Two arms locked around me from behind and dragged me from the stool, my legs knocking it over as I was yanked into the air.
The sound of the metal clattering against the concrete floor was deafening.
Reverberating through the chaos.
“What do you want? Don’t touch me. Who are you?” I shrieked as I kicked and clawed and thrashed, but my arms were pinned to my sides.
Overpowered.
Unable to break free.
In the flash of a second, I was flying, thrown to the ground. I crashed against the hard floor.
Pain splintered up my shoulder, and a wail tore from my throat.
Terror rushed, surged, and clouded my thoughts.
“Help,” I moaned and choked, dazed, completely caught off guard and turned around and clueless to what was happening.
Darkness blinding.
Unable to see my attacker.
Unable to anticipate what was coming next.
I made it to my hands and knees, and I started to crawl across the floor, hands feeling around to try to make an escape.
There was no bracing myself for the blow.
No preparing myself for the searing agony when I was kicked in the stomach from out of nowhere.
A haggard cry screamed from my throat, and I curled into a ball on my side in the staggering agony.
I gasped, writhed, tried to get back onto my hands and knees.
To find a way out.
But there was no escape.
No fighting someone who wasn’t fightin’ fair.
A vicious voice growled at my ear, “You shouldn’t go diggin’ up graves. You never know when you might fall in.”
That was the only thing I heard before a fist landed on my cheek.
So hard it shot me straight into a dark, bottomless abyss.Twenty-SixRichardI sped through the night with the accelerator pushed all the way to the floorboards. Vision a haze of red.
Fury and fear.
Sickness clawing at my insides. Eatin’ me alive.
I skidded into the parking lot of the hospital where I’d been with Violet and Daisy only a few nights before. But tonight, it was completely different.
Ominous and dark. A foreboding that sagged and shivered in the night.
I flew into a parking spot, and I was out of my truck in a blip of time that hardly existed and still seemed to go on forever, sprinting into the emergency room entrance. First thing I saw was her father pacing in the waiting room.
His attention snapped up when he felt me coming like an earthquake.
That’s what I felt like. Pummeling the earth with my fists until I shook down whoever was stupid enough to hurt her. Hunt down the motherfucker. Skin him alive. Stand for this girl who I should have been standing for all along.
“Where is she? Is she okay? What happened?” I blurted the second I got to him.
He glowered with the force of a nuclear power plant. “How dare you show your face in this place.”
The outrage of it should have blown me back, but I stood ground.
“She’s my wife.”
“You no longer get to claim that.”
I angled toward him. No matter how much I respected him, I wasn’t about to stand down. “You have every right to hate me, Mr. Marin. I get it. Accept it. But she is my wife, and I’m not going anywhere.”
His protective demeanor shifted, his shoulders sagging to the floor, horror in his expression.
“She was beaten.” The words fumbled from his mouth in a roll of confusion. “I…I called the ambulance when I found her. Who would do this?”
Rage singed through my body. A flashfire. Nothing left but the need to hunt down whoever had done this.
Had promised her that I wouldn’t let anything happen to her.
And this?
Guilt clutched me by the aching throat, and I swallowed it down, focused on the only thing I could change.
The one thing I could do.
Protect her.
“Where is she? Is she okay?”
When Emily had woken me, she didn’t have any information other than Violet’s father had called her from his car in hysterics, asking her if she could come pick up Daisy at the hospital since he couldn’t leave her with Mrs. Marin.
They didn’t have anyone else they could trust.
I was flying out the door ahead of Emily before she could stop me.
Wasn’t like my sister didn’t know what reaction she was going to get out of me, anyway.
His head shook.
“I do not know. I cannot bear to take Daisy back there.”
Helplessly, he gestured to the little girl who was curled up on two plastic chairs, her head propped on a rolled-up blanket that had been ripped off her bed, child fast asleep.
My spirit throbbed.
Affection rushed to occupy my chest.
A straight-up invasion.
It got whipped up with the intense need to decimate.
To destroy.
“Give me one second.”
Panic seizing my breaths, I moved to the reception desk, voice a desperate growl, “You have a patient…my wife…Violet Ramsey. Need to know where she is.”
Knew she went by Marin. But legally? She was mine.
Mine.
My wife.
My reason.
My life.
My light.
The woman clicked into her computer before she looked up at me. “She’s in room 3B. You can go back.”