“All you’ve ever done is hurt me,” I say, my anger unstoppable now, breaking like a tidal wave, soaking everything in its wake. “I don’t love you, Sebastian. Get it? Do you see me now? Our marriage is over.” I lurch toward him, my voice low and gravelly. “You mean nothing to me and when I get the fuck out of here I will never see you again and all you will see is the inside of a prison cell.”
He cackles. “Nothing is over, Cassandra, until I say so. And as for getting, as you so crudely put it, the fuck out of here,” he says, yanking my head up by the back of my hair, “I don’t suggest making any assumptions.”
His voice is so cold, so certain, that I can’t hold back my tears any longer. Sebastian only tsks at my silent weeping, shaking his head as if I’m a wayward child that has disappointed him. I don’t see the slap coming, and after it happens, and he’s cradling my head against his chest, I feel myself go somewhere else. It’s a familiar feeling, but one I haven’t experienced in a long time.
There’s a pounding coming from somewhere, and at first I think it’s just my heart, which throbs in my chest, beating like it’s on borrowed time as I’m pressed into Sebastian’s shirt, forced to breathe in the scent of his cologne.
And then I hear my name.
“Cassie,” Ryder says, his voice muffled from outside as he knocks quickly on the room’s front door. “Cassie, are you in there?”
Sebastian releases me. Still sitting on the tub’s edge, he looks over his shoulder at the door. He tries to muffle me with his palm as he pushes me back against the wall of the tub, but I manage to wrap my mouth around his hand, driving my teeth into his flesh until I taste blood.
He jerks it away and I scream and scream and scream, wanting Ryder to hear, the entire city of Atlanta, the whole fucking universe: I am here. I am alive. Help me.
“Shut up,” Sebastian yells as he smacks me across the jaw with his good hand. Unlike the first slap, this one wakes me up, snaps me back to reality. And unlike all the times before, when I didn’t holler my head off like I should have after every slap, every shove, every blow, I don’t shut up, and the volume of my screams competes with the sound of wood splintering and hinges snapping as Ryder breaks down the door.
Before Sebastian can stand, Ryder bursts into the bathroom, his eyes blazing.
“Get away from her,” he says, springing onto Sebastian like a hungry wolf attacks a deer, both hands on Sebastian’s shoulders, pushing him backwards off the tub ledge, the t-shirt and scissors and hair dye scattering under the sink.
Sebastian’s body flies into the toilet, the sound of his head hitting the ceramic seat echoing off the tile floor, his body as limp as a dead flower, his eyes shut. Knocked out.
Ryder kneels in front of me, taking my face in his hands.
“Are you alright?” he says. I nod as he reaches behind me and quickly unties my wrists. “Come on,” he says, as I step out of the tub and he pushes me through the bathroom door in front of him, my tattered shirt falling off my arms in the rush.
And then: Ryder yells, a string of expletives. I turn around to see him collapsed over the sink, Sebastian behind him, crouched on the floor, conscious now and grinning, his hand still on the scissors lodged deep in Ryder’s lower calf, blood slowly seeping across the white floor.
“Run, Cassie,” Ryder says. “Get out of here. Go. I’ll deal with this.”
But all I can see is Ryder’s bleeding leg and Sebastian’s wild eyes and it’s like I barely hear him as adrenaline rushes through every vein. I feel like I’m flying through the air as I leap toward Sebastian with my fist curled, my thumb on the outside, thinking about breaking a nose and not my hand, just like Ryder taught me.
My knuckles explode Sebastian’s face, the sound of the impact loud and thick and unnatural. He yelps, holding his hands over his nose, blood oozing between his fingers. “Did that hurt?” I say, pulling back my arm and hitting him again. “Good.”
Sebastian lunges toward me on his stomach, grabbing me by the ankles, and I fall, catching myself on the edge of the tub, my feet slipping out from under me on Ryder’s blood. Gripping my ankle with one hand, Sebastian yanks the scissors from Ryder’s leg, and crawls toward me, his white shirt now red.
Twisting in a sitting position, I grunt and try to push myself up, but Sebastian’s pull on my leg is too strong and I flail against the tub. I kick at him but he stabs the scissors through my bare foot, and as I scream he pulls himself on top of me, straddling me as I writhe underneath him. He brandishes the scissors. “If you’re not going to let me kill him,” he says, “then it’s going to be you. Either way, love, you’re always going to be mine.”
“Over my dead body,” I say.
“Precisely,” he says.
And then, like a breeze had blown him away, Sebastian is off me, his throat in Ryder’s hand, his arm twisted behind him against the wall, the scissors falling from his fingers, clinking on the tile at his feet.
“She meant over your dead body,” Ryder says.