I didn’t know if it was a joke. It had to be, right? “Danny… are you threatening me?”
There was a brief pause of silence, which allowed me the hope that he was going to break out in laughter and tell me he was sorry for playing such an awful trick on me.
But that didn’t happen.
“Danny.” My intentions were clearer. “I asked you if you were threatening me.”
His silence turned into a growl. “Yes, Hannah. I believe I am.”
Chapter Ten
Charlie
I had been overseas for a week, but my phone was still accepting calls. It just wasn’t accepting any from Hannah, because she wasn’t calling me. I didn’t want to bombard her. I remembered the training at Ft. Bragg. It was terrible. And I’m sure it’s even more terrible for her. You can take tests, you can run five miles, and you can even jump out of airplanes, but in those thirty-eight days, you learn that this shit is real.
You learn that at some point, you will have to try to kill someone, because at some point, someone will be trying to kill you. When that realization hits, everything changes. You can’t go back. And, for a good number of days, you can’t stop throwing up your lunch.
I didn’t envy her the torture she was currently going through. I had told her before: from the moment I met her, I never wanted that life for her. After what happened to her father, I still couldn’t believe that she wanted it for herself.
I was stuck at our makeshift base, doing nothing but looking at pictures that my men had taken while doing recon. It sucked, but I couldn’t fight. I was no good to them with a bum leg. God forbid something went wrong out there, I’d be a sitting duck, and asking them to stay behind and help me would be a death sentence for all of them. It was much better this way.
And hey, if nothing else, at least they let me tag along. I’d be half dead by now if I were sitting at home alone doing nothing but thinking about how I could win over Hannah. Hell, I was almost doing just that now, but at least these pictures gave me some sort of purpose.
My phone rang. I jumped at the prospect of her being on the other line, but quickly calmed myself down when I realized it was just the boss man.
“Madison.” I spoke quickly into the phone, as if he was distracting me from something overly important.
“Just wanted to check in. How’s the team doing?” He spoke as if we were talking about our old high school chums.
I wasn’t buying it. “You know they’re fine. I just sent you a report.” I stopped holding the phone to my ear with my shoulder, realizing quickly that this was going to be one of those kinds of conversations. “What’s really going on, Pops?”
He sucked at his teeth; I could hear it over the phone. I did the same thing when I was avoiding something. It was obvious that he didn’t want to have the conversation we were about to have. Suddenly, I became very worried.
“Dad, what happened?”
“Nothing!” He quickly eased my mind. “Nothing.”
“So…” I knew there was more.
“Son, I hate to ask this, but have you spoken with Hannah?”
I sat back in my chair, shaking off the complete stupidity of this. “No. I told you. I don’t talk to Hannah any more.”
“And I told her mother that…” He paused. “But she’s worried about her and asked me to call you.”
“Dad, I’m not going to play relationship counselor for you two. But tell your fiancé that I don’t keep watch over Hannah. If she wants to know what’s wrong, she has to ask her daughter herself.”
“Of course. Sorry to bother you, Charlie.”
I just about hung up the phone, but I stopped, and he knew it. Neither of us said anything for a good ten seconds.
“She’s fine, Charlie.” He assured me, knowing I was too stubborn to ask. “She’s just having a bit of an issue with this doctor guy, but I’m sure it’s nothing she can’t handle.”
I couldn’t help it. I was trying to act unfazed, but with that little piece of information, I exploded. “That bull brained doctor that saw me at the hospital? That’s still going on?”
He tried to calm me down. “It’s not important, Charlie.”
“The fuck it isn’t.”
I hung up with my father and dialed Hannah’s number. I had been trying to respect her decision to put all her efforts into this leg of her training, but if she was spending her spare moments fucking some snot nosed, goody-two-shoes doctor, then I wasn’t going to keep quiet any long.
“Charlie?” Her voice cracked with weariness.
“Yeah, it’s Charlie. Did you forget about me?” I spat.
“What…” It was obvious my call had woken her up. “What are you talking about?”
“I ask you to run away with me and instead you go fuck that doctor?”
There was a pause, and then in the background I heard a deeply muffled voice.
Hannah came back to the phone. Her demeanor had changed. “Hey, can I call you back?”
“Hannah, what just…” I tried to decipher the sudden change, but she cut me off with nothing short of a whisper.
“Charlie… he’s here.”
And then the phone went silent.
Chapter Eleven
Hannah
“Who were you talking to sweetums?” Danny stood above my bed, holding my phone between his fingers. “Who called you this late at night?”
His voice sounded sweet, but his intentions were anything but. Even in the darkness, with only a tiny stream of light coming through the window from the front porch, I could tell that there was something sinister in his stare.
He had also managed to break into someone’s house with no one the wiser… Yes, I would say his intentions were frightening at best.
