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His next blow made the world go black.
18
I woke up to pain. My shoulders were wrenched above my head. Rain hit my face so hard I coughed and sputtered against it.
Only to realize Jeff was dragging me across the front yard on my back, a dead weight, by my wrists.
Ow, fuck, ow. It hurt. And my face. Pain, God, fucking ow— Everywhere, it was blinding. My back scraped across rocks as he dragged me through the yard.
Did he know I was conscious? Would he have cared?
He yanked harder at my wrists, heaving me step by step even as the storm raged overhead. It made the yard slick and muddy, but with each wrenching step it was like he was trying to pull my shoulders out of their sockets. Maybe he was.
I’d hoped he’d finish it off in the house. That he’d go into such a rage…
God, I just wanted the pain to end.
But if he was trying to take me back…
An entirely new horror hit me. Oh God, if he got me back in that house…
I blinked up at the sky, through the rain. Or tried. The storm wasn’t quieting, only getting worse. It felt like the world around me was churning, growling, roaring to echo my own fury and grief.
The wind howled around us and bits of tree branches and other debris flew around the yard. I tipped my head back and saw Jeff was having to bend his body into the wind, his hair flattened against his head.
But he didn’t stop, his face was still mottled with that anger I knew so well, and there was his car, parked behind a stack of hay bales to the right of the property.
I could try to pull away, a stupid instinct for self-preservation fighting its way to the forefront in spite of what I knew was reality. Jeff, mad as a bull, would never let me go. Come hell or high water. Or roaring storm.
I went lightheaded, my eyes shut against the rain, bright spots dancing.
Pain.
Bright lights.
Drift away.
Reece’s face, smiling at me as dawn light filtered through the window. A gentle caress of his finger tracing down my cheek.
Pain splintering my shoulders.
Blackness.
Wet.
Rain.
Mud squelching in my hair.
Shackles around my wrists. The devil had hold of me. He’d never let me go.
Hands on my body.
I was being lifted.
My head hit something hard. A car roof? A shouted curse, Jeff’s voice, screamed into a screaming sky.
No one heard. No one cared.
My body tumbled onto something softer than ground. Leather in my nose.
I blinked against the muddle, trying to swim back to the surface. Swollen eyes, couldn’t open them.
Everything was spinning. Pain. It all hurt. I needed to throw up.
Drifting back down while hands on my legs shoved more of me wherever I was being shoved.
Back seat.
It was a back seat.
Wake up. Danger. I needed to wake—
The roaring howl outside was loud, louder, so loud.
I rolled against the back of the seat as the car started forward.
Car. I was in a car.
Jeff’s car.
He was driving away.
Away from the ranch. Away from Reece and Ruth, and—
I blinked again, against the pain of my swelling right eye, against all the pain. It was so loud, so loud I wanted to cover my ears.
Jeff was shouting curses.
Close my eyes, drift away, let him take me. Find a way to die later.
That would be easiest.
I couldn’t fight anymore. Nothing was left. I was too broken. I’d tried, I’d tried and look, look, here I was again.
Give in. Go to sleep. Fly away from the pain, from all of it. Give up, give in. You always do, you always will. There never really was any escape, you knew it all along.
But the sunsets.
The wind in my face and my hair as I rode the four-wheeler, day after day. Free.
Laughing at Bessie and Nine, at their joy and curiosity at simply being alive.
I’d been alive, too. Shining moments of life, flowing through me, the sky in my soul, expanding me.
The roar of a train thundered by outside the car.
A train?
I blinked in confusion. There weren’t any trains or tracks near the ranch.
How far had we gone? Had I blacked out?
I struggled to hold onto consciousness. I fought my way to the surface and blinked my eyes open, holding them even though my right eye was just a slit against the swelling.
A car, I was in a car.
Jeff was in the front seat. He swerved the wheel and my body jostled, almost falling off the seat. My hand shot out to brace myself and I came more into awareness. My head pounded and my shoulders and ribs hurt, they hurt bad, but I sat up, and looked through the window, and—
My eyes widened in spite of the pain.
It wasn’t a train.
Not a train, no, not a train.
The ground beside the tiny dirt road Jeff was speeding down was being ripped apart by a funnel that reached from the dark sky above to the ground, so wide I couldn’t see the other side of it.
