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“It’s going to be all right.” Danny squeezes my hand, holding tight as a wave washes over the top of our boards. “We’ll paddle around the cliff. Maybe there will be a smaller beach on the other side. If not, at least we’ll be out of sight while we hang out and wait for them to leave. They won’t stay long. There’s no beer for sale here and frat boys on vacation are going to need a beer in their hand before five o’clock.”
“Okay,” I say, pulse slowing a bit in response to the calm, logical tone in his voice. “I’ll follow you.”
“We’ll go together,” he says. “I’ll stay between you and the beach just in case. They’re not going to see you and they’re not going to hurt you, Sam. I promise. I’m never going to let anyone hurt you again.”
“Let’s go,” I say, paddling toward the cliff, knowing now isn’t the time to have an argument with my knight in shining armor.
I love Danny for wanting to stand between me and danger and have always admired his brave heart. But he doesn’t understand how dangerous Todd can be. He didn’t sit in the courtroom and watch the monster lie with such conviction that the jury believed his outrageous falsehoods over my simple truth. He didn’t see the look on Todd’s face as he watched his friends take turns with me. Todd was the only one who wasn’t afraid to look me in the eye, who was capable of staring straight into my tear-streaked face and smiling.
He craved my pain. It was my suffering that got him off, not my body.
Todd is a menace, an evil thing set loose on the earth, and the biggest threat to my future. Only when Todd is dead, when I know I’ll never have to see his face and never have to fear his touch, will I be able to truly move on.
Chapter Eleven
Danny
“We are shaped and
fashioned by what we love.”
-Goethe
* * *
Sam and I spend a tense half hour floating in the increasingly dramatic waves rolling into the shore before I paddle back around the cliff to find that the red jeep Sam saw has been replaced by a beat up blue pickup truck. By the time I paddle back to get Sam, we carry our boards in, rinse off, get her board returned and mine strapped to the top of the rental car, there is barely time to get back to the compound before my meeting with the staff.
I hate leaving Sam alone in the cabin, even for an hour, but I have to do the job I came here to do. If I don’t, we’ll lose our safe haven from the hotel maids. And I still believe the overnight training session could be important for establishing an alibi.
I know Sam and I will both be careful, but when it comes to a murder charge, an airtight alibi can mean the difference between life and death.
Death.
The entire time I’m talking ropes and harnesses and demonstrating the backup security procedures for lashing a sleeping ledge to a cliff face to the other guides, I’m thinking about Todd Winslow. The lag while I wait for what I’ve said to be translated into Spanish, for the staff members who don’t speak English, gives me plenty of time to remember the terror on Sam’s face when she realized he was on the beach.
He’s the ringleader, the one who set this nightmare in motion. Without him, the other three might have wanted to take turns with a girl, but they wouldn’t have dared to do it.
Todd is a sociopath. Maybe even a psychopath. At twenty-one, he led the gang rape of an innocent woman and walked away from the trial without a smear on his reputation. Who knows what he’ll be doing by the time he’s thirty. I know he won’t get better with age and that Sam will never fully recover as long as that evil shit is walking the earth.
He has to die and I’ll have to be the one to kill him.
I know Sam’s physically stronger than she was and insanely good with a gun, but she shook for a good ten minutes after we’d paddled out of sight of the beach today. She isn’t as ready for this as she thinks she is.
But why should she be, after what they did to her?
I think about it every time I see a guy in a fucking polo shirt with Greek letters on his ball cap. I think about a bunch of smug, entitled assholes ganging up on my girl, holding her down while they use her for a night’s entertainment, not giving a shit about the life they’re ruining or the good person they’re tearing apart.
Fraternities should be burned to the ground. They bring out the worst in people who aren’t that enlightened to begin with. Any prick who needs to spend a shitload of money to buy “brothers” is only half a man, and people who aren’t whole too often fill the void inside of them with dangerous things.