“A call from Charlie, huh?” He searched my call history. “Whatever was he calling about at this hour?” Danny took a step closer to the edge of my bed as I scooted back. In that moment, I cursed myself for not staying on base. He would never have been able to get to me if I were in the barracks. Here, in the middle of nowhere, I was a sitting duck.
“I don’t know why he was calling.” My voice cracked. “You hung up on him.”
He set my phone down on the desk and lowered himself onto the edge of the bed. He reached his hand out, placing his cool touch on my knee. “You will not be talking to him anymore. Do you understand me?”
Maybe I was tired, maybe I was over it, or maybe it was a mixture of both, but I lost it.
“Who the fuck do you think you are? You do not, I repeat…” I raised my finger to him, letting him know I was absolutely serious. “You do not have the power or the right to tell me who I am and who I am not allowed to talk to. I’m a fucking adult and I’ll do as I damn well please.”
Danny stood. I thought that was the end of it. I thought I had made my point and had proven it all in the same vein.
But I was very wrong.
Before I knew it, he had me pinned up against the headboard, his hand encompassing my neck. I tried to fight, but my exhaustion from the constant Special Forces training outweighed my ability to use any of those tactical skills against him. I kicked, I tried to scream, and I even tried to claw at his arms. Nothing was stopping his grip. Nothing was calming him down. I thought at any second I could lose consciousness.
But finally, he released me, without so much as an apology.
“I just wanted to remind you of your place.” He stood from his spot.
I wanted to say something back to him, warning that I wasn’t going to give into his threats so easily, but I couldn’t speak. My throat was searing from his hold.
“You… you…” I scratched out, but he was right back at my side.
“Shhh… Hannah.” He ran his fingers through my hair. “You don’t have to talk right now. Just go back to sleep. Things will make much more sense in the morning.”
“No they won’t.” I argued, not caring any longer how much it hurt to talk. “Everything will be the same. I will still be the
girl who isn’t scared of you, and you will still be a psychopath.”
He started laughing. His laugh was eerily sinister, haunting even. And I was only being half honest with him. I was scared. I thought I could take care of myself. I thought I was a good judge of character. But I was the one who allowed him into my life. I allowed him to get close. And now he was refusing to leave.
And he didn’t seem like the type of guy who would take ‘no’ for an answer.
“You know…” he placed his hand around the back of my neck. He didn’t squeeze, and he didn’t try to hurt me. It more so felt that he was claiming me as his own. And I froze. “I always admired psychopaths. The way they can go about their everyday lives and no one knows the darkness inside of them… the way that even their closest friends are in the dark about their true nature… the way they never get caught.”
He kissed my shoulder. And then he kissed it again. I don’t know why I didn’t just flip on him then, but his words, his tone had me frozen.
“Did you know,” he giggled like a little boy, “that psychopaths actually have an underdeveloped part of the brain?” He almost waited for an answer from me, but quickly decided it wasn’t worth his time. He knew I wasn’t about to engage in his little game. “Yeah, it’s that part of the brain that’s responsible for emotion regulation and impulse control. So, if I really were a psychopath, I wouldn’t be able to control my impulses.”
He grabbed my hand, placing it on his hard cock. I quickly snatched it away, which seemed to both anger and excite him.
“Oh, come on. You’ve done it before. You’ll do it again.” His voice seethed.
“I don’t want to touch you ever again.” I growled, finally feeling my voice coming back. “Now get out of my bed and out of this house.”
“Don’t kick me out, Hannah.” He was so close I could almost taste his breath.
“Don’t tell me what to do, Danny. If I scream, Amanda will be in here in a second. And then you’ll have to take down both of us.”
With that, Danny stood, raising his hands in the air. “Hey, I don’t want to take down anyone, Hannah. I just think you need to reconsider our relationship.”
“We don’t have a relationship!” I yelled, half hoping Amanda would rush in and save me, even if it were from nothing more than the rest of this conversation. “You just choked me.” I was honestly trying to figure out if he remembered attacking me.
“Oh come on.” He laughed, dropping his hands to his side. “That was all in good fun.”
“It wasn’t. Not at all.” I looked at him, complete shock flushing my face.
“I thought you liked it rough?” He half questioned, half teased.
“I…I…” I mean… I did… but did he think what he did, how he was talking was… sexy? Did he think I was aroused by his attack?
“Danny.” I calmed myself, trying to understand what was going on. “What do you think is going on here?”
He grabbed the chair out from under the desk and sat down. He stared at me for a few seconds, and then sighed.
“I wasn’t ready to lose you. I… I really like you, Hannah. You’re fun and spunky and you fight for what you want. You’re strong and sassy and I just think we’re really good together. I can understand that you’re busy, but I felt these last two weeks that you were purposely pulling away, and I didn’t understand why you would do that. Sure, this sucks, but at the end of it, if I get you back, then the wait was worth it.”
