Her body crashed to the floor beside the shattered lamp, her palm cut open by the broken glass. The deep, dark crimson shade of blood caught her gaze just before her body was pulled up, turned and slapped back against the ground like a slab of meat. The trace amount of breath remaining in her lungs was forced out by the weight of Max' body crushing down on her own.
Straddling her stomach, Max held her shoulders to the ground, a placid mask of indifference on his face, his shoulder length, obsidian hair a wild frame around his head.
Alice bucked against him despite her grim understanding that she was helpless beneath him.
"Stop fighting me, Alice. There is nowhere you can go. You're only making things worse."
His controlled voice was in perfect contrast to Alice's panic. It angered her that he controlled himself as much as he controlled her. She wanted him enraged, wanted him losing that terrifying control so that he would make a mistake, so that he would err and give her the upper hand.
"Fuck you!" she screamed, spittle spraying from her lips onto his cheeks, her teeth gnashing against each other as she bucked and twisted in a futile effort to escape his hold.
Anger flashed behind his blue eyes, only a momentary weakness before he wrenched back the control she hated more than anything. The glimmer of his loss wasn't enough to satisfy her. She wanted the rate of his heart to match hers, wanted his sunkissed and scarred skin to match the fierce red mask of anger she wore.
He wouldn't give her the reaction she sought, she knew that, yet she craved it regardless.
"I've already told you there is no way out. Why do you waste your time trying? It makes no sense."
After brushing away a hot tear from her cheek, he ran the tip of his thumb along her jaw, a smile playing at his lips, widening with every burst of her struggle. When her body stilled, exhausted from the fight she never had the chance to win, he closed his eyes, opening them slowly to stare down at her from beneath thick black lashes.
"I think it's time I tell you something." His eyes scanned down surveying slowly the way her chest rose with erratic breath, the cold blue orbs pausing to focus on the pulse point in her throat. "But not like this. Not in this position. Can I trust you to behave if I let you up?"
Her jaw ticked, her teeth throbbing from how tightly she held them clenched. Her thoughts drifted then to a memory that until that moment had been dormant: She was eight years old, her sister nine. They'd gone with their father to a convenience store for ice cream on a hot and humid summer day. Upon entering the store, both their young eyes were drawn to a headline on the front page of the local paper in a bin displayed at the front of the store. It was an image of a young woman, her hair long and blonde, her eyes wide with the hope of a bright future.
Beside that photo was another: the same woman, her body broken and beaten, left hanging from raised train tracks that cut through the sky and ran across the four lane highway that led out of town.
Things were different back then. The topic of sex was buried like the devil's sinful secret, but shock and gore, the horror of man's violence was put on display, a warning to the young about the evil that lurked in every shadowed corner.
Her father kneeled down behind them, a hand on the shoulder of each of his girls. His eyes scanned the article, a low whistle escaping his lips. "Well, would you look there. The poor woman made the wrong choice, it seems."
Ripping her eyes from the disturbing image, Alice glanced back at her father, a question written into her raised brows.
Pulling his large hand from her shoulder, he pointed to the text. "If you read there, you'll see she had a choice." Lowering his voice to a bare whisper, he explained, "It says that the girl had a gun pointed to her head in a public setting. The man must have told her to go with him or he'd shoot. Pretty standard stuff with criminals: the warning. Had she fought then, she might have lived, or at least she would have died quickly with a bullet in her head."
Turning, he looked each girl in the eye before continuing forward.
"The woman chose to go with the man. Most likely she was raped and beaten, only the Lord knows how many days that poor woman suffered. And look where she ended up."
He sighed, his head heavy with the weight of the violence staring them in the face. "I'll give you this piece of advice now: if you ever find yourself in her situation, you fight, even if it means you take a bullet for the struggle. Because the quick death will be a hell of a lot easier than whatever that sick bastard will do to you when he gets you away from that crowd and alone."
Alice promised herself then that she would fight, no matter the circumstances, no matter the risk, she would fight. Little did her father know that his words on that humid summer day had been prophetic, spoken to two small girls who would one day become women faced with making that same choice.
Delilah disappeared when she chose to go with whatever monster had taken her from her family and her life.
And, Alice, who’d developed a significant fear of those types of stories after that day, refused to make the same mistake.