I want to run for the door but can’t drive without my keys. Still, I know the woods. Better than anyone. And I can run. I’ll come back for Finn. I tiptoe one foot toward freedom, until Alec freezes me.
“Your favorite song.”
His voice surges through the air, galloping my pulse. He is close. In the kitchen close. Inches away. I grip the neck of my stick tighter, silently retreat my foot. My breathing impossibly loud.
“You don’t have to answer me, but you should. I know you’re here. And you know I’ll find you.”
Then, Joan:
Oh the feeling
When you’re reeling . . .
All those times I reeled from Alec. His touch. His promises.
“You know, this really isn’t a love song.” He raps his knuckles against the butcher block top of the island, a slow, dull metronome that lets me know he is patrolling its outer edges. “You should have listened more carefully, Zephyr. This is a song about rejection, something you know too much about.”
She’ll take the worry from your head
But then again, she put trouble in your heart instead
“I want you to hear it for what it is. You put trouble in my heart, Zephyr.”
His voice tracks to the living room. I tighten my grip, plan my escape. Then, only Joan:
Can bring more pain than a blistering sun
But oh when you fall
How did I not hear the heartbreak in this song? How did I miss so much?
Alec calls over her lyrics. “Favorite song to hear again?” he asks the darkness.
The universe pauses. Joan sings.
“No? Nothing.” Another pause. “I vote for a repeat. Let’s play it again, shall we?”
I raise my foot, waiting to step, to escape. I wait for the shuffle of his footsteps on the carpet, his shadow skulking to my bedroom, toward the source of the music. I wait for Joan. A noise to locate him, any little sound that will buy the seven seconds I need to get a head start out the door.
But the room hangs motionless for a dozen eternities.
“Choosing to stay put, are you? Smart girl, Zephyr. You make the chase fun. You always have.” The curtain in the living room draws back too quick over its rod. Metal scratching metal. He’s searching. It’s only a matter of time and he can’t find me cowering.
“Oh, hello mangy dog. Not feeling so hot?” Finn. On the couch. The playfulness in Alec’s voice distorts reality. “You know it didn’t have to be like this, Zephyr. I gave you every chance to come back to me.”
His words bounce off the photos in the hall, the path to Mom’s study. I move from the laundry room, marrying my back to the wall, my stick firmly in my grasp. The front door is within reach, its knob glistening in the dense dark. I step quietly, my feet barely touching the floor. I reach for the doorknob and that is when I find my keys. They clink underfoot, kicked by my creeping toes. The clanking is a bullhorn, a siren, the dull foghorn call of a lighthouse.
I grab the knob with lightning quickness, turn it, and pull.
But my fingers slip, clutching air. A hand grabs the back of my hair, yanks me away from the freedom of the woods. I fall to the floor. Crashing onto my hip. I writhe against the siege of pain as my body is stretched, dragged.
Then there is my scream.
The only sound in a sea of dead air.
He tugs harder on my rope of hair, uprooting me. “Quiet.” His word is clipped, hard. “Be quiet and I’ll let you go.”
I have to trust his words. Mute mine.
Every follicle, every inch of my scalp screeches in protest. And then, my head drops, hitting hard against the unforgiving floor that blunts and swallows my cry.
A minute. Maybe two. Maybe a hundred.
He stands over me and there is a beam of light casting a dance of shadows around the room. A flashlight rests on the island. It is enough to illuminate his face. His eyes, the cut of his jaw. Malice makes the person tented over me unrecognizable. I work up a scream but then Alec’s fingers are at my throat.
He straddles my waist, pins my arms under his knees. The pressure of his weight on the inside of my forearms is too great to fight against. I cut my eyes to my stick, just out of reach.
Then, in an almost intimate gesture, he brushes back my hair, floats it onto the floor around me. “Such a beautiful neck.” He presses against the tender cords hidden beneath. My throat becomes smaller, pushed into submission.
“Don’t,” I choke. “Please.” Finn groans and my heart breaks.
Alec pushes harder, my voice box bruising. “I like it when you beg. Remember how you’d beg me, Zephyr? With that arched back? Your eager tongue? I know you still want that.”
“Alec, don’t.”
“I will.”
Cold rushes down my neck as he unfastens my buttons. I swim my fingers along the floor searching in vain for my stick.