Page 81 of Rune’s Solace

I gave him one hard shake. “Now help me finish it. House. Front door?”

“Yeah.”

“Back?”

“Kitchen, I think. I saw one when he dragged me through.”

“Anybody else there?”

“I don’t know.”

“Car?”

“His truck. Dark. Old.”

Sawyer grabbed the front of my cut with both hands, his wrists rubbed raw where the rope had been.

“He hit her.”

Everything in me stopped.

“When she yelled at me to go. He hit her and she went down, I heard it and I kept running because she told me to.” His voice broke completely. “I’ll hear that for the rest of my life.”

I was already turning.

“Please, Rune. He is going to hurt her.”

I looked back.

Sawyer’s face was a mess, but his voice came out clear. “You have to be faster than I was brave.”

That one stayed with me.

I didn’t answer.

I ran.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

ONCE I KNEW Sawyer was safe, something happened in me that had never happened to me before, and it took me a moment to understand what it was.

It was the scared girl going away.

That dark nowhere I go, the place he built in me, the place where I get small and wait for it to be over. It just drained out of me, all at once. Because the thing that I came here to save was gone. There was nobody left to protect by being good.

And what came up into the empty space where the dark had been was not the girl in the hallway.

It was pure rage.

He was still talking. He’d been talking, that awful gentle voice, knew you’d come home, always knew, we can start over, you and me, nobody has to know, and he reached out to touch my hair, the purple ends of it, like he had a right, like it was his, like I was his.

And I hit him.

My hand just came up and cracked across his face hard enough that the sound bounced off the walls, and for one second neither of us moved.

I don’t think either of us believed it.

“No!” I snarled.