Page 200 of Deliverance

I throw a fist at him right before he slams me back to the ground, my knuckles grazing his cheek. I expect us to slip lower, but the tangle of our bodies seems to have found some invisible purchase and we’re embedded into this spot. There’s blood on his clothes and it’s soaking my dress, but he either doesn’t care about the wound or my aim is bad and the cut is superficial.

Probably the latter since my self-defense classes didn’t cover knives.

“Get off me.” I’m panting from the struggle. “Get the fuck off me, Rhys!”

He laughs and straddles my hips, his hands clutching mine above my head, pressing my throbbing wrists into the cold ground. Something inside my shoulder stretches and clicks.

I jerk underneath his weight. “What do you want?! What the fuck do you want from me?!” My throat is raw from my screams and my voice has turned raspy.

Ignoring my thrashing, he lowers his face and says, “First of all, I want you to apologize for leaving.” Our noses are nearly touching. “Then I want you to withdraw your divorce petition.”

I sense that there’s more, that the list goes on and on, but I’m never doing any of the things he’s asking of me.

“You’re a fool, Rhys,” I whisper, straining against his hold. “People divorce all the time.”

“Until death do us part, Andrea. Remember?”

It’s dark here, but even under the canopy of the forest night, I can still see the madness in his eyes and the simmering rage just below the surface.

“You forgot the part where it said you’d love and cherish me.” I jerk again and spit at his face. My own frenzy is taking over my judgment. “Selective memory much? Huh?”

For a long moment nothing happens. His looming form simply freezes. The space between us grows hysterically taut, ready to snap. Then when he speaks next, the venom in his voice paralyzes the parts of me that are still functioning. “If I can’t have you, no one will, Andrea.” He releases one of my arms and clutches my neck. “Until death do us part.”

The air stops.

Balling my fingers into a fist, I hit him in the temple. No reaction. Instead, he tightens his grip.

My mouth opens but the only sounds that spill past my lips are a series of broken, guttural garbles.

He’s going to kill me. I’ll die in the middle of nowhere. Alone.

“You think you can just walk away from me, Andrea?” he hisses, a second palm shackling my throat and squeezing so hard, stars begging to dot my vision.

Now that both my hands are free, I claw at his face and his forearms, scratching and cutting into his skin with my nails.

“It’s your own damn fault, Andrea.” He shoves my head deeper into the ground.

It’s your own damn fault.

It’s your own damn fault.

The words melt against the abyss of emptiness descending on me. I can feel it—the weakening of my muscles, the fractures in my bones, the blood spilling from my wounds.

Around us, a flurry of snowflakes dance the night away, beautiful and utterly clueless. They land on my cheeks and forehead. They whisper a soft goodbye.

All my emotions—fear, loss, pain—lance through me like a shockwave, transporting my mind from now to the day I decided to leave Rhys, to the moment I found myself bleeding across the frozen road, my beaten body shattered into millions of pieces.

Then a chilling realization sets in.

I should have died then. It was all borrowed time anyway. And every second between my escape from that house and this final minute I’m clinging to has been precious, easily worth a thousand lives. Because I had Santiago with his dance parties and take-out dinners, I had Tina with her empowering speeches and blind faith in my art, I had wise Reagan and sweet Mack, whose shocked expression I still can’t forget when I gave him the check a few weeks ago, I had Hazel with two little monsters and her spacious home studio overlooking the ocean where we worked on a collaboration, I had countless hours with Roque and his punching bag.

And then there was Zander.

The kindest, and craziest, of them all.

My safe haven, my one and only handsome, blue-eyed regret that I wish I could see just once more. Because I never told him how insanely stupid it was of me to freak out about the ring.

It’s a horrible feeling—the feeling of life leaving each and every inch of your body, the defeat of your arms and legs as they stop fighting for scraps of breath and fall to the frozen ground where numb fingers scoop up the earth in search of a weapon but instead grapple a handful of snow.

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