Page 82 of Further To Fall

For the next hour, I filled trash bag after trash bag with torn clothing, ripped pictures, and shattered knickknacks. Some of the broken items were irreplaceable. I shed a couple of tears as I knelt to pick up the pieces of a shattered ceramic apple my dad had gotten me when I was twelve when I told him I wanted to become a teacher. Drying my eyes, I reminded myself that these were just things and stuff could be replaced.

My head snapped up at the sound of Blue’s low growl. “What’s wrong, baby?” I asked but froze when I felt the cold steel of a blade at my throat.

“Hello, Carter.” I knew the voice so well, but there was a deadness in it that I had never heard before.

My brain couldn’t quite wrap itself around what was happening, it was like my synapses weren’t firing quite right. “Kyle? What…?” My words trailed off because I didn’t know what I was going to ask. “What are you doing?” or “Why?” seemed ridiculous given the circumstances.

The blade bit into my skin. “I want you to stand up nice and slow.” Blue growled again and inched toward us. “Call off that mangy mutt, or I’ll slit your throat and then gut him like a fish.”

Hot tears, a mix of anger, fear, and grief, flowed down my cheeks as I shakily got to my feet. “It’s okay, Blue, everything’s okay. Stay.” Blue whined but stopped his forward movement.

Kyle jerked me back against him with one hand and used the other to throw my speaker against the wall, shattering it and leaving us in silence. “That’s right, everything’s just dandy. I’m just going to have a little fun with your mom here. She never did let me between those thighs.”

Bile rose up my throat as Kyle trailed the knife down between my breasts. My breath came in short, staccato bursts as my vision went a little hazy. How could it be Kyle? Images of him sprawled out in my living room as we ate ice cream and watched cheesy horror movies danced in my head. I remembered our first date when he was all bumbling nerves and polite gentlemanliness. This wasn’t the same person I’d known for the past two years.

Choking back the acid in my throat, I asked, “It’s been you all along?”

Kyle chuckled, it was ugly and menacing. “You always did underestimate me, Carter.”

“But you had an alibi for the pictures in my classroom.” My voice shook, and my hands trembled as I searched for a way out. Any way out.

The edge of the knife began to tear at my top. No, no, no. This couldn’t be happening. “Do you know how easy it is to drug someone, Carter? All it takes is a couple of ground-up sleeping pills in a friend’s beer and, suddenly, they’re feeling the need to crash on your couch for the night. But the couch is right outside your bedroom, so when the police question him, he says there’s no way you could’ve left without him hearing something. Plus, I had told him what a conniving little bitch and cock tease you were so he wouldn’t have been eager to help anyway.”

My phone started to ring, but Kyle pressed the blade against my skin. “Uh, uh, uh. No phones for you.” He located the cell on the floor where I had been kneeling and kicked it away.

I wanted to weep as my one hope of contacting the outside world disappeared under my bed. My stomach pitched as I asked, “And you were the one who shot at us last night?”

“Yes. I must admit, that one was fun, seeing you and those dimwits hit the deck. I could have killed you all then, so much power in my hands. But now that it’s just the two of us, I thought the knife was a little more personal. Don’t you agree?”

I bit down on my lip to keep from crying out as the blade bit into my skin. “Why are you doing this?”

“Why? Why?!” Kyle grabbed my shoulder in a punishing grip and spun me around to face him, pushing me back into the wall. Blue growled again, but I held out a hand to tell him to stay back. Kyle continued on his tear. “How about because you were supposed to be mine? I gave you all of these chances to figure that out. I forgave you again and again, but you just had to go back to that ape. You never let me touch you like I wanted to, but then you just gave yourself to that heathen like a little slut.”

The knife dug in deeper. “You’re crazy.” It came out in a hoarse whisper but clearly reached Kyle’s ears because his face filled with rage. Suddenly, a hand cracked across my face, sending me crashing to the ground.

42

Austin

“Hey, man, thanks for getting back to me,” I said into my phone.

“They caught the guy?” Liam asked.

“They think they have him. It’s the father of one of Carter’s students, the same one that attacked her.”

“Fuck, what is wrong with that guy?”

“He’s clearly got a screw loose, that’s for sure,” I said as I twirled a pen between my fingers.

“You don’t sound relieved.”

Before Liam called, I had been sitting at my desk reading the same paperwork over and over, unable to focus on the words because my mind kept drifting to Carter. I was worried about her. I got that she wanted to prove to herself that everything was fine now, that she had nothing to worry about anymore, but something wasn’t sitting right with me.

I continued rolling everything around in my mind, trying to figure out what didn’t feel right. I kept coming back to the note on my car and the words used on Carter’s walls. Those felt personal and sexual, not like a man pissed because he had been sent to jail after assaulting someone. “Something doesn’t feel right,” I admitted.

“What do you mean?”

“It’s just that all the incidents have seemed way too personal for this to be retribution for reporting a case of child abuse.”