The Love Triangle (BWWM Romance) (23 page)

Evelyn chuckled.

“Always a sense of humor,” she said. I glanced out the window in the kitchen again. I gave myself three seconds to pull myself together.

I didn’t have three seconds. I heard a car pull up before I got to two, and it parked behind Evelyn’s car. I heard car doors slam, saw Grace turn around. The question on her face changed to something that looked like horror.

“What the hell are you doing here?” a man shouted, and I recognized the voice.

“Shit,” I said and ran out the house.

“Justin?” Evelyn called after me, but there was no time to explain. By the time I reached them, Elijah had Grace in a death grip with both hands clamping her upper arms. She begged him to stop, but he was shaking her.

The first thing I thought of was the fact that he was manhandling her. Almost at the same time I thought about her head injury, the concussion she’d had, the memory loss, and I doubted shaking her like that was good for her head.

“Let her go!” I shouted, jumping down the porch steps and running to them. It was like Elijah didn’t hear me. His eyes were wild and manic, with dilated pupils and whites showing all around the irises. He wasn’t drunk, but he was on something.

“I said let her go,” I said when I reached them, and tried to get him to let go of her arm, but if anything he gripped her tighter. She cried out, and behind me I heard Evelyn. She’d made it onto the porch and she was mumbling “oh my Gosh, oh my Gosh, oh my Gosh.”

Whatever Grace had told her, it had caused her to understand that Elijah was bad news. Half of me was relieved that finally someone realized he really was a bad guy. The other half was pissed that it had to come out with an example like this.

Elijah still wouldn’t let Grace go. It was like I wasn’t even there, and for all my shouting and trying to pry his fingers loose he kept going like they were alone.

So I did the only other thing I could think of. I pulled my hand back and hit him. I hit him in the face hard enough for him to stumble. In doing so, he finally let her go and she crumpled to the ground, one hand on her upper arm.

“Get her out of here,” I called over my shoulder to Evelyn. She jumped into action immediately and coaxed Grace into getting up. Elijah was coming round, shaking off the stun that had come with the hit, and he turned those crazed eyes to me. As I watched they filled with rage and I understood why so many people around town feared him. I don’t know how many have seen his ugly side, but I knew that Grace was right to run from him.

He swung at me and he was fast. He hit me on the jaw. He may have been small, but his body was compact, solid muscle. If he was drunk I’d have had that on my side, but whatever he was on just made him seem invincible. I knew it wasn’t real, but he didn’t really feel pain, not the way he should have.

I would have guessed it was drugs if I had enough time to think about it. I backed up, trying to recover from the white spots that danced in my vision from the hit. I was disorientated, but I managed to shake it off. I hadn’t been in a lot of fights in my life, but I knew that I had to get my head about me if I wanted to save myself at all.

“You have no idea how long I’ve wanted to do that,” Elijah said to me and his voice sounded like a sneer. He walked toward me, but he kept his body low like he’d had some form of training. If that was the case, I was in trouble.

He moved toward me, keeping his body low. I mimicked him. I hadn’t had formal training, but I knew that if I copied what he was doing maybe I could save myself. He launched for me, crying out as he did with something that sounded animalistic rather than human. I tried to step out of the way but he caught me with his arms around my waist and tackled me to the ground. A sharp pain shot into my elbow on impact, but I didn’t have time to think about it. He pulled back a fist and aimed for my face.

I did what I’d seen animals do in fights. I twisted my body. It worked in nature, and by some miracle it worked for me. Elijah lost his balance and it gave me the leverage I needed. We rolled over the ground and I tasted sand in my mouth. We wrestled on the ground, and each of us got punches in, but none were as lethal as our first blows had been. The angle was awkward and we got in our own way more than anything else.

I ended up on top and I slugged him in the face. His eyes rolled back, but then he came back and that same rage was in his face. He curled his lips back and snarled at me. I was vaguely aware of the women on the porch, shouting things at us, but I didn’t pay attention to what they were trying to say.

A shot suddenly sounded, and I ducked instinctively. It gave Elijah the time to knock me hard on the ear, and it messed up my balance. I fell to the side, my left ear ringing. Elijah didn’t seem worried about the shot.

That could mean one of two things. He was far enough gone that he was running on bare emotion, or he was the one that had organized the gun. I glanced at the porch, and the women were gone. I hoped they were hiding inside.

I didn’t have a lot of time to think. Elijah was on top of me now, and he was raining punches on my face. My head spun and my vision started to dim, blackening around the edges. I heard my nose crack and I was pretty sure it was broken. It was like I was detached, watching it all from somewhere else.

But I would feel it later.

I don’t know how I did it, but I managed to get out of the locked position with Elijah on top of me. I knocked him to the ground and pressed both hands to my nose. Blood gushed onto my shirt and my vision swam. From the corner of my eye Elijah was running at me. I stepped to the side, tried to get away from him. Another shot sounded, and it was like something bit me in my shoulder. It was hard and sudden, and a searing pain washed through my body before concentrating in one spot on my shoulder. I cried out and forgot about my nose.

I was on the ground curling with pain before I registered what was going on. Elijah stood over me, heaving, face gleaming like he’d just won a great battle. From somewhere behind him another person appeared.

From my angle on the ground ,he was huge. He was four times Elijah’s size, with so much bulging muscle it looked like his t-shirt was going to pop right off. He wore all black and he had wrap-around sunglasses on his head that made him seem heartless. Maybe he was.

He held a gun in one hand, hanging loosely by his side. He was the one that had fired the shots. And hit me in the shoulder.

