if my car was still where I parked it at the paid lot beside the docks. Then I searched the fastest route from Wolf's cabin to my car's location.
I did all this, cleared the history (as if Wolf was tech-savvy enough to even know what a browser history was), ate, showered, watched night fall.
Still no Wolf.
I climbed into bed with the dogs and read.
Morning came.
Wolf didn't return.
At this point, I was pretty much the Mom in every teenager's house when they stumbled home after missing curfew and got the 'dead in the ditch' speech. Worry took on a whole new meaning, bringing its close friend Paranoia to the party that had me hacking into all of the city's camera feed looking for signs of him or signs that something was amiss at The Henchmen compound in general.
After half a day and nothing to show except an alarming amount of drug hand-offs that no cop seemed to spot and business-as-usual at the compound, worry and paranoia gave way to righteous anger. If something was up with Wolf, surely there would be action at the compound. They wouldn't let their road captain go missing without at least sending someone to the cabin like they sent Cash a few days before. So... he wasn't missing. They knew where he was.
The 'worst-case-scenario-is-the-likely-scenario' part of my brain decided that he probably was at the compound. Most of the members had rooms there. So he must have had a room there. And that pesky negative part of my thought process also latched onto another realization: that where you found hot, dangerous biker dudes... you found hot, skanky, shameless club whores.
And, well, that made sense, didn't it?
He'd been holed up with me for a week, sharing close quarters, getting handsy with me, but getting absolutely no relief that wasn't self-induced.
Of course he would seek out sex elsewhere. How stupid of me to not consider that when I realized first thing in the morning that he was missing.
I took another walk with the dogs, I rummaged around in the closet, I ate, I showered. Then, with nothing else to do, I hit the laptop again. But this time, I couldn't resist it. I found the forum; I found the post. Then I looked over it until the memories felt as vivid as if they were happening in real time, until the helplessness, anger, pain, and horror were as much a part of me as they were eight years before, until I realized they always would be. I would never be free of them.
And on that, I threw myself into the bed, knowing the nightmares would come, but not having any other way to keep myself from flying through the woods, tracking him down, and taking aim again."Janie, wake up!" Wolf's voice demanded through my dream. I felt my shoulders being shaken hard and flew up in bed on a silent scream. My heart was hammering in my chest, my body broken out in a cold sweat. "Easy," Wolf said, his hand moving out and swiping my hair out of my face where it was stuck there with sweat. "You're safe."
My head whipped in his direction, his massive body, his beard that tickled, his eyes that had a depth I thought I could drown in, sitting on his knees in the middle of his giant bed secluded in the woods. And I realized his words were false, that when I had believed them myself over the past few days, that it was all an illusion.
"I'm never going to be safe," I choked out, my breath hitching on a sob that felt ripped from somewhere primal and unstoppable inside.
"With me, you are," he objected.
I felt my head shaking roughly side to side. And then it happened too fast to fight. The tears welled up and spilled over, running hot streams down my face. There was no stopping them. The dam inside broke and I realized for the first time that the well it stopped was bottomless. It was fed from somewhere deep and might never dry up. I could feel my face twisting into horror that I finally lost the fight with my emotions after all this damn time. Wolf made some sort of rumbling sound in his chest, his hands reaching out and brushing the wetness off my face. But it was just replaced a second later.
"What is it?" he asked, his face a mask of masculine ineptitude when faced with feminine tears.
"I can't," I objected, shaking my head as I dropped my face into my hands.
"I can take it," he said with so much confidence that I wanted to believe him.
"No... you can't," I objected. No one could. I barely could and I had lived through it.
"Janie..."
"Fine!" I screeched, flying off the bed, vision blurry with tears as I threw his laptop lid open and started typing. "Fine. You think you can handle it? Fine. Look!" I demanded, storming away from the laptop on the dining room table and sitting down in the center of the bed, arms crossed, not bothering to try to stop the tears because I knew it was no use. Everything about me was a challenge, daring him to go, to look, to see that he didn't have the stomach for it.
