by J. Evans
And I’m going to be ready. He’s not going to get away with this. He’s not going to walk away this time.
He begins to push forward and I fight my own instincts, forcing myself to relax, knowing it will hurt so much more if I fight, knowing that I can’t afford to be hurt that bad if I’m going to make him pay. But just before he breaches the tight ring of my ass, thunder booms through the clearing and his knife falls away from my stomach.
A second later, the pressure of his cock is gone and I hear a heavy thud as his body tumbles to the ground behind me.
Before I can fully comprehend that it’s over or that the sound I heard wasn’t thunder, but a gunshot, Sam is by my side, helping me up and pulling me into her arms. As I lean into her, I look down at the ground to see Todd’s lifeless eyes staring up at the sky, a bullet hole through the center of his forehead.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Sam chants, her hands running over my body as if she can banish all the ugliness with her touch.
And she can. She will.
“Don’t be sorry,” I say, trying not to shake as I lift my arms between us. “Just untie me. And we’ll finish this.”
“I’m sorry,” she says again, sobbing as she tugs at the knots holding my hands together. “I had to wait until he wasn’t looking at me. I had to be sure I could get the shot in before he cut you again.”
“It’s okay.” I roll my wrists, bringing sensation back into my fingers before reaching back to tug my boxers back up around my hips. But the movement makes Sam sob again and I wish I’d waited.
“I’m fine,” I insist, shifting until I can sit and take her hands in mine. I wait until she looks up at me, tears spilling from her big blue eyes. The lantern light isn’t that bright, but I can see how much she’s hurting, how much she blames herself, and I refuse to let that happen.
“Please don’t hate me,” she whispers.
I don’t say a word. I cup her face in my hands, pull her close, and take away her pain. I consume her tears, kissing them away with my lips and tongue, taking all of her sadness into myself because I can handle it. I can handle it because she saved me from the nightmare she lived through. She saved me and there is no reason for her to cry for something that didn’t happen.
Finally, her tears stop and my lips find hers and we kiss. And it is sweet and intense and filled with gratitude. It is all I wanted in those moments when I thought I was going to die. By the time we pull apart, tears are rolling down my cheeks, but they aren’t sad tears.
I’m just so damned grateful.
“Don’t be sad,” I say, blinking fast, determined to pull myself together. “I love you. I don’t blame you. Even if it had happened, I wouldn’t have blamed you. You are mine and I could never hate you. No matter what.”
“I love you,” she says, brushing the tears from my cheeks with tender hands. “I don’t ever want to see you in danger again. Promise me, never again.”
“I can’t promise that,” I say. “Because the world is a shitty place full of terrible people, but I promise I’ll always have your back. And I’ll know I’m a lucky bastard that you have mine.”
She leans in, hugging me tight for a long moment before she kisses my cheek and reaches down to untie the ropes binding my calves together. “Let’s get out of here.”
“The sooner, the better.” Once I’m free, we grab Todd’s knife from where it fell to the ground and hurry back to the cars, circling around the pit where either Jeremy or J.D. is moaning. We start our car, breathing twin sighs of relief when it turns over easily, the battery not drained by the time spent with the lights on.
Pulling out my pack, I shove my ruined jeans inside and grab a pair of shorts, tugging them on before taking the gun from Sam and wiping it down, getting all her prints off, while she takes a bleach rag to the bat and the knife. After, I wrap the gun and the bat together in the plastic from the trunk.
While she wipes down J.D.’s rental car, I take one of the lanterns and follow the trail back into the jungle to the second hole we dug the day we spent sweating in the sun with our shovels. I bury the weapons quickly and then cover the freshly turned earth with leaves.
If the police have dogs, there’s a chance everything will be found, but there will be no prints and no way to track the illegally purchased firearm, Todd’s knife, or a bat purchased with cash to either Sam or me. This is just a precaution, but one I’m glad we thought to take. After nearly dying, I have no interest in ending up in prison facing a death penalty.
I grab the wicker basket containing the snakes I bought from the weird dude down the road from the compound, chilled by the sudden squirming inside, and hurry down the trail.
Back at the clearing, I find Sam standing in between the headlights, chewing on her thumb as she stares down at the pit.
“You ready?” I ask, setting the wicker basket carefully down in front of her.
“What about the blood?” she whispers. “Todd might have your blood on his hands. And I know there’s blood on the ground. I saw it drip from your stomach while he was…while he was getting ready to do it.”
