She moved across the room, her steps slow and shaky, until she stopped at the windows. He swallowed hard past the rock in his throat and took a step toward her. “Hannah?”
She lifted a trembling hand. “Don’t.”
His mind was blank and full and reeling all at once. Someone did this to her. Someone hurt her. He’d thought that before. For five years he’d dealt with and lived with this same thought about someone else. It had tormented him. Driven him to the brink of insanity.
Silence weighed in the room for what seemed like an eternity. “What…?” He didn’t even know what to ask. He wanted to know, but he didn’t. “Hannah. Please.”
She stared silently out at the woods for so long he didn’t think she would answer. When she did, her voice was too thin, too far away.
“I was fourteen.”
Stephen moved until he stood a few feet from her and to the side. He studied her face, waited.
“He took me to a basement. It was always dark, dark and black unless he turned on the lights, and then it was blinding.
“He was a scientist, he said. There were things he had to know, tests he had to do. A bat. A bowling ball.” She reeled off facts like she was talking about someone else even as her hand closed over her forearm.
Cheeks pale, eyes wide, staring into the innocent woods but seeing something horrible. He didn’t want her to see it. Didn’t want her there, not even in her mind.
“He cut me. Glass. Razors. Knives. Always knives.”
The words crawled over his skin like acid, the images she created slammed into his heart until he couldn’t breathe. “Stop.” He took a step toward her.
“There was so much blood. I was wet with it.” His breath hitched.
“Stop.”
“I tried not to scream, but it hurt so much. I—”
“Hannah, stop.”
“I tried, but I— There was so much blood.” Her voice grew high-pitched and panicked.
A war raged inside him, choked him until he couldn’t take it anymore and he took her by the arms. “Just stop! For God’s sake, stop!”
Her pale face jerked to his and for seconds she seemed to look right through him. She blinked and the look in her eyes changed. Confusion. Anger. Pain. How could this have happened? How could this kind of evil touch a girl who was nothing but good and light? He dropped his hand; his mouth was so dry he couldn’t speak.
“I want you to go.” Her voice was flat, emotionless.
“Hannah.”
“I want you to go now.”
“Hannah.”
“Just go!” It burst out of her and she stumbled away from the hand he offered, grabbed his shirt off the floor, and flung it at him. “Get out!”
His heart was being torn open to the point he literally expected to see blood. But there was no blood and his shirt hit him in the face. Her small, ice-cold hands hit his bare chest.
He opened his mouth to speak. Tried again. Unable to reach the words locked behind the lump growing in his throat. One last look at her tortured face, and he opened the door. He wasn’t even off the porch before he heard it slam behind him.
—
Time skipped in Stephen’s mind. His hand opening the cabin door. Kick-starting his motorcycle. He hadn’t gone home, just drove and drove, pushing the machine between his legs to the limit, peeling around turns and daring the pavement to touch him. Faster and faster like maybe he could get away, and if he flew right off the road, all the better.
He’d been here before. Desperate to block out another person’s suffering. Ready for death or whatever punishment God wanted to dole out and thinking, Bring it. For once in my fucking life let me be the one to feel the pain.
At some point, he ended up in his office, alone and in the dark. Maybe his subconscious slipping back to all the hours and days and years he’d medicated himself with work. The time he’d turned to Trace to save him, but now? Now he just sat, staring at nothing. Doing nothing.
Every word replayed until he was nauseous. Every image brought the liquidy acid up his throat. Hannah and his fiancée blended together in his mind until he thought he would go insane.
The graphic crime-scene photos of her dead body on their apartment floor. The light tan carpet soaked with her blood. The stabs and slashes that left her flesh gaping in too many places to survive.
Day after day, he’d sat in the courtroom and looked at all of it. Ingested it. Never letting his eyes waver for even a second. Listening to the prosecution lay out the case in gory detail.
He made himself look. Made himself hear every word like he owed it to her. Like that would somehow put him there with her, naked on the floor, swimming in blood. His punishment for not being there before.
Her ashen face swollen and disfigured where they’d beaten her. Her white-blond hair dark with dried blood. Her legs left spread to show where she’d been ravaged and torn. And the ring he’d given her, gone, along with the finger she’d worn it on. And she’d endured it all alone.