“We need to get out of here,” he said to Elijah.

“Not yet. I still need to get the girl.”

“The police will arrive soon, after hearing the shots. Someone’s going to squeal.”

“Dammit, Kyle!” Elijah shouted and Kyle pursed his lips. His face didn’t betray much. It was hard to tell what he was thinking with his sunglasses on. It made him look rough, and for a moment I wondered if he thought about shooting Elijah. But then Kyle lifted the gun and pointed it at me.

Looking down the barrel of a gun was horrible. It was a black, bottomless pit that held every single regret. I felt myself breathing harder and faster, until it went over into hyperventilation. The inconsistent rise and fall of my chest made my shoulder hurt, and my head was throbbing. The blood on my face had started to dry.

“Just fucking finish him,” Elijah said, and his eyes were cold and dead. Fear pulled over me like blanket.

A police siren suddenly made a whoop sound and then there were officers everywhere with guns pointed at Elijah and Kyle.

“Drop your weapon!” they ordered. Kyle hesitated. He looked like he just wanted to start shooting. But then the moment of tension passed, and he slowly bent down, laying his gun on the ground. He held up his hands way above his head.

“Get on your knees, hands behind your head!” a police officer shouted again, and Kyle did as he was told without thinking twice. Elijah didn’t do what he was told. He cried out and launched for the gun. They shot at him before he managed to pick it up, and he fell to the ground, swearing. I heard screams from inside the cottage, the first sign that the women were there and alright.

Everything after that happened as if there were parts left out. Maybe I blacked out. The police were suddenly on Kyle, cuffing him. An ambulance arrived on scene. Before I knew it I was strapped onto a gurney and they were loading me into the van. Grace was suddenly next to me, and her face was streaked with tears.

“Justin,” she said, crying. But then the van was closed and we were moving. I heard paramedics call out my vitals, but I don’t remember ending up in the hospital. I just remember a lot of darkness, soft and warm, welcoming.

Chapter 22 - Grace

The police came in the nick of time.  A moment later and Justin would have been dead. Evelyn and I had been watching through the window, saw the big hit man train his gun on Justin, and there had been nothing we could do but cry and grab onto each other.
 

If we ran out, the guy was going to shoot at us. It didn’t take much to know that.

The ranch owner had phoned the police when they’d heard gun shots. They’d seen Elijah’s car come by and known there was trouble – they didn’t know the car and they saw him dropping off the big guy by a clump of trees before he drove to the cottage.

The police still aren’t sure how they managed to find us, but they think the big guy, who turned out to be a wanted convict named Kyle Waterson, had tabs on everything that was happening.

The thought that someone had been following us, with intentions to kill Justin, left me cold.

The police had taped off the cottage and immediate garden. Elijah was beaten up, bleeding from his nose, a split lip and an eye that was going to be black in a couple of hours. But he swore at the policemen when they rushed to him to cuff him.

They’d shot him in the leg and he was wildly unhappy about it.

When they’d taken Justin away, Evelyn and I sat huddled under a blanket on the porch. We were both freezing, even though it was middle of the summer. We watched the police clear up the crime scene. Kyle was taken away immediately. Elijah was patched up first and then he was taken away too.

And finally, a plainclothes officer came to us with a notebook. He took our statements. I hated it. I didn’t want to replay what had happened word for word, but I did.

“I’d like to lay a charge for domestic abuse,” I said after we’d told him everything.

“I’ll add that to the list. He’s already going to be charged for assault, attempted murder, resisting arrest and assisting attempted murder.”

It sounded terrible. It was hard to think that the man I thought I knew so well turned out to be such a criminal.

“Are you going to search his house?” I asked.

“We have no reason to do it just yet, although we do believe he’s under the influence of something. As soon as we get the blood test results we’ll know.”

“Search his office, when you do,” I said. “I don’t know what he’s hiding, but it’s what started all this.”

The office nodded and made a note. A paramedic looked us both over but we suffered from shock and trauma, nothing else. We were lucky, they said.

And I really believed we were.

I’d seen more of the hospital in the last couple of weeks than I ever wanted to see in a lifetime. The irony didn’t pass me by. It was like after everything, we’d come full circle. Justin was asleep for days. The nurses said that it wasn’t a coma, just much-needed sleep, but it always seemed like every time I was there, he just wasn’t.

I sat next to his bed. I watched the steady rise and fall of his chest and told myself it was a good thing that he was stable. He looked terrible. He had a hard strip of padded plastic across his nose. He would always have a kink in his nose, the doctor had said, but other than that he would be okay.

The skin around his nose and his eyes had gone a purple-black, both eyes darkened from the break. His lip was split down the middle and dried in a dark red line, and the side of his jaw was an angry purple and swollen.

I wondered if this was what I’d looked like when I’d woken up in the hospital. I knew now that my bruises and injuries, besides the lump on my head, weren’t from the accident. It had been Elijah, but it was easy for him to chalk it up to the accident after I was brought into the hospital.

In a lot of ways, the accident was convenient for him. Yes, it was sad that I’d woken up not remembering that he and I were together. But because of that, I’d also not remembered everything that had happened. Everything he’d done to me.

I had a lot of time to think, sitting next to Justin’s bed, waiting for the time to pass so that he would finally open his eyes.

There were thoughts and feelings I’d had at the beginning, when I’d just woken up in the hospital that made more sense now. Like the fear I’d had of Elijah, my inability to trust him, even though it just didn’t make sense. I replayed everything that had been said, and looked at it in a different way, started seeing underlying things that had really been said but I’d missed it.