Southern Heart, Madison, Natasha [the little red hen ebook TXT] 📗

neck in his hand. "Three," he says the number. "Always three knocks in a row."

"This is insane." The words come out of my mouth.

"Chelsea," my father says my name. "Let him finish."

I shake my head and put my hand to my stomach. "He stabbed me six times but got the same one twice." I shake my head, trying to block out the words. "He dropped the knife one night and forgot about it."

"Was this before or after you were shot?" I ask him, looking over at the men in the room and wondering why the fuck they haven’t said shit to him.

"Same day," he says. "He did my legs first, and then when he dropped the knife, he took the gun out."

"For fuck’s sake," Ethan says now, and I want him to get angry. I want him to ask all the fucking questions.

"I got the knife and hid it. But not before he came out and hit me some more," he says, and I look at him.

"I’ve seen your wounds," I say. "There is no way that was done with a hand."

"You're right," he says, looking straight at me. "Sometimes, they were his steel-toed boots. Other times, it was the bat just for good measure," he says. "I got loose and waited or maybe I passed out, but I knew the lay of the land." He looks at Ethan. "I know the surroundings like I know the back of my hand. I waited until I knew he passed out and then crawled." He sits up now as proud as can be, this man who just spent five days being tortured by the person who should have protected him. "I don’t know if you can call it crawling." I look down at his hands. "I pulled myself inch by fucking inch," he says, and my stomach starts to turn. "It took me over eight hours to get to my neighbor’s land, which takes thirty minutes to hike." My head spins around and around as he says the next part. "There was no way he would have left me alive. Not this time."

"It was your training," my uncle Jacob says. "Your training saved you."

"I don’t know what the fuck it was, but at one point, I just wanted to let fucking go. I could barely fucking see out of one eye. Every single time I took a breath, it felt like I was being stabbed over and over again. Every time I moved, I felt the stab wounds in my legs rip open even more. Forget about the bullet wound. Forget about the gash in my head or the fact that one of my eyes was swollen shut," he says. "I got to the truck, and the only place I could think of was making it here. For five days, he beat me and tortured me. He wanted me to beg for my life." The words pour out of him so painfully. "He wanted me to beg him and bow down to him. The more I fought it, the harder the hits came, but there was no fucking way in hell I would bend to him. There was no fucking way I was going to let him win." He shakes his head, and now the tears roll out of me over and over again. "I was not going to let him fucking win!" he roars out. "Not then and not fucking now. If I was going to die, I was going to die on my terms." I turn now, walking out of the room straight to the bathroom.

"Chelsea." I hear my father calling my name, but I close the door and make it just in time to throw up in the toilet. "Honey," he says softly, and I get up, walking over to the sink. Turning on the tap, I cup my hands under the stream. I wash my face, then open the bathroom door just a touch, seeing my father standing there with worry all over his face. I push open the door, letting my father come in. "Honey." He whispers my nickname and holds out his arms, and I run into him, my sob muffled in his chest.

His arms go around me, and I know that I’m safe. I know he has me for as long as I need him. "It’s okay," he whispers in my ear.

"His father did that to him," I say, my eyes open and are focused on the wall. "Beat him to an inch of his life." I let go of him now. "How? How can someone do that to their own child?"

"I can’t explain that to you," he says. "I mean, my father was no walk in the park, and he definitely never helped me with homework." He has never really spoken about his father. He was dead before I was born. I do know from the stories that people tell me, that he was not a nice man. He was the reason that Ethan left us when he turned twenty-one.

"That man is lucky to be alive," I say softly. "You didn’t see the wounds, Dad," I say softly. "You didn’t spend over six hours stitching him up. You didn’t have to fix a man whose own father did that to him."

"I didn’t." He leans now against the doorjamb of the bathroom, putting his hands in his pockets.

"Now that you know what he’s up against, you still want him gone?" I hear Ethan say from behind my father.

"What if his father finds him here?" I ask him and then look at my father. "Are you going to be okay with me being a sitting duck until his father comes back and finishes the job?"

"He won’t get close enough," my uncle Casey says from behind Ethan. "I would never put you in harm's way." I shake my head, not listening to what he has to say. "I promise you that."

I look at my father, then to Uncle Casey, who just smiles shyly at me, and then