I put my arm around her shoulder and pull her in for a hug, holding her close while I think. “Well,” I finally say, keeping my voice low in case J.D. or Jeremy is alert enough to be listening. “We can go clean it up the best we can, but I’ve never been arrested or enlisted in the military. My DNA shouldn’t be on record. As long as I keep it that way it should be fine.”
“That’s not good enough. I need to know you’re safe.” She pulls away, looking up at me. “Do you still have your lighter in your pack?”
I nod. “You want to burn him?”
“We can use the basket to get it going,” she says. “It’s so dry, it should burn well enough. And we don’t need the body destroyed, just for the fire to burn the skin with the blood on it away.”
“And I can dig up the place where I bled on the dirt and throw it farther out in the woods.” I grab my lighter from my pack and press it into Sam’s hands before reaching for the basket handles. “I’ll empty this in the pit and meet you by the body.”
She touches my wrists. “No. I… I don’t want to. Not anymore. Just let the snakes loose in the woods.”
“You sure?” I say. “You’re not going to regret it later?”
She shakes her head. “No, I’m not. We’ll leave those two in there with their hands tied and let them figure their own way out. They will, sooner or later, and eventually they’ll learn what happened to Todd. I think altogether that’s a strong enough message.”
“Then I’ll let these guys out and meet you there.”
By the time I dump the snakes in a gulley and make it back to the place where I almost died, Sam’s got Todd propped up against the tree stump and a bundle of sticks wedged into the crevices beneath his back and under his legs.
“I already threw the dirt with your blood on it out into the woods,” she says. “We just need to get him ready.”
We tear the basket apart and stuff the pieces around the body, not speaking until the moment comes to light it up. Then, we stand side by side, staring down into the flat, empty eyes of a dead monster.
I don’t know about Sam, but when I look at him, I feel nothing. Not hate, not fear, nothing but exhausted by what we’ve been through and sickened by the gore beginning to drip from the hole in his forehead.
He isn’t a monster now; he’s just dead tissue. Whatever it was that made Todd the nightmare he was—his mind or his soul—is gone. I don’t know where it’s gone, but I don’t feel any guilt about my part in its destruction. And if there is a hell, I know he’s on his way there, to rot and roast with the rest of the wicked things.
“To the end of it,” Sam whispers, flicking the lighter on.
“To the end of it.”
She lights the wicker pieces and they go up fast, flaming hot long enough to catch the sticks and Todd’s clothes on fire. We stay until he is engulfed in flames and the smell of human skin catchi
ng begins to overcome the smell of burning sticks and cotton and then we turn and walk away.
One of the men is calling out from the pit as we get into the car, but we don’t answer his cries for help.
We get in, buckle up, and drive away, and we don’t look back not even when we’re safely strapped in on a plane taking us far, far away.
EPILOGUE
One Year Later
Danny
“All the knowledge I possess everyone else can acquire,
but my heart is all my own.”
-Goethe
They say absence makes the heart grow fonder, and for a long time, I thought that was true. Forced to be away from Sam so much while we were growing up, I loved her more every time our separation ended and I could finally hold her in my arms again.
But after a year of marriage and constant togetherness—working and playing and healing together—I know it wasn’t absence making my heart grow fonder, it was just Sam. It’s how things are when something is meant to be. I still love her more every day, treasuring the fact that I get to go to bed with her every night and wake up to her every morning.
And today, I got to marry her all over again, on a cliff beside the Croatian sea, with our family and friends all here to help us celebrate. They don’t know this was our second wedding or that we eloped in Thailand a year ago, but we thought it was best to keep that our secret.
They wouldn’t have understood the two of us making such a major decision after Sam had spent a year in seclusion. They wouldn’t have understood that a love like ours doesn’t need long to fix the things that are broken, or that we needed to be married, just in case we were ever asked to testify against each other in court.
We haven’t told a soul what we did, and even when the news came out about Todd’s murder, no one asked if we were in Costa Rica at the same time as the SBE brothers. Not the authorities and not our family though I would bet my hands that Caitlin and Gabe know. The way my sister hugged me, the day Sam and I showed up on her front porch with everything we owned in the bags at our feet, made it clear how worried she’d been.
And how happy she was to have us both home safe.
“That was so beautiful,” Caitlin says now, dabbing at her face with a tissue as she wraps her free arm around my waist. “You guys just about broke my heart with the vows.”
