“I don’t know why it said that. You heard her!”
Collin grabbed my shoulders and shook me once before slamming me back, making my head smash against the door. “Not good enough, Harlow!” When my head rolled forward, he grabbed the top of my hair and yanked my head back. “You are worthless,” he spit out. “You mess up time and time again, I’m constantly having to correct you, and you can’t give me what a wife should. After two and a half years, we should at the very least be past me having to correct you, don’t you think? Shit, we should have been past that after the first month!”
“I try,” I whimpered, and attempted to blink away the darkening in my vision. “I don’t want to mess up, I—” My slurred words stopped, and my head rolled forward again.
“Jesus Christ,” he scoffed, and yanked my head back up, but this time his other hand wrapped around my throat and began squeezing. “I’ve looked every time and I’ve never found any birth control pills, which means you hide things better than I thought, or there’s something else going on. But I know there is something going on, Harlow.”
I tried desperately to bring in air, but there was nothing, and he didn’t seem too affected by the fact that I wasn’t breathing or that I was gripping and scratching at his hand and arm, trying to get him to release me.
“So let’s do this differently. Are you going to try to get pregnant now?”
Nothing but choking sounds left my mouth as I continued clawing at his arm.
Collin made an annoyed face and sighed. “Poor, poor Hadley. She’ll never get married, or have children. All because her big sister didn’t care enough to try to protect her.”
My arms and body hung uselessly, and my vision was almost completely black by the time Collin let me slowly slide to the ground, but his grip on my throat never loosened.
The last thing I remembered was his voice saying, “I’ll let you think this over.”
I WOKE UP to the sound of hoarse screaming, and soon realized it was mine. The realization came seconds before the pain did. My head felt like someone was taking a jackhammer to the back of it, and my body felt like it was being pricked by thousands of needles. I automatically tried to move from where I was, but froze at the sound of Collin’s menacing voice.
“Do not move.”
Even though I’d thought my eyes were open, it took force to get them to, and then it was only halfway. I was on the ground in the shower, and Collin was sitting outside it with a gun aimed right at me.
He waved the gun at the rest of my body. “You took too long to wake up. So I thought I’d do it for you.”
It was a few moments before I felt like I could look away from the weapon in his hand; I was worried what would happen the second I did. When I finally managed to tear my eyes from it, I sluggishly looked down, and my eyebrows pulled together. I was covered in ice cubes . . . so much so that I couldn’t see my body, and water was coming down on me from every angle in the shower. After a few seconds I realized I couldn’t feel the water coming down or the ice, and I didn’t understand why I wasn’t shaking.
“You know,” Collin said laughing, “the guy at the gas station asked if I was having a party when I bought all the ice. For some reason that was hilarious to me, because I was planning on announcing your pregnancy at my parents’ anniversary party this week had your appointment gone differently this afternoon. That won’t be happening now. But I guess this is kind of a party, too, if you want to count it as one.”
“H-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-how . . .” I didn’t try to get anything out after that, and it was then that I realized that I was shaking. I was shaking so hard my teeth were actually rattling.
Collin studied me for a few seconds, but then it was too hard to keep my eyes open. “How long have you been out?” he asked, trying to guess my question. “About an hour. How long have you been in the ice shower? About ten minutes, and you’re almost done.”
What felt like seconds later, I was waking up much like I had before. Screaming. This time in agony. The water was hot. Scalding hot. There was still some ice on me, but Collin was pulling me up, and the water felt like it was burning me.
“Don’t show your pain, Harlow,” he reminded me with a gentle voice.
I tried to clench my teeth together, but soon I was screaming again. I didn’t understand why the pain wasn’t stopping. I thought Collin had been pulling me up; I thought I’d been getting out of the shower . . . where had he gone? The hoarse screams continued for a minute before they slowly started dying out, and soon they were gone. I gradually became aware of the fact that my face was pressed against the shower floor, which was now clear of ice, and that I was choking on water . . . but I didn’t care anymore. I wanted to go back to sleep again.