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Breathe, Ward. But I feel so powerless.Do not lose your shit.The last time I felt so helpless,shefound me. My scar. It’s burning. I close my eyes. Take deep breaths.
She doesn’t plunge the knife deeply enough. She doesn’t lunge and stab, she swipes and drags, and I’m powerless to stop her, completely paralyzed by the pure, unmistakable intent in her eyes. I’ve always thought she was unstable. Always questioned if there were issues that she needed help with. Even before our daughter died.
Now? Now she’s plain fucking scary, and I have gone out of my way to stay out of her way. I never anticipated she’d come to The Manor. And if she did, security was good enough to alert me of her presence before she actually found me. But I was otherwise engaged. Drunk. Balls deep in a woman.
Lost.
I look down at my naked form, blood gushing from the wound. I inhale and place a hand over it, my palm immediately soaked, slipping across my skin. I swallow. Cough. Blink. “Lauren?” I question, as if asking for a reason for this madness. I look up at her, finding her eyes rooted to my stomach, the knife still in her hand. I move back, and she glances up. And something in her eyes changes, a veil of remorse falling. “What have you done?” I whisper, falling to the couch, the absent pain now finding me.
The knife hits the floor. She flexes her hand, looking down at it, as if she’s checking it’s actually her hand. “I...” A step back.
“Do you want me dead, Lauren?” I grate, blood now pissing all over the couch. “Because you’re too late.”
“I’m sorry,” she blurts, her hands going to her head. “Oh God, I’m sorry. I don’t want you to die.”
“Then why the fuck did you stab me?” I hiss, my face screwing up, my stomach pumping from my heavy breathing, making my hand slip and slide.
“I need you to love me,” she screams, staggering back with the force. “Why can’t you love me? Even when I had your daughter, you couldn’t love me!” She rushes over and kneels before me, pressing her hand into my wound. “Oh my God.” She’s panicked, frantic. “Look what you made me do. Don’t die, Jesse. You can’t leave me. We only have each other.”
I stare at her. Just stare, stunned, out of words and out of energy. “I won’t leave you,” I say quietly, giving her what she wants to hear, and she freezes, looking up at me. I hate the hope I see in her empty eyes. “I think I need a doctor.”
“I’ll get my dad.” Lauren’s up fast, running to the phone on the nightstand. “Dad, dad, Jesse’s hurt. I need you to come. I need you to come now!”
She hangs up, just as John bursts into my room. His face when he sees me on the couch, bleeding out, is fraught. And then when he finds Lauren by the bed, it goes from fraught to murderous.
“Don’t worry, I’ve called a doctor,” Lauren declares, coming back to me, sitting down and stroking my face with her bloodied hands, whispering words that make me sick to my stomach. I look at John, my eyes warning him.
Tread carefully.
But that plan goes to shit when Sarah breezes into the room. Lauren looks up. A wall of hatred falls. And she’s off, flying across the room like a rabid dog. “He’s mine!” she screams, charging into Sarah, smashing her up against the wall. I struggle to my feet and get the knife, and John wrestles Lauren to the floor, restraining her, face down, her arms up her back. She’s completely immobilized. Except for her mouth.
“He killed our baby,” she screeches. “I hate him! He killed our baby. He killed our baby. He killed our baby.”
I roar, my head snapping back, my eyes clenching shut. And my heart? The fucker starts to slow. I heave and pulse, blinking the rage from my vision.Focus. I need to focus. I turn my head, spotting my phone on the nightstand. My lips press into a straight line, and I wriggle up to sitting, stretching as far as I can, my hand squeezing through the cuff painfully. “Fuck it,” I hiss, trying to disregard the discomfort, my fingers skimming the edge of my mobile. “Come on,” I murmur, straining. “Fucking hell.” My arm feels like it could pop out of its socket. I grit my teeth, cursing constantly, stretching, and wrap my grip around my phone and practically spring back against the headboard, puffing violently. “You are seriously in for it, lady,” I mutter, smashing away at the screen of my phone. I dial John. It goes to voicemail. Growling, I dial Sam. It goes to voicemail. “Where the fuck is everyone?” I yell, wriggling for the sake of it, yanking and tugging at the cuff still in place.
Calm down.
I dial John again and get nothing again. I dial Sam again and get nothing again. I dial Drew. Nothing. I yell and slam my head back, looking up at the ceiling, willing myself to calm the fuck down before I break an arm.And I slowly come to terms with my fate. I don’t want to call her. Ireallydon’t want to call her, but she’s the lesser of two evils at the moment.
My nostrils flaring dangerously, I dial. She answers in two rings but says nothing.
“Where are you?” I ask shortly, looking up at my hand hanging lifelessly from the bed. The red welts are glowing, the bruising angry, the swelling back.
“Just leaving home for The Manor. Why?”
“I need you to swing by my place.”
“Why?”
“Sarah, for fuck’s sake, are you going to help me or not?”
“Oh, you want my help?”
I slump on the bed and accept what needs to be done. “Yes, I need your help.”
“Okay,” she says, sounding all too thrilled about that. “Why?”
“You’ll see when you get here.” I hang up, refusing to indulge her. I know Sarah better than anyone. If I say I need her help, she’ll come running. That won’t have changed because I’m in a relationship with a woman she doesn’t like or approve of. Would Sarah approve of any woman?