Now my head was spinning. This made sense. This was the guy I had met. This was the guy who had me smiling, even if it were only for a week. And I guess… well, I guess I could see where he was coming from?
He cleared his throat and kept going. “I want you to give us a chance. That’s all I’m asking.”
“Then what was all this tonight?” I finally chimed in. “Because that was something completely different than what you’re telling me now.”
“You were…” He grabbed my phone off the desk and tossed it to me. “You were talking to Charlie. After the amount of effort I have put in to remind you that I’m here and that I’m waiting for you, I show up to surprise you and you’re talking to him.”
“And that means you go bonkers?” I was still trying to figure him out.
“No. It means I was trying to give you what you wanted. You want Charlie. So I tried to give you what Charlie would give you.”
I rubbed my temples, trying to see this situation through his eyes.
“You don’t know Charlie. You also don’t know that I want Charlie.”
He shrugged. “I saw how he treated you the day I met you… and even though he spoke to you that way… I also saw how you looked at him.”
Could I blame him? Did I give him the wrong impression of me? He knew I was strong- did he think I was going along with his attack? Did he really think that I was turned on?
I mean, it turned him on.
I was so confused. And what was possibly worse was that I was honestly giving him the benefit of the doubt. It was a miscommunication; that was all. It would never happen again, as long as I didn’t want it to. So who was I not to forgive him?
I yawned, tired from both lack of sleep and from trying to piece this puzzle together.
“I think I need to go back to sleep, Danny.”
He nodded, letting me know that he completely understood. “Can I…” He struggled to get out the words. “Stay with you tonight?”
I didn’t want to go down this path, but his question was so sincere. I didn’t know how to say ‘no’ to him.
So I smiled (albeit a fake smile) and moved over, offering him a spot in the bed. He quickly shimmied next to me, and kissed me on the cheek.
“I’m sorry that I scared you, Hannah.” He wrapped his arm around me, spooning me into his form.
“It’s okay.” I whispered, although deep down, I didn’t feel okay about it at all.
“And hey,” he laughed, “If I really wanted to hurt you, I have unlimited access to Succinylcholine.”
I laughed along with him, hoping to God that it was a joke. Succinylcholine a depolarizing muscle relaxant. It stops the muscles from contracting, paralyzing the muscles in the face and those used to breathe and move.
So yeah, if he really wanted to hurt me, he absolutely could.
And I had just let him crawl into bed with me.
Chapter Twelve
Charlie
I tried to get a hold of Hannah the next day to make sure she was all right, but my calls kept going to voice mail. I tried not to worry; knowing she wouldn’t be able to have her phone on her while in training, but the suspense was too much to handle. Finally, I shot her a text asking her if she needed me to come home or send someone to get her, but she assured me that everything was okay. Apparently, it was all a misunderstanding.
Fuck a misunderstanding. She sounded worried, even frightened. If I weren’t stuck overseas, I would completely ignore her promise that she was ‘fine’, and I would see to her well being myself.
But my hands were tied. And my leg… well, that was still broken.
A week later, we made our way stateside, having accomplished what needed to be done during our reconnaissance mission. I figured it was just the time to make a follow up appointment with my favorite doctor, Dr. Danny Falk.
“Dr. Goldrick will be with you shortly.” The nurse smiled at me before sneaking out of the room.
“Hold on.” I called out to her.
“Everything okay, Mr. Madison?” She peeked her face back in.
I corrected her. “I’m supposed to see Dr. Falk.”
“Oh!” She chuckled, coming back into the room. “I’m sorry; I thought you knew. Dr. Falk took a temporary position at another hospital while he’s dealing with a personal matter.”
She almost excused herself again, but I stopped her.
“Where? Is the hospital nearby? I don’t mind going to him.” I was oddly calm on the outside, considering the fact that I was fuming inside.
My insides churned. Of course that’s where he was. Why was I not surprised?
I stormed out of the hospital, announcing that if Danny Falk was in North Carolina, then Charlie Madison was going to North Carolina, and no one was going to be able to stop me.
The awkward thing about the whole situation was that no one did try to stop me. It’s not like they were going to chase me out of the hospital and give me a stern talking to. If I wanted to go to North Carolina, I could absolutely go to North Carolina.
I jumped out of my truck, rushed into my house, and went to packing an overnight bag. I mumbled to myself as I paced between my open dresser drawer and my closet.
She needs me to come save her. She needs a man to step in and kick this mother-fucking stalker to the curb. He had no right to chase her up there. I’m sure she’s told him time and time again just how much she wants noting to do with him, and yet he still hasn’t left her alone. This must be stressing her out, especially with everything she has going on.
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