Page 103 of Risk

“Fuck. I’m so sorry, Beautiful. I am never letting you go again,” he grits out into my hair.

I can’t speak, knowing I’ll start crying, and I don’t want to give Gary the satisfaction of knowing he made me cry. Men like him get off on that shit.

“Bag over here now, boy. And if it’s empty, I’ll fucking shoot you both, and I’ll lose zero sleep over it.”

Kaden tucks me into his side, keeping a tight hold on me. “I wouldn’t expect any less from a bastard like you.”

He throws the rucksack to him, and Gary catches it with the hand not holding the gun pointed at us.

He opens the bag and looks inside. The excitement on his face at what I’m assuming is the money he asked for is sickening.

He reaches inside and pulls out a wad of cash. “Do I need to count it?”

“Every fucking cent is there, old man. I hope it brings you nothing but misery.”

Gary laughs, stuffing the wad of money back in the bag, fastening it up. “This money is gonna give me the life I should have had after I killed your bitch of a mother and was free of her instead of ending up inside that hellhole that I spent all those years of my life in. Wasted fucking years!” Gary walks backward,gun still pointed at us. “And it’s going to be even sweeter, knowing that it’s your money I’m spending. My bastard of a son, who I wish had never been born. But then, if I had spunked you out onto your mother’s stomach and wiped you up with toilet paper and flushed you, I wouldn’t have the bag of cash right now. So, you were good for something, I guess.”

Kaden says nothing, but I can feel the rage emanating from him, like it’s a living entity.

Gary’s smirking, still walking away from us, backward, gun pointed at us. He derives some sick kind of pleasure from what he’s said to Kaden. Like he’s been wanting to say these things to him for a long time and he’s now getting off on finally being able to do it. I hate with every fiber of my being that Kaden has to listen to him.

“She begged for her life, you know? Your slut mother. That whore was fucking everyone in the neighborhood. Needed a lesson. She begged for her life and begged me not to hurt you. Fucking cunt.” He reaches the train track and stops to glance down at his feet for a second before stepping back over the metal track line. “The best thing I ever did was remove her waste of a space fucking ugly face—”

It happens so quickly. I feel the intense rumble of a train, and then it’s there. It’s like time slows down, but speeds up as well. Gary seems to freeze momentarily and then swings around to see the train.

Right before it hits him.

The sound is like nothing I’ve heard before and something I never want to hear again.

The rucksack that was in Gary’s hand comes flying across the space and lands off to the left of me, about thirty feet away.

I hear the screech of the train slamming its brakes on.

I look at Kaden. He looks frozen, and then he seems to come to.

“We need to get out of here,” he says.

“Shouldn’t we—”

“No. We don’t need to be here.”

“But the train operator—”

“Likely hasn’t seen us. I don’t want you getting dragged through this. You’ve been through enough.”

“But we didn’t do anything wrong. If we leave the scene of an accident, we could get in trouble.”

“We won’t. Trust me, please. Go to the car now, babe. I’m gonna grab the rucksack. I want no trace of us being here.”

He kisses me firm on the lips and starts to run over to where the bag sits on the gravel ground, covered in dust, and I hope to God there is no blood or anything else human on it.

I turn and move as quickly as I can to the car, getting into the passenger seat. Kaden’s back in the car as I’m buckling up. He tosses the rucksack into the backseat and drives us out of there quickly.

There is absolute silence in the car. Not even the radio is on.

We’re probably a few miles down the road when Kaden pulls the car off to the side and sets the car into park.

He turns in his seat to face me. “Are you okay?”

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