Ryder

thirty nine

Ryder's POV

"There's someone in here."

Big doe eyes, the warmest shade of brown--so frightened in the dark.

"Can you hold still and let me undo your fucking ropes?"

Her hands reaching out for me, fingers cold, hesitant.

"What's your name?"

Her wide eyes search mine, afraid and confused and refusing--"N-No. I'm not...I will not...Please."--refusing to tell me her name. So goddamn terrified. I was thinking irrationally because all I wanted to do was erase that look from her eyes. Even when I didn't know who she was.

"We have to go," I repeat, gritting out the words, feeling the fight of pure anger and frustration within me.

"R-Ryder." She says my name--she'd said it for the first time. "I don't want to leave. I...I don't want to leave."

I blinked once, twice, and looked down at Alice who was still in my arms, holding onto me as if she was terrified--she is, I repeated the words in my head--of everything and maybe even me.

It was a bewildering thought, one that made me want to punch something, but a lot was making me want to break something with my fists or shoot bullets into someone's fucking head, so I had to restrain it all. At least for now. Because I would unleash it, I was saving it all for him. Michael Sullivan. I will ruin him, I reassured myself--and even those words in my head weren't calming enough. I felt it in my bones, over my skin, the fury I wanted to unleash, how I wanted to burn everything but especially him--ruin him for hurting Alice. For hurting my querida.

He'd done it, dared to touch her, force her when she'd not wanted a single second of it. He'd kept touching her without her consent. The rage I felt inside me only seemed to increase the more I thought of it, the more I thought of the last I'd seen him with his hands on Alice before I bashed his fucking face into the mirror and the broken shards of glass. It was pure, agonizing fury I felt within my fists and I was going to watch that fucker die in the slowest and most painful of tortures. I was going to enjoy every fucking second of it. I'd make him hurt the way he'd hurt my Alice. I would make him regret every single second of his pathetic life.

And then I'd finish him off with a motherfucking bullet between his eyes.

Out of instinct, I curled my fingers into the soft, warm locks of Alice's hair before letting go. She stirred a little, exhausted from crying so much (and every second of it, of watching and hearing those cries leaving her lips, had been a gripping pain I had never once felt before--an emotion I hadn't thought myself capable of feeling), and slumped further against my bare torso.

I glanced down at her, at the top of her head, and then I was thinking of it again, because my brain kept going back to it and it was stuck--stuck at the Alice I'd first met, scared and confused as she'd cowered away from me in that crumbling old cellar. She'd carried the same haunted look in her eyes, reached for me the same way she did now.

I don't want to leave, she'd said to me. I don't want to leave.

She'd not wanted to leave that godforsaken old cellar back then. I had thought it was the hazy senses making her act that way, think that way. I'd thought they must've drugged her up because those fuckers in white coats had done the same to every other prisoner stuck in those cells. But maybe I had been wrong. Could it be that she'd refused to walk away, refused to leave, because she couldn't have thought of going back home? Home, where maybe that fucking bastard of her sister's boyfriend waited for her?