Page 47 of Chad's Chase

“I think I’ve given you enough chances,” Chad snarled to my face, and even his breath was so aggressive it stung my skin. “And since our fucks meant nothing at all to you, I don’t see a reason to keep you alive anymore.” He jammed the gun harder under my chin. “Tell me. Who the fuck are you, and who sent you?”

I started to swallow from trepidation, but stopped, brought the saliva right back up and spat it in his face. “Fuck you.”

Like ice cream melting on hot pavement, the rage slowly melted from Chad’s eyes. Tense shoulders relaxing, he lowered his gun, took a silent step back from me, then tucked his gun away.

Run, a voice whispered in my head.

I didn’t dare move.

Removing his ball cap, he folded the thing and stuffed it in his back pocket, then from the other pocket, he pulled out a monogrammed kerchief and, calm as a lazy dog on a rainy day, wiped my spit from his face.

When he was done, he just looked at me with placid equanimity.

Run. Fast, the voice repeated.

My lungs quit its job, and my heart turned in its resignation letter. Shutdown sequence initiated.

What did his sudden calmness mean? Was he sorry? Was he going to apologize? Was he going to let me go? Was he—

Faster than I didn’t want to believe, Chad had both my hands seized and locked in a vice grip above my head, with one hand. All my thoughts of what his calmness meant got scattered in my head when his open palm sliced through the air and connected squarely with the side of my face. A slap so hard my ears rang as loud and mind-numbingly long as a Catholic church bell.

Giving me no reprieve, a backhand across my other cheek ensued, my head whipping to the side.

A repeated slap across the face, then a backhand.

He did it again. And again. And again. Until my vision was nothing but twinkling stars on a black backdrop.

Tears I couldn’t control cascaded, as one slap succeeded the other. As I began to feel like my head had been shoved into a barrel of burning hot coals, I cried out a garbled, “Stop. Please! Stop.”

Immediately, he stopped, dropping my hands.

Raising abased eyes to him, I blinked a couple of times, trying to see through the blur of stars and tears. There was nothing but the same placidity on his face. And I worried what to fear more: when he was raging mad, or when he was abnormally calm.

Gently bringing his hands up to cup my stinging face, he seized me with his stare as he said in an unbelievably soft voice, “I don’t want to kill you, Blood. Believe me, I don’t. But if you continue to fight me when I’ve been nothing but nice and lenient with you, then you’re gonna break my resolve to spare you and give you a chance. And when you do, I won’t just give you an easy bullet to the head. No. I’ll gouge those beautiful emerald eyes of yours, and make your deathlongandpainful.”

As my face throbbed with flaming pain, all I could do was stare up at him. In this moment, I was just a weak little girl who wanted to be rescued. I’d been knocked around, a lot, and thought I’d gotten inured to pain. But apparently, I wasn’t.

And what made this moment hurt so much more than the throbbing was that it washiminflicting pain on me. All that safety I’d bragged about feeling around him, was gone.

In this moment, I realized that as bad as my life was, I didn’t want to die. If I could get a second chance at life, I wanted it. I wanted to be normal.

“Do you want to die, Blood?” Chad asked, as though he had direct access to my thoughts.

As much as I could between his hands cupping my face, I shook my head.

“Then stop fucking hurting me, okay?” His eyes softened. Only a small fraction. “If you don’t hurt me, I won’t hurt you.”

When I only stared back at him, he sought, “You don’t believe me?”

As asinine as it was of me, I believed him. So instead of nodding, I answered with a verbal, “Yes, I do.”

Lowering his head, he pressed a soft kiss to my forehead. And I closed my eyes to let it seep into me.

Among all the bad shit that just happened, that kiss, weirdly enough, gave me a strange sense of peace. All my fears calmed, all the pain temporarily forgotten. The result of a single kiss.

How did he do that? How could he make that happen?

I opened my eyes and found his staring down at me. They were warmer now. And a piece of my heart foolishly floated towards him. He was doing something to me, and I didn’t think I wanted him to stop. I wanted him to keep giving me soft kisses, because I needed them. Ineededthem, dammit.