My eyes un-focus for a moment. All I can see is blinding white light.
But I keep struggling.
I will not simply lie in the muck and grime of the forest and accept that I’m going to be raped.
“Lie fucking still, you bitch!” he screams at me thunderously.
A smarter woman might have listened. And maybe I might have, if it hadn’t been for the child inside me.
I couldn’t let this happen—for my baby’s sake. He manages to rip at the front of my nightgown. The thin fabric gives way easily. He pulls again, harder, and the tear widens until it’s reached my stomach.
“No… no!”
“I told you to shut the fuck up,” he barks. “Unless you want this to go…”
His threat trails off as his eyes fall to my swollen belly. “You’re pregnant?” he asks in amazement.
His shock is the distraction I need. My free hand grabs a handful of the dark, gritty soil and I fling it hard into his wide-open eyes.
He yells back in shock. Cocking back, I swing my fist straight into his nose as hard as I can.
Something gives way beneath my knuckles. Bone or flesh, I don’t know, but I feel his blood slicking the back of my hand.
The bastard falls back into the dirt, cupping two hands to where I struck him and cursing rapid-fire.
I scramble onto my knees as I root around in the dirt, desperately looking for the gun I’d dropped.
I can feel him at my back, inching closer as he tries to coax his vision clear once more.
Where is it? Where the fuck is it?
And then I see the butt of the weapon glinting out at me from under a ragged leaf.
I lunge for it. My fingers close around the grip just as the man’s hand closes around my ankle.
“I might have gone easy on you, bitch,” I say. “But now I’m gonna fuck that baby right out of you.”
He tugs hard. I lose my position and my head slams against another half-buried rock.
In that moment of disorientation, I see a flash of a woman behind my eyelids.
I’ve never met or seen her before.
But I feel like I know her.
She’s pregnant. She’s terrified. She’s staring death in the face…
She’s staring my brother in the face.
And I feel a kinship with this Marisha I’ve never known and never will know. This woman who was married to my husband, who was carrying his child, just as I am now.
A woman whose last view of the world was my brother’s stormy eyes—just before he murdered her.
And suddenly, I’m furious.
I’m determined.
But most of all, I’m tired.