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“No, wait. Wait, Nick, listen to me, you have to listen to me.”

"Beth's fine", she adds, and I cease immediately.

“She’s fine, I promise. She’s at home, or must be. She’s safe at home.”

I read the half truth in her face. She wasn’t completely lying, but she wasn’t being completely honest either.

"Spit it out, just spit it out before I lose my goddamn mind." I bark at her, trying to calm my racing heart and failing miserably. Something wasn't fitting, something terrible was about to happen. And I have no idea how to deal with the awful premonition.

"Is this yours, this paper? Is this yours?" she questions anxiously, waving a sheet of paper in front of me. I try to focus on it, on the contents of the paper, and end up getting more confused by the minute.

"Yes, Kate", I answer, having no idea where she was going with this.

"It's the paper from Doctor's Hayden's sessions, when he asked Beth to draw something pleasant and she ended up drawing this".

"But what is it doing here?" she asks, still not explaining why she was being this worried, and fretful.

"It must have slipped from my pocket. I kept it folded in my jacket so she wouldn't have to see it. I was wearing the same one to her session and I forgot it there, I guess."

"But why don't you want her to look at it, Nicholas", she whispers, still vague, and I've had enough.

"What's with all the twenty questions, damn it", I snap, getting worked up at her deliberate vagueness. She keeps her eyes down while tears pool in her eyes.

And that's when I know that something's very wrong.

“Hey, don’t cry, come on Kate. Look, it’s not that I don’t want her to look at it so much as she doesn’t
want
to look at it. It makes her angry for some reason, and Dr. Hayden thinks it probably reminds her of____", I trail off, and a God-awful realization sinks in the pit of my stomach as I jerk her shoulders in agony, stunning us both.

"What is it?" I question calmly in direct contrast to my inner turmoil. With Beth's permission, I had discussed those sessions with Kate but I hadn't shown her those drawings, having hidden them and then promptly dismissing them.

"What does it mean, Kate?" I roar loud enough to alert the other guests in the parlor. But I was gone past the stage of caring.

"Cufflinks", she gushes, and the whole place grows quiet. Not a single soul ventures another word. Silence descends like vultures, grabbing each and every one of us by the throats. No one speaks, no one moves, and everyone understands.

It wasn’t an outsider.

"Are you sure, are you absolutely sure", Drew whispers, while I stand stupefied like the rest of them.

“I gave it to him, on Christmas eve, I gave it to him, Nicholas.”

And for the second time this evening, I'm struck dumb and mute with horror, accompanied with the slithering edge of a terrifying sickening awareness.

He wasn’t here.

***********************************************

I drive my car like a fanatic, like the hounds of hell were after me. In a way they were.

I have no idea how I managed to unlock my knees and race towards my car. No idea how I managed to insert my keys with shaking fingers. As I sped towards the house with inhuman speed, my only thought was Beth's safety.

Only to get sucker-punched in the gut by the scene spread before me in the middle of the road, by the valley of Cider.

The human mind is a mystery. It can process an image in roughly 13 milliseconds. Coincidentally, it can flash your entire life before you within that time too. A fraction of a second is what it takes to turn your mind to mush and to freeze the breath in your body. Because a fraction of a second is all that is required to contemplate the scene in front of you, to feel your soul paralyze inch by bloody inch in mute terror and rising fury.

I couldn't call her, couldn't reach out to her. Could do nothing but watch as he points a pistol on her head, as he shoves and pushes her into the shady depths of the forests, into the wild and under the dome of the ancient trees which had given the valley it's name. He hadn't seen me yet, his back is facing my front, but then he wasn't paying much attention to the far end of the road, or the hidden car parked behind a cocoon of trees on the parallel path directly opposite to his. Still, I couldn't discount his hearing or the fact that a small misstep could alert him of my step and cost me her life. The way he stood jerking the gun between her head and torso, and laughing maniacally with a drunken swagger told me he wasn't completely lucid or sane, which made him dangerous and unpredictable. But then he wasn’t completely insane either, which made him cautious.

I get out of the car keeping my eyes trained on them and quickly follow behind, deeper and deeper into the woods until I see them standing on the very edge of the cliff, see her poised on the precipice of the valley, braced for the plunge as he shoves her again, looming over her. And my heart leaps to my throat.

No, God. NO

She looks at me then, and I see it. The helplessness she has lived with, the constant fear of having to watch your back, the constant flinching from the shadows, see the pain of losing one's self, of having to feel your soul twist in agony. Every day she lived with it, every night she slept with it, and every morning she opened her eyes to face yet another day. Rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat. I look into her eyes, my blue eyes, and in them I see my life passing away, see it collide and end with hers right here on this slippery path if she took one step further.

I trap her gaze in mine for what may have seemed like an eternity, yet it was but a brief look of reassurance. It's all the luxury I could afford for myself for now. As if she understood, as if she sensed my resolve, she takes a small determined breath and prepares herself for the questions that were trapped inside her chest, and the answers that would most likely crush mine.

"Why, Ryder"?

"Why she asks?" he laughs like a loon, waving the pistol in a sick dance of mockery and death. With one hand, he grasps her chin, holding it in a vice-like grip, shaking and squeezing. I fist my hand around a thorny branch, drawing blood on my palm to stop myself from circling his throat in my hands and squeeze the life right out of him.

