There’s a tiny part of me—the one bent on self-preservation—that tells me he can’t be here. He can’t see this. He can’t write about this.
Go, I try to tell him, but my mouth isn’t working right. Nothing is. I want to shove Ian away, but my arms are so heavy I can barely lift them. My whole body feels like it’s slogging through quicksand. Like I’m drowning in plasma and can’t work my way out of it. Whatever strength I had, I used up just getting here.
Ian grabs my hand, holds it up so he can look at it. Then he’s shrugging out of his T-shirt and wrapping it around the wound.
He’s glancing around now, eyes dark with horror, even as he elevates my arm and holds pressure on the cut. He’s talking again—I can see his mouth moving—but the words still sound tinny and distorted. Like they’re coming through water.
I look back at the doorway as my mother comes skittering through it. She freezes much like Ian did, then screams, her hand pressed to her mouth.
“Damn it, Veronica. Focus! I need you to answer me. Are you hurt anywhere else?”
The words he’s saying finally arrange themselves in the right order and instinctively, I do what he commands. “I don’t know. I don’t think so.”
He grabs my nightgown in the center of the bodice, then rips it away with his bare hands. Thank God. I don’t think I could handle him trying to pull the bloody thing over my head.
Then his hands are on me, running over my shoulders, my back, my ass. Doing the same to my chest and stomach and sex. “Let me see your legs,” he orders, and I stick them out obediently. I’m so confused, so lost, that it seems smart to let him have control, at least for a little while. He seems to know what he’s doing.
“It’s not yours,” he says after a minute, relief ripe in his voice.
“What?” I finally manage to force a word past my dry lips.
“The blood. It’s not yours. I don’t see any other injuries.”
“But where’s it from then?” I clutch at him, still too groggy and panic-stricken to think clearly.
“I don’t know,” he answers grimly. And then he’s sitting down next to me, right in the middle of the mess.
“Be careful,” I warn him, my words sounding garbled to my own ears. “I cut myself on something back there—”
“This,” he says, his voice dark and foreboding. “You cut yourself on this.”
He holds up a black and orange bow saw.
“Oh my God.” I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. “Oh my God.”
It’s the same saw that Belladonna used to dismember that poor girl. The same one I used in the bloodiest scene in my entire career.
“Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God.” I look around at all the blood. “What’s happening to me? What did I do? What did I do?”
“Nothing!” Ian snaps. “You did nothing!”
“You don’t know that. You don’t—”
“Get away from my daughter!” My mother shouts suddenly and when I look up, she has one of my father’s handguns aimed straight at Ian’s chest. “I don’t know what you’re trying to do to her, but get away from her right now. Right now,” she screams, when he makes no move to leave me.
“Your daughter needs help, Melanie,” he says soothingly, even as he puts his hands up. “She’s cut herself.”
“Like I would trust you to help her? You’re using her just like everybody else, seducing her to get information for that filthy book you’re writing.” She waves the gun around threateningly. “Now get the fuck away from her or I promise yours will be the next blood splattering this floor.”
“I’m not going to hurt her.”
“You’ve already hurt her more than enough. If you think I’m going to stand by and let you hurt her more, you’re crazy. My daughter has been through enough. Now go.” Her finger trembles on the trigger, her face filled with resolve.
That’s when I know she’s serious. She will shoot him if he doesn’t back away from me.
“Ian, go,” I tell him as I reach out and try to shove him away. “Now.”
He looks at me like I’m crazy. “You don’t actually think I’m going to leave you here like this, do you? With her? You don’t even know how any of this happened.” He gestures to the blood on the floor, on the bed, on me.
“And you do?”
“No, of course not. I’m trying to figure it out, just like you.” He pushes to his feet, and turns so that his back is to me, his gaze focused on my mother who still has the gun aimed directly at his chest. He’s moving now, angling himself so his body is between my mother and me.
“Leave!” my mother screams. “Or I swear, I’ll shoot you!”