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I risked a glance behind me. I didn’t see any movement.
Was that a shadow moving there against the fence?
No, no, I didn’t think so.
We stopped for the night in a small town a few hours away, pulling into a fast food place. Drew had always refused to stop by fast food, saying it wouldn’t make us feel good. But my mouth was already watering when we pulled up and parked. I guess I had missed the occasional burger and fries more than I thought.
I was so excited to get some I forgot and bent down to get my backpack to find my wallet.
I heard a low, pained noise that made the hair on the back of my neck stand on end. I whipped my head around to look at my brother. For a moment he was frozen, and then he put his big hand out, very carefully, on my chin and turned my face toward him.
The painful swelling feeling in my face meant my black eye must be very visible.
“I’m fine,” I began to babble, hating the look in Torin’s eyes, like he was the one who had been struck. “it’s fine, it’s nothing. He never hit me before. It’ll go down soon.”
But when I saw him put the key back in the ignition, I knew exactly what he was going to do. He was going to drive all the way back, get out of the car and do what he had always done, maim or kill the person who had hurt me.
I felt a raw, searing panic.
“No, Torin!” I cried. “No! Not this time!”
His eyes were bleak when he looked at me. “Not an option, sister!” he growled.
But I grabbed for his hands, desperate to stop him.
“Please, brother, please!” I begged, but he turned the key in the ignition and I knew I wasn’t strong enough to stop him.
“You are such an asshole!” I raged, ripping at his shirt. “I want to go back home with you! I want to live in the cabin! And now you’re going to throw it all away to go back to jail! You don’t care about me at all, or you wouldn’t be so anxious to leave me!”
I was breathing hard and suddenly he stopped.
“Baby girl, you know I don’t want to leave you,” he said. “But I have to kill him.”
“No,” I said, and for several long moments we sat looking at each other.
“I can’t bear to lose you again,” I gasped, my heart in my throat, my feelings cut open and bared before him.
Then finally, he pulled the key out of the ignition.
But before I could sigh with relief, I saw him grab the big hunting knife he had placed in the side truck door. He flicked the knife blade out and, before I could say anything, he cut a line across his arm, sharp, quick, and brutal.
The blood-red slash was in a perfect row with his other scars.
Then, with a shock of horror, I realized what all those other scars on his arms were from, what they had always been from.
“Torin, stop!” I cried.
“One for every time I didn’t keep you safe,” he said, and my heart seemed to shatter into a million pieces, so full with his twisted love for me that it felt like my chest couldn’t contain it.
“Torin,” I said, yanking on his sleeve, forcing my brother to turn toward me. “Look at me. You don’t have to do that. I’m fine. You’ve always kept me safe. I’m safe here with you now.”
He looked at me, and I felt the breath catch in my throat, with those midnight blue eyes so close to mine. There was an endless well of twisted, dark obsession in those eyes, his world, his morality always narrowed to what hurt me or what didn’t hurt me.
But he moved the knife toward his arm again and I yanked on his shirt, hard, and pulled his mouth to mine. He responded immediately with a low groan, his tongue in my mouth, heat and dark and lust and love and Torin, always Torin, and I looked down, seeing his cock hardening against his pants and the knife slackening in his hand, just the slightest amount.
I grabbed it, jerking it away from him, then I fell back into my seat and slashed a line across my own arm.
“If you do that again, I’ll just do the same thing!” I raged. “One cut for you, one cut for me!”