"Because I could", he sings in a vicious melody, "because I wanted to. Had wanted to since the first time you turned up that snotty nose on me, you stupid
uptight bitch
.
I
ask you out, finesse all the details and arrangements for a nice romantic evening with you, and what do you say? What do you say, you foolish bitch? You say you don’t want to. You aren’t i
nterested
, that we can only be friends,
FRIENDS!

Huh! And what do I see next? I see you going out with your poster boy for friendship with whom you share a roof, ready and willing to commit moral incest with him. You should've been punished for it. I told everyone what was going on, informed your father, your legal guardians,
my
legal guardians for fuck's sake. And he tells me to stop gossiping and mind my own business. My own father, the mayor. The gutless unfeeling swine. So I took matters in my own hand. Haha. My own hands, pun intended. And I plotted and plotted. But then, as nature would have it, I see history on repeat with my brother. And this time I see your asshole boyfriend beat the shit out of him. And what does that foolish brother of mine do? Lie back and take it. And that's when I had an epiphany, and everything fell into place. We were brothers, Taylor and I, and we fell for the same girl. So it was only fair that we shared you. So that's what we did. We shared you".

She stands like a statue, not a syllable spoken, not a hint of movement, and my heart breaks for us, it breaks all over again. The only sign of life in her were the steady stream of tears that tumble down her eyes full of rage, replacing the earlier helplessness and fear. And then she spits on him.

"You filthy slut", he snarls, backhanding her as she falls to the ground with the muzzle end of the pistol pointed at her forehead. I control my labored breathing and focus on picking the heaviest, sharpest rock off the ground and imagine bashing him repeatedly with it, until his brains leaked out of his ears.

"We spent the entire summer planning", he continues, satisfied when she makes no attempt to stand up and spit on him again.

"And then finally, we put our plans into action at our very first opportunity. We researched your drivers, the man who was scheduled to drive you to the airport on Christmas Eve and replaced him with our inside man, after abducting and disposing off the driver, of course. He drugged you and carried you to the abandoned music room in the basement of the oldest school in the history of Cider valley, two miles away from St Ann's. And then he began to negotiate with us on the price. Wanted a bigger cut to keep his mouth closed, he said. Foolish guy. I accepted all his terms, produced a check for all expenses incurred, opened a bottle of stolen beer and offered him a drink. And watched him die, choking and sputtering like a rat, as was advertised by the poison. No loose ends", he chirps, gesticulating a pair of scissors in the air.

“I wanted to go first. There were a lot of firsts with you. I had saved them for you. And since I was older, it was only fair. So I went first and then asked Taylor to take a turn, making him watch the whole time. But the wimp was pathetic; turned chicken shit on me. He didn’t enjoy your screams the way I did. Couldn’t get it up for God’s sake, the stupid sissy. So I gave you another hefty dose of the date rape drug and went at you again. And again. And again. Rung you dry. By the time I finished, you were barely whimpering. So I threw you on the road side and that was that. I wanted to kill you, wanted to watch those eyes glaze with emptiness, but Taylor voted against it. You wouldn’t have remembered anything, anyways.”

I almost hit him there and then. Almost killed him right there. But I had to let him finish. Had to listen to this vicious recitation of his sins before I could act on it.

"And watching your sap of a boyfriend sob and whine for you was a side benny. For years, I saw him suffer and agonize over every little mention of your name, so I mentioned you a lot. I befriended Kate, and to my wild wild surprise, discovered she was as gone for me as I was for you. Turns out my obsession with you turned me blind to others. But now you were gone, and she was a nice piece of ass. Plus she was your soul sister. Pleasure by proxy and all that shit. Everything was cruising smoothly."

Nope. Not gonna kill him with a rock. I’m going to do it with my bare hands, going to feel the satisfaction of peeling his skin from his flesh, his flesh from his bones, and break each one of them.

“But then you came back. And everything became hazy. Ragged. I watched you with him, watched him watch you with thin concealed hunger, watched you reciprocate his
love
", he spits on the ground, narrowly missing her face, "and I hated it, hated you. And then you go and make everyone suspicious, start freaking remembering things, start psychiatric sessions for God sake. Kate was handy, she kept me updated, but she wasn't very forthcoming with details."

He frowns into space, and Beth scrapes her nails on the ground.

“Only today, she accidentally spilled about how you had a session with the shrink where you drew something which reminded you about the rapist.
Me, the rapist
And the stupid chit told me that Nicholas knows about those sessions. Beat that, you loony bitch. What was he doing with you? Aren't sessions supposed to be private and confidential? The doctors today have no medical ethics. So now I have to take the trouble to kill you, and plant evidence towards potential suicide. But first you'd have to tell me what you drew", he leers, pointing the muzzle on her head. "I need to do damage control, you fool, so you need to tell me what you keep drawing during one of your wacky episodes, and where is that bullshit piece of paper?."

"No", she speaks in a clear sharp voice. "No, I will not. You'd kill me if I told you, you'll kill me if I didn't. You've dug your own grave by bringing me here, and now, you'll lie in it. I'd never kill myself this way, never hurt my family and you'll never convince them. I love Nicholas, and he loves me, and that's enough reason for me to want to live. You'll never convince him otherwise, and soon, very soon, he'll come after you."

I take careful aim of his pistol and signal Beth to throw her handful of dirt on his face as soon as I nodded.