I pull the chain again. Same result. This ignored, unused machine knows better than to start. This little cage isn’t the place to run a chainsaw. What am I going to do? Bring it upstairs with a roaring motor? I might open a wall in the elevator. I might cut the building in two. New York City is too fragile for me right now.
“She stays here with me.” I drop the chainsaw back into the crate and dig to the bottom of the one next to it, finding a little cardboard box.
“Why?”
“Because at some point, soon, I’m going to have to explain to her who the fuck you are.” I read the printing on the box. Wrong. I toss it and hunt for another. “And I don’t want you around, complicating the conversation.”
“About me being your wife?”
“Yeah.” Another box. Wrong again. “Sarah doesn’t have a nuanced idea of marriage.”
“None of them do. What I don’t understand is why it matters to you.”
The last box is labeled with the right size. I open it. Three spark plugs. I pluck one out and pocket it.
“I don’t have time to explain it.” Opening the motor cover, I find the old plug, and grunt as I remove it with my fingers. I have a wrench somewhere, but this is faster. “But having you around is going to hurt her, and I don’t want her hurt. So, good-bye.”
I grab the chainsaw and stand, facing her.
A light flashes from the parking lot behind her. Car headlamps. My team is doing what I told them and getting the fuck out of here.
“You don’t get to decide what hurt she bears. Not after what you did.” Willa steps forward, completely blocking the way out of the chain-link cage, touching nothing, hands folded in front of her, manicured thumbs tapping. The approach is utterly non-threatening and fully assured. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall give me a fucking headache.
“What I did was set us up to win a war you chose to fight with me.” I approach the exit with a chainsaw in my hand and she still won’t budge.
“While I was down there getting complacent, you were up here acting like a damn vicious monster.”
“I did what had to be done.”
“Bullshit. You changed. You’re regressing.”
“I want to protect her!”
“If you want to protect her, you’ll send her with me.”
Willa’s right.
I have fucking changed.
The man who kidnapped Sarah would use her as bait. He’d throw her back to the pack of wolves he stole her from. She’d return home a broken woman with horror stories bad enough to force them to pause, and in that pause, I’d attack.
None of that is going to happen.
Willa’s always right, and fuck her for it, but she’s only seen a slice of the truth.
Everything’s changed.
“Lock up on the way out.” I brush by her as I leave.
She’s perfectly capable of locking the cage, since she helped build it.
Breathless from running up the stairs, I burst into my apartment with the chainsaw.
We don’t have much time.
Crossing through the living room, I slide open a hidden door.
On my wedding night, Sarah heard Nico and Oria in his old apartment, which can only be accessed through mine. I’d walled it off from the hallway until he comes home. Matter of security. Didn’t stop them from walking through my residence to get to it.
I enter Nico’s bedroom like a hurricane and yank the bed away from the wall.
I put my ear against the cool plaster and hear a scratching sound from the other side, as if she’s clawing her way out, but gently.
Crouching, I open the chainsaw’s motor door and snap in a new spark plug. As I do this, I realize the gentle scritch-scritch is her drawing on the opposite side of the wall.
“Sarah.”
“Dario.” Her voice sounds far away.
“We’re leaving.” I close the motor cover.
“I’ll leave when I’m ready,” she says.
“Step away.”
“Why?”
I yank the chainsaw cord and it roars like a bear poked with a stick.
I bend and put the chain against the wall, squinting against flying plaster as I push the saw up and over, then back down to the floor, pulling it across the top of the molding. Then it sputters, kicks, and dies. Out of gas.
“Back up,” I call, then shove my shoulder into the wall. It cracks, and on the third hit, bends. I smash my body against it over and over, grunting, “Mine. Mine. Mine,” with every impact.
The wall drops with a pop and a spray of dust.
Sarah stands in the center of the room, sweet brown eyes wide as chocolate coins. A dozen walls could not keep me away from this woman.
Mine.
Neither of us move over the line separating us.
I have to tell her to get her toothbrush and underwear before her family comes to take her away, but she’s so beautiful, there’s nowhere to run.
“You’re ready.” I step forward, onto the fallen wall.
“You lied to me,” she says, stepping back.
“I told you our marriage wasn’t legal.” Forward again.
“You don’t get a medal for that.” She points at me while taking another step back. “You knew that if I knew you were already married—”
“You wouldn’t have obeyed me. Damn fucking right. You would have screwed your ass tight to your Colonia bullshit… your loyalty. Your upbringing. That trash fire of a wedding I saved you from.”
“You didn’t care who I married.”
“I didn’t!”
What am I saying?
Why is my face hot? Why am I shaking?
How did it come to this?
“That was then.” I put my hands on her shoulders. “This is now.”
Why is she crying? God damnit, why is she crying?
No. Comfort is too much of a distraction. I need to get her out of here before they take her away from me forever. Physically, she needs to be safe from the world. Her body is all I have control over. It’s the only safety I can guarantee. I’ll never be able to protect her heart and mind from me.
I bend, pick her up, and throw her over my shoulder.
CHAPTER 5
SARAH
Someone pulls Willa away, and her voice is lost behind a slamming door.
His own wife was trying to protect me, but I’m tired of being protected.
Dario throws me over his shoulder before I can tell him how sick to death of it I am.
“Stop!”
I just want this to stop. The taking. The forcing. The surprises and upheavals. But after Dario throws me over his shoulder, he doesn’t even pause before taking me down the stairs. I’m whipped around corners, blurring the windows at each landing.
Twisting my body, I jab my elbow into the back of his head until he stops on a concrete landing and roughly puts me on my feet.
“You want to stay here?” His shout echoes off the walls. “They’re coming for you.”
“Who?”
“I have no time to explain it to you.”
“Make time.”
“Your family. They’ll be here in under an hour, and you can either come with me or you can sit in that apartment and wait for them to come and take you back.”