Page 55 of Running Feral

Of course, the rational part of me is never truly silent. It reminds me that I am not Liam Neeson, and this is not a revenge movie. The reality of me finding Eamon, subduing him, stringing him up so I can torture him to death, and then escaping any legal consequences for it is less than zero.

I’m not that guy. And more importantly, if I ever can get Tobias away from him, Tobias needs me a lot more than he needs the shredded remains of Eamon’s corpse in exchange for me spending the rest of my life in prison.

At least, I think he needs me. I hope he does. I’ll be here for him as long as he wants me, at the very least.

It’s not as impressive as severed fingers in a jar, but it’s what I’ve got, I guess.

I just need to bring himhome.

Still bristling with disgust, I make a snap decision and delete the footage. Then I get up, ignore the slight sway to my movements from all that gin, and destroy the camera. I’ll tell the cops whoever broke in did it. I’m not letting Tobias take the fall for shit, obviously.

If I have to listen to one more cop condescend to me about Tobias being an adult and how unlikely it is that another man could be forcing him to do anything he didn’t want to, I really will turn into some kind of violent, avenging angel. It’s fucking repugnant.

With shaking, hate-fueled fingers, I dial 911. I mentally prepare myself to deal with the insurance claim as well, and all the garbage that will entail. I tell myself over and over that this is for Tobias.

Driving around the city won’t save him. Fantasizing about eviscerating Eamon won’t save him, even if I do keep going back and forth on whether that needs to happen.

Right now,I can’t save him.

It tears me apart to admit it, but I can’t. All I can do is make sure I’m here and kind of, mostly standing for when he manages to save himself. Again.

Chapter Nineteen

Iexpected to feel like a zombie the whole way back from the Feral Possum. Normally, the worse Eamon is on a particular day, the more my mind checks out. It’s easier that way. But for some reason, the part of my brain that lets me detach—that unhooks itself from the dock and allows my consciousness to drift away until I can passively observe from a safe distance instead of participate—seems to be broken.

Instead, I feel shivery and intense. My prey-senses are dialed up to their maximum level, and I’m hyper-aware of every flicker of movement or sound or scent that I can perceive.

Eamon is continuing to be extra as fuck. Tapping his fingers, snorting more of whatever meth or coke he’s been pounding, chain-smoking like it’s the eighties, rambling about his glorious victory over Gunnar, who he clearly perceives to be some kind of competition.

Which doesn’t make any sense. Even he should know that. Competition implies there’s a choice, and I have no choice here. Unless he thinks I also don’t have a choice with Gunnar, becausethat’s just how relationships work to him, so he’s competing with Gunnar for who can keep me chained in a tower the most tightly?

Fuck if I know. I want to go back to being exhausted and stressed out. This wired, alert, close-to-panic-but-not-quite version of myself is something I’m not used to and don’t fucking care for.

When he finally pulls the car in and throws it into park, I look around.

“We’re not going home?”

His home, obviously. Not mine. All of my homes have been razed to the ground by his existence.

We’re in the parking lot of a motel. The whole place is long and low and flat, including the building, and we’re within both eye and earshot of the freeway. It’s not a chain, and looks like it’s on its last legs before it gets bought out by one, which makes me think we’re here for the discretion rather than the decor.

“Fuck that,” Eamon says before sniffing loudly. A brief image of him having such a colossal nosebleed that he hemorrhages to death right here in the parking lot flashes in my mind, but it doesn’t happen. “I’m sick of people meddling. Everybody wants to meddle. Everybody has an opinion. You should thank me, too. If your boyfriend comes looking for us, I’ll fucking kill him. At least here, we’re off the grid until everyone comes to their senses. I just need a few days until Patrick cools down and accepts that I am the one who should be taking over the Banna. And you’re going to keep me company.”

Jesus, he really has gone fullWolf of Wall Street. I can taste the unhinged from here, and it’s difficult not to sigh. This issue is one of his greatest hits. Patrick is his shitty boss—my shitty boss too, I guess, although I’m sure he also wants me dead by now. Eamon has been rambling about becoming his ‘successor’as long as I’ve known him. As if any hick-ass backwoods mafia is going to want their leader to be someone like him.

Maybe they could get over the fact that he fucks men. Maybe they all buy into his Spartan bullshit about real men exerting their dominance over othersblah blah blah. But whoever he fucks, he’s still a mess. I’m sure he hasn’t impressed them by spending all this time chasing me around town because I bruised his ego by running away. He must be neglecting whatever it is he does for them when he’s not coked-out and paranoid.

Resigned, I follow him toward the very outer edge of the one-story building. I’m still wired, but I have it under control. The motel is split into several arms, all jutting out from the main entrance, with rooms on either side of the arm and each room directly accessible from the parking lot.

We’re at the very end of one of the arms. Private, just the way he likes it. I wouldn’t be surprised if he bought out the rooms around us and paid or threatened whatever passes for maid service in this place to stay away.

In all my time with him, I’ve experienced a lot. But there’s been at least a veneer of civility over it. No matter how much brutality he exerted, there was always the facsimile of some kind of relationship, and he bothered to make excuses or at least convince me that whatever he did was my fault.

He was teaching me. Correcting me. Punishing me. Whatever he thought sold his dominance and my subservience.

I feel like this time, all that’s about to go out the window. I’m graduating from constant, insidious terror combined with brief moments of violence to being chained to a radiator until someone eventually finds my corpse. I can see the whole thing playing out in my mind’s eye.

I don’t want to die chained to a radiator.

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