Save Me

The small prickle on the back of her neck, the feeling of the small hairs on her nape standing on end, should have been enough warning for her. The way her stomach clenched in nervousness and extreme anger should have told her to step down and leave without making a scene. The smug look on his face should have told her to watch where she stepped.

But she didn’t.

Rage, pure unveiled rage, boiled in the pit of her stomach, and a voice in the back of her mind whispered that she should leave. She blinked in mild shock at the suggestion. Leave? But…but why? He had insulted her. For the last time, he had made fun of one of her faults, one of her opinions on life. Why should she leave? He should leave, she thought childishly. It was her house, her home, where she had grown up and overcome the hatred felt towards her. It was her place. Her wolf den. If anyone left, it would be him.

“What’s the matter, babe?” he asked tauntingly. “Cat got your tongue? Or do you just realize that, once again, I am right?”

His eyes were laughing at her, she realized. Laughing and jeering at her silence. And knowing that she wouldn’t fight him. Simply because he knew she was too afraid to fight. He knew she was an obedient girl. And how she hated it. She wished, just once, that she could rebel against the people who held her chained. Just lash out, and destroy anything that got in her way. She wished she could. She wished.

“Hey, I asked you a question!”

She blinked and looked at her boyfriend. His smug look of victory was gone, replaced with one of anger for her disrespect. She hadn’t been listening to him, and it made him angry. To have a disrespectful girlfriend was shameful in his eyes. He stepped forward, his mammoth shoulders seeming to crush her against the wall. She pulled away, not wanting to feel his steely fingers grip her arm, before he hit her. She didn’t want to feel his fists pound against her again. No more, she silently begged.

His eyes widened in shock for a moment when he saw her shrink away from him. They hardened into an ocean-teal color, the color of waves crashing against a rocky shore, his anger scratching away at its cage in a desperate attempt to get out. She dared to cringe at his advance. It was pathetic, he thought. He grabbed her upper arms, his strong hands squeezing until she whimpered. She closed her eyes and bowed her head. <i>Please, don’t let him hit me</i>, she prayed in her mind.

“How many times have I told you? Huh? You’re thinking stupid thoughts again! Don’t you <i>realize</i> yet, that no one wants to listen to you? You’re not worth the time!”

His breath smelled of booze and cigarette smoke, and she clamped down on the wave of nausea that rolled over her. She squirmed slightly, trying to loosen his grip, but he only became angrier. He twisted her arm until it felt like it would break, and she whimpered again, feeling tongues of flame flick against her arm.

“Don’t you try to step away from me, bitch!” he bellowed in anger. She stifled a small sob, wishing in the back of her mind that she had never met this demon. She closed her eyes, knowing what he was going to do before he did it.

He drew his hand back and let it fly, knocking her to the ground in a single slap across the face. She yelped as she hit the floor, her face burning where his hand had landed. She scrambled madly, trying to get away before he could catch her again. His hand closed around her ankle, pulling her backwards, and she felt his fists pummeling against her back and sides as he rolled her over. Sobs wracked her body as the pain, sharp as a knife, cut into her system again. She curled into a small ball in fear, trying to protect herself, feeling his fists climb up her stomach to her chest. She screamed as a punch connected with the side of her face, and blackness closed in. A blackness, which she couldn’t escape, not this time. He kept beating her, long after she had passed out from a well-aimed blow to the side of the head. When he finally quit, she was bloody and torn, and his knuckles were bleeding. He rubbed them tenderly and climbed to his feet, turning his back on the girl sprawled across the floor. He didn’t even check her pulse. How was he to know that when he woke the next morning she would still be there, in the same position, unmoving, not breathing, never to see the sun rise again over the world in which she lived and loved? He didn’t. So he went to bed, unknowingly signing his own arrest warrant for murder.