“Do I have permission to move?”
“Long as you’re doing what I want, fucking have at it,” she sneered.
“I’m going to get the belt from my robe and the belt from… my jeans from the chair. I’ll tie them to my bed, and it’ll keep them from attacking you. Is that okay?”
The only answer she gave me was shaking her gun from me to the chair and back again.
Squatting down, I placed the stick on the ground as quietly as I could, murmuring to the boys to stay. As I moved over to the chair, I kept my movements slow and measured until I had both belts and returned to where the dogs were watching me.
Neither of them was happy as I looped them around their collars, and they were even more unhappy when I attached them to the end of the bed. As crazy as it was, though, I just didn’t want anything to happen to them, so I’d make this decision a hundred times over, if it meant them being safe.
With a final kiss on the tops of their heads, I went back over to where I’d been standing before. This time, I deliberately hit the side of the bed and hopped around until I was where I needed to be and dropped down to my knees. “Ow, my damn foot.”
“Get your ass up. I could care less if you’ve hurt yourself.”
A brief moment of hilarity hit me when I had to bite my tongue not to correct her and tell her it was ‘couldn’t care less,’ because her saying she ‘could care less’ meant she really could care less. I didn’t, though, and straightened back up, holding my hand just behind my back with the walking stick back in it. She had a gun; I had a device an old lady had needed to walk—guess who’d win first.
“Thought I said get your ass here?”
Looking at the spot she was pointing the gun at again, I took a deep breath in and moved around the bed toward it.
“You ruined my life,” she growled as I got closer. “All the time, it was you ruining everything.”
“I never did anything to—” I stopped as she pressed the gun against my forehead, almost every cognitive function leaving me at once.
“You know what I felt when I stabbed you? Happiness. I’d have done it more. If you hadn’t broken the pencil. Ruined that, too.” Pressing the barrel harder into the skin, she hissed, “Thought you’d die. You were meant to. But you lived and took him from me.”
Her sentences were short, like she was trying to remember what she was saying or filtering it from all of the other things going on. It made the message more sinister, more hateful, and more chilling.
“I only just came back.”
“Nah,” she said, shaking her head vigorously. “Nah. You took him.” Then, leaning in so her face was only a foot away from mine, she screamed, “You took it all from me.”
I could hear the boys pulling against their restraints behind us, and knew they’d find a way to get out of them if we didn’t leave the room soon.
“Please, let’s discuss this in the living room. Maybe we can have some,” I swallowed, almost choking on the absurdity of what I was about to suggest, “tea?”
Shoving her hand in her pocket, she pulled out something that generally wouldn’t strike the kind of fear I was feeling at that moment. But in her hand, it made my blood run cold.
She was holding a pencil—a sharp one. And it looked like the same kind she’d used on me before.
“Remember this?”
How could I forget? Trust me, after going through what I had, it’d taken two years of therapy for me to be able to pick one up again to draw with.
Before I could say something, the door flew open, knocking her into me. I had a brief moment where I could see her pulling the trigger of the gun and it being the last thing I’d ever actually see, but then her arm flew out to the side as she spun to see what’d happened.
Jordan.
“Put it down,” he clipped, holding a baseball bat in his hand. When she didn’t and just stood there staring at him, he pulled a gun out of the waistband of his jeans with his other hand and pointed it at her head.
“Come at me with the pencil, Hazel, I’ll hit you with the bat. Point the gun at Sienna or me, and I’ll shoot you before you can even try to get a shot off.”
“You wouldn’t shoot me,” she sneered, shifting her weight from foot to foot.
“I would, and I will.” Then, he said, “Open the curtains, Sienna, and let some light in. The guys are on their way.”
Doing as he asked, I walked backward to the window, and pulled the curtain with the hand that wasn’t holding the walking stick. Then, just in case, I unlocked it and opened it, letting air into the room.