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I’d just passed Maggie’s truck when I heard soft, steady footfalls behind me, with none of the natural grace of the Grahams. I shuddered, my breath coming in short white puffs in the frigid air. Shards of icy panic wormed their way through my stomach, making it hard to breathe or think.
Whipping around, I turned back toward the north ridge and saw Glenn standing there in all his angry glory, practically vibrating with rage under his thick Gore-Tex coat. The climate had not been kind to Glenn. His overbright brown eyes watered against the cold, prickling wind. His cheeks were fire-engine red. And instead of making him seem pathetic, the wear and tear just made him seem that much more unstable, unpredictable. Any veneer of civility had been torn away to reveal a level of crazy I’d never seen before.
My heart stuttered in my chest as my brain shouted, Not real! Not real! Not real!
“Don’t you have anything you want to say to me?” he sneered, chapped lips cracking. “I don’t even get a hello?”
I stumbled back, barely staying upright as my heel hit a patch of ice.
“Do you have any idea what you’ve put me through?” he demanded, stumbling forward, grabbing my arm and shaking me like a rag doll. He seemed reluctant to touch me, as if even after all of this time and all of his efforts to find me, confronting me in person was somehow harder than threatening me through a computer screen. “This is all your fault.”
Panicked, runaway thoughts kept me from focusing. There was nowhere to hide, nowhere to run. I wanted to curl in on myself, make myself small. “The humiliation of you filing for divorce. Calling the cops on me. Months of searching, paying some stranger to dig into our business. Years of worrying where you were, what you were doing, who you were with. Do you know how humiliating this has been for me?”
In full fury, he didn’t hesitate to use the violence he used to cover up with “accidents” and clumsiness. He grunted, tossing me back into the snow as if I weighed nothing. I skidded across the ice-slick surface of the road, whacking my head against Maggie’s bumper.
“Your fault,” Glenn spat. “All your fault. Losing those jobs because I was so busy looking for you. You trashed my reputation. You ruined me.”
I slowly pushed myself up, gingerly turning my head back and forth. I could feel a warm trickle of blood down my back, where the base of my skull had caught the edge of the truck bumper.
Glenn shoved me back down with the toe of his boot. “What kind of wife does that to her husband?”
“I’m not your wife anymore,” I whispered.
“You’re my wife as long as I say you are,” he growled, stepping on my chest and pushing me down into the snow. He leered down at me, as if he’d been picturing me like this—broken and bleeding under his foot—for a very long time. He gave me one last kick before crouching over me.
I sat up again, bracing myself on the truck. “You can’t hurt me anymore, Glenn. This stops now.”
He acted as if he hadn’t even heard me speak. “We’re going to walk out of this valley, take my snowmobile back to that piss-water little town, Grungy or whatever. We’re going to go back home, and you’re going to beg the hospital to give us our jobs back. You’re going to tell them it was all your fault that they fired me. We’re going to go back to our life just the way it was. You’re going to go back to being the wife you were. Now, pull your hood up, honey, we don’t want you to get sick.”
Flinching away when he tried to adjust my coat, I stared up at him incredulously. He had finally lost his mind. He thought we were going to go back to where we were when I left? It was insane. Any friends we’d had together had no doubt stopped believing we were a couple years ago. And there was nothing I could say that would get his job back. I doubted I could get my job back at the hospital, given my abrupt exit. I shook my head, and the motion upset my equilibrium. “No,” I whispered.
He punched me right on the bridge of my nose, where the cartilage connects to the brow. I sank to my knees, seeing stars. “What did you say?” he demanded, standing over me.
“No,” I said again, my voice a little louder but shakier. “No! No! NO! NO! NO!” I screamed so loudly that it echoed down the street and off the trees. Glenn viciously kicked me in the ribs, cutting off the werewolf-summoning noise into a squelched cry.
“I see we’re going to need a little refresher, honey. I’m your husband. I’m in charge.” He delivered another kick to my rib cage. I flopped onto my side, my face buried in snow. The tiny shards of ice burned the scrapes on my skin. I rolled faceup, my coat tangled under my body, and I felt a metal cylinder bump against my leg.
The baton. I’d forgotten that Caleb had sewn a special pocket in the recesses of my coat to store the baton as a just-in-case measure. I thought it had been overkill when Caleb insisted I keep it in my pocket even after we returned to the valley. Who was going to try to hurt me on the twenty-yard walk from the clinic to our house? But now I thought it was just-enough-kill.
As Glenn grumbled to himself about my “fat ungrateful ass,” I slid the hand of my uninjured arm into my pocket. My fingers curled around the baton just as Glenn’s foot connected with my ribs. The impact knocked me back, spinning me over and over, while the breath fled from my lungs. The baton was still clutched in my hand as I landed in the snow, a heavy weight in numbed fingers.
“When I say stop, you stop.” He grunted, kicking me in the stomach this time.
This was never going to stop.
Unable to scream for help, I lay there, cataloguing my injuries—dislocated shoulder, broken nose, fractured ribs—and I knew he would just keep coming after me until I was dead. Part of me wanted to give in, to let him just take me. It seemed so much easier than this constant struggle, the nagging fear. I was so cold and tired; down to my soul, I was exhausted. If I got into the car with him now, at least it would be over. He wouldn’t have the chance to hurt anybody else.
“When I say get off of your lazy, spoiled ass and get moving, you say, ‘Yes, Glenn,’ and go where I tell you.” Glenn put the weight of his boot on my damaged shoulder. I made a hoarse mewling sound, one that I swore I heard echoed in a canine yelp in the distance. I rolled onto my injured side, trying to protect it. And he laughed. He was enjoying himself, the big man, the little brat who never got enough of my attention. Well, he certainly had my full attention now. My pain and fear were fun for him. And if someone was that good at hiding that he was that sick, it was not my fault that he’d fooled me. He did this, not me. He was the one who manipulated and controlled and caused pain, not me. He was the asshole, not me.
I was not the problem.
I slung the weight of the baton outward with my good arm, thrilling at the metallic singing sound. Sitting up and fighting against the sick, dizzy sensation that came with it, I brought the baton down with all my strength just above his knee. A deeply satisfying crunch echoed about the street, and Glenn howled. I kicked up, catching him square in the crotch with the heel of my boot.
“I always was a slow learner,” I huffed, struggling to my feet. “So is this what it feels like, Glenn?” I slurred, standing over him as he whined and keened over his knee. I cradled my injured shoulder. “Did it make you feel good to stand like this, over me, while I rolled around on the floor like a dog? Answer me!” I yelled, kicking at him, catching him in the stomach.
He moaned and tried to struggle to his knees, but I brought the baton down on his back, knocking him to the ground.
“What you did to me, that’s your problem, your damage. You’re going to have to live with it, because I’m sick of carrying it around with me. You’re never going to touch me again. This is over,” I told him, turning toward the community center.
