Page 61 of Love You To Pieces

Once I’m at the top, I look around, my heart racing. Below me, the door to the theater slams open, and when it’s kicked shut, I again hear Pearl’s yelp of shock and pain.

“Stop hurting my dog!” I scream down the stairs, not expecting an answer.

But I get a snarling laugh in reply. “Fine. Then stop running so I can hurt you in her place.”

The voice doesn’t belong to Fox.

Or Deacon.

A shiver runs up my spine, forcing me to freeze in place as I realize just how bad this is. If it isn’t either of them, then there’s only one option to explain why someone would want to find and hurt me.

I take off at a dead run again, heading for one of two doors upstairs. The one I yank open shows me the film room, but it’s really just a box with nothing useful in it, and no means of escape.

The second is a bathroom.

But more importantly, a bathroom with a window on the far wall.

“Fuck,” I hiss. “Oh, fuck, oh, fuck.” I close the door and lock it, even knowing the flimsy little latch won’t last very long. But hopefully it’ll give me enough time, and I bolt to the window to yank it open.

At first, it won’t budge. The wood groans, protesting this foreign motion, and my arms burn as I shove and push on my tiptoes.

I will not die in a bathroom of a movie theater, goddamn it.

With a sudden creak of protest that could peel paint, the window finally jerks open, pulling a gasp of relieved surprise from my throat that’s cut off by the shaking and twisting of the bathroom doorknob.

“Stupid fucking bitch,” the man snarls, resorting to banging on the door. “I should’ve killed you in the fucking desert. You goddamn⁠—”

I tune him out as best as I can. With shaking hands, I shove the screen out of the window, sending it clattering to the ground below. This is such an awful idea, and I’ve never in my life wanted to dive from a second-story window before.

With my luck, I’m going to break a few crucial bones.

Like my neck.

I’ve just hoisted myself up onto the sill, with my shoulders and head in the cool night air, when the door suddenly bursts open and off its hinges. I barely have time to panic, let alone brace, before I’m dragged back inside by a hand in my hair that rips hard enough to pull a ragged scream from my throat.

But the scream doesn’t last long either once I’m thrown into the heavy porcelain sink. The man cracks my head against it, causing me to stumble, and as my hands hit the carpet on the other side of the splintered door, I can feel a hot trickle run down my skin that has to be blood, though I’m too dazed to think about what that means.

Instead, I can only stare at the once neon, now faded patterns on the carpet and blink my watering eyes.

A hand clamps onto my ankle again, and he throws me onto my back so hard my head bounces off the carpet, only adding to my headache. It also gives me my first look at this man, whose face I barely recognize from that night back when all this started.

“Now,” he pants, grinning. “You’re not safe in some farmhouse anymore, little bitch.” He spits on me. Literally spits on me, his saliva hitting my face. “And it’s time you pay for what you did to my brother.” Slowly, like he’s savoring the moment, the man unsnaps the holster on his hip and pulls out a wickedly sharp, serrated knife.

For the life of me, all I can think is one stupid thought as he steps closer to loom over me.

This is really going to hurt.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Iswear time slows down. My ears ring from the pain of having my head smashed into a sink, and more than anything I just want to drop onto the stiff carpet, close my eyes, and pretend none of this is happening.

Not for the first time tonight, but probably for the last, I wish to God I stayed at the farmhouse. Was it really so bad? Did I really have it so terribly, when all in all, neither man did anything to hurt me?

Because this, I think ruefully to myself as the man’s knife catches in a ray of light from the fixture above us, is infinitely fucking worse. My eyes slip closed, no matter how much I don’t want them to. I want to stare this man down, to let him know that even now, he hasn’t won.

But I can’t stop myself. Spread out and aching on the carpet, I can only wait and wish and kick myself for not having done things differently.

However, a sound on the stairs, which are only feet to my left, pulls my eyes open again, and my heart races as I desperately hope for it to be Pearl about to be my guardian—or avenging—angel. Her taste for blood has never been more welcome, and as I open my mouth to call to her, my eyes fall on a very familiar pair of boots.