Near the Bone by Christina Henry (ebook reader color screen txt) 📗

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Thought you could get away, didn’t you, you little slut?”

Thunk-drag, thunk-drag, thunk-drag.

Behind her. He was behind her and C.P. was on the ground. She didn’t see blood but that didn’t mean anything. C.P. could be bleeding to death while she stood there, paralyzed, unable to help him or to turn around, unable to face the specter that she’d called William.

“Found those bags last night. I knew you’d come back for them. I thought I’d catch up to you before that but I made a note. You can’t outsmart me, Mattie girl.”

Think. Move. Run.

(No, don’t run. If you run he’ll shoot you.)

He’s going to hurt you anyway. If you run he’ll shoot and if you stay he’ll use his fists and no matter what he’ll find a way to drag you back to the cabin, to the place you thought you left forever.

She heard his footsteps coming closer and closer, thunk-drag thunk-drag thunk-drag, but she couldn’t make her body obey the screaming in her brain that was telling her to move, to run, to get away before his hands were on her.

Move, Samantha!

Yes, I am Samantha, I am brave and strong, I am not little Martha mouse and he’s not going to take me back to that place, not again, not ever.

She turned to face him, and gasped.

He was a few feet away from her, and she didn’t know how he could be walking at all.

His right leg had been torn by claws, long deep gashes that swept from his hip down to his knee. The gashes were clotted over but his pant leg—or what was left of his pant leg—was coated in dried blood. There were tears in his coat, too, at the shoulder and over part of his chest, and Mattie could see the wounds underneath the ragged flaps of clothing.

And skin, she thought with a sickening realization. Some of those flaps are his skin.

But his body wasn’t even the worst of it. The creature had swiped its needle-sharp claws over William’s face, tearing the flesh from his hairline to his jaw on the right side. The eye was sealed shut by black clotted fluid.

He should have been dead, or at least immobile. His wounds would have stopped a normal man. But William was not a normal man.

And he would do anything, anything, to capture her again, including roam half-dead through the woods in the night. She knew that. In William’s mind, she belonged to him, and he wasn’t about to let his possession go.

“I’m quite a sight, aren’t I, Mattie girl?” he said, and grinned. His grin was hideous, his teeth coated in blood, the claw marks contorting his face. “And you’ve led me on quite a chase. But you should have known better. God made you my wife, and a wife must submit to her husband and obey. You’ve defied the will of God and the will of your husband, but the Lord made certain I would find you again. He knows where you belong, even if you don’t.”

“I’m not your wife,” she said, backing away as he approached her, her hands raised to ward off an attack.

Why hadn’t she taken some weapon from the cabin—a knife, the axe, anything? Why had she let herself think that William might be gone forever? He would never be gone. He would always be there, following, if she tried to run.

“You are my wife. You have lived as my wife ever since you became a woman.”

“No,” Mattie said, and her voice was stronger than it had been a moment before. “You stole me. You killed my mother. You never married me. You only told me you did, told me I belonged to you, told me if I tried to leave someone would only return me to you. You beat me and starved me and made me think that everything I knew, all of my life before, was a dream, something that never happened.”

“Anything I did was only for your own good, Martha,” he said, and his voice was the frozen cold of winter.

That cold would have chilled her marrow even the day before, would have made her bend and submit. But now she saw that she was proof against it, that he only had power because she’d believed it.

“My name isn’t Martha,” she said.

His brows drew together and his left eye, the one that wasn’t damaged, was a roiling storm of fury, but his voice was still frosted over, calm and cold.

“Your name is Martha and you are my wife,” he said, like his saying it would make it true, would make her believe it again.

“My name isn’t Martha,” she said. “I don’t belong to you.”

She’d backed away from him, moving across the trail toward the cliffs. Now she realized how close she was to the edge, that if she took one step backward her foot would only find empty air.

I could fly away, she thought. I could fly into the sky and William would never be able to capture me again. I’d be free, free as a hawk, and I’d never again be a scurrying mouse for him to snap in his trap.

(Don’t be a little coward)

Samantha again, Samantha always harrying her, always pushing her to be stronger, to try harder, to fight.

I don’t want to fight anymore. I’m tired. I tried to fight him, to get away, and look where I am now.

(Yes look where you are now)

I don’t want to fight. I don’t want to hurt anymore. I just want to be free.

(Look where you are now)

It’s so hard.

(look)

“Come away from there now, Martha,” William said, and for the first time Mattie heard alarm in his voice. “You’re too close to the edge.”

He was closer to her now, less than three feet away. If he grabbed her, if he got hold of her with those powerful hands, then she would be lost. There would be nothing left of Samantha. She’d be