Page 106 of Surrender
And I smiled.
With blood in my mouth.
Because if these were going to be the last moments I had on this earth, I refused to live them in fear.
I refused to sit here in silence.
Surrounded by the graves of other women.
Imagining how they would have felt, alone and petrified, listening to the ranting of a crazy man they thought they once knew. He put them through hell, and he intended to do the same to me.
But I wouldn’t let him.
Rafe was gone.
Roxie was gone.
He ripped them from this world.
And while I knew Nate was coming, that he was doing everything humanly possible to make it to me, I couldn’t lie down and let this man get away with it.
“Shut up, Darcy,” he spat, scrubbing at his hair, his eyes pinched closed. “Justshut up!”
“No! I won’t,” I rasped, my voice hoarse from the amount oftears I’d shed over the last half hour or so. “This is your karma, Parker. You hurt all these beautiful souls. You destroyed them. You don’t deserve silence.”
He spun on his heel, tucking the gun into his pants before storming toward me and grabbing a handful of my hair. I kicked and fought hard as he dragged me across the clearing to the end. “You don’t want to be silent? Fine!” he barked, slamming me into the side of the flower bed right on the end of the row. “Let me introduce you to the women you’ll be spending eternity with!”
Vomit touched the back of my tongue, but I managed to keep it down out of pure spite and refusal to break under him.
“Clare was my high school sweetheart,” he announced, sitting on the edge of the garden bed. It was clearly the most weathered, parts of it looking like they’d been replaced recently, touched up maybe.
The flowers in the garden were roses.
They were beautiful, growing tall and proud, despite the ugly reason they’d been planted there.
“She was my first love, the first one to pay me any attention.” He picked up some soil, rubbing it between his fingers. “She was also the first one to take me for granted and break up with me during our senior year because I was getting tooclingy. You think I’m so cold-hearted, but it’s because of her that I’m like this.”
I didn’t answer.
I refused to talk through his problems with him like some fucking therapist.
He was a murderer.
He didn’t deserve validation.
“So quiet now, aren’t you?” he sneered. His lip curled, the gentle hand that had just been playing with the dirt suddenly clenched into a fist. “Isn’t this what you wanted, Darcy? Thetruth? To know why I turned out the way I did?”
He leaped to his feet, grabbing my arm and throwing me down in front of the second grave.
“Here we have Tegan,” he practically sang, like we were now on some fun graveyard tour. “She was a lot like you. Far too determined to be independent. She thought she could fix me. Here’s a spoiler… she couldn’t!”
When he reached for me again, I swung, clocking him in the jaw, stunning him for a second. I scrambled across the ground, trying to find my footing but barely making it a few feet before a Prada shoe slammed into my back. I hit the ground with a thud, the air forced from my lungs, leaving me choking as dust kicked up like a cloud around my face.
“Number three was Grace,” he announced, stepping around me as I writhed on the ground. “I didn’t even mean to kill her, actually. I just wanted to talk about our relationship, but she wouldn’t stop crying.”
He was sick.
Sicker than I ever could have imagined.