“We’ve had a long time to plan them,” I say, looking over my sister’s head to where Sam is talking to her parents by the railing at the edge of the cliff overlooking the ocean.
In a white, flapper style dress, with her chin-length brown curls wild around her face and flowers in her hair, she is stunning. But it isn’t just the dress or the flowers; it’s the way she smiles when she looks over to see me watching and starts toward me across the grass.
It’s her Sam the Shark smile, the one so big and wide one of her meaner friends used to make fun of her for it. I’ve always loved that smile, but I love it even more now because it means she’s whole again.
There are scars on her heart that will never heal, and both of us lost what little innocence we had left last summer. But scars remind us to be grateful for beautiful days without any pain in them and innocence is overrated.
Our younger, innocent selves loved purely, but not as fiercely or selflessly as we do now. Now we know that there is nothing more precious than this. We were stripped bare, brought low, and met each other in the darkness where there was nothing but our love to lead us back to the light.
And it was enough.
More than enough.
Now, there is nothing left to be afraid of. Let the world bring its worst. We’re ready because there is no end to a love like this. Whatever comes after this life, I will be with Sam and she will be with me. We’re not two trees with a fused trunk anymore, we are one heart, for now and always.
“No more crying,” Sam says, pulling Caitlin in for a hug. “If you don’t stop, I’ll start again and I wasn’t smart enough to wear waterproof mascara.”
Caitlin laughs as she pulls away to wipe her eyes. “Okay. I’ll stop. I’m just so happy for you both. No two people have ever deserved happiness more.”
I reach for Sam, but she’s already wrapping her arms around my waist, sensing what I need before I have the chance to ask, the way she does.
“I don’t know about that,” she says, “but we’re certainly grateful for it.”
“We are.” I hug her closer. “And I’m going to be even more grateful after we have cake.”
Caitlin rolls her eyes. “You and Juliet. She’s been trying to get her little arms elbows deep in that cake since she laid eyes on it.” She turns, scanning the crowd for her daughter, laughing when she sees the two-year-old dashing across the grass toward the cake with her daddy not far behind. “I’d better go give Gabe a break before she runs him ragged.”
“Tell her we’ll be right over to cut her a big piece,” Sam says. “We don’t want to keep our favorite tyrant waiting.”
“She is a tyrant,” Caitlin agrees affectionately. “Good thing she’s cute.”
“Crazy cute,” Sam agrees, smiling as Caitlin runs across the grass to scoop Juliet up in her arms, blowing kisses against her daughter’s cheek until Juliet giggles.
Sam has grown closer to all my family in the past year, but she and Juliet have a special bond. They are kindred spirits, strong girls who know what they want and aren’t afraid to let the world know about it. Though Sam has more patience. Most of the time.
“You didn’t tell her did you?” she asks, tilting her head to look up at me, the setting sun making her eyes sparkle, taking my breath away.
“You look like a movie star right now. I swear you do.”
Her smile shifts to the right. “That means you didn’t tell her.”
“I figured it could wait,” I say, kissing her forehead. “I don’t want to ruin the day for her. She’s going to be sad to see us leave, even if it is only for four months.”
“I know.” Sam lifts her chin, bringing her lips closer to mine. “But if we don’t have our adventure now, we’ll have to put it off for another twenty years.”
“Not true,” I say, kissing her, loving that she tastes like sunshine and happiness, exactly the way a bride should taste on her wedding day. “When they’re teenagers, we could leave the kids with Caitlin and Gabe for a few months and sneak off. Teenagers suck anyway.”
Sam smiles. “That’s why they need parents around, to keep them from sucking. And I’m sure Caitlin and Gabe will be busy enough with their own obnoxious kids.”
I bring my hand to her flat stomach, still finding it hard to believe our baby is in there, growing bigger every day. “I can’t wait until I can feel her kick.”
“Or him,” Sam says. “It might be a boy, a boy as gorgeous and wonderful as his daddy.”
I shake my head. “Trying to butter me up so you’ll get laid tonight?”
“Oh, I’m getting laid tonight,” she says, eyes narrowing as she grins. “I have a letter from the doctor saying it is completely fine for us to have sex. I went to her office this morning and made her write it out, even though she thought you were crazy for worrying.”
“I’m not crazy,” I say though I’m secretly relieved. It’s been hell keeping my hands to myself the past week since we found out. Unexpectedly, knowing Sam is pregnant with our baby has given me a hard-on that won’t quit.
“You are crazy,” she says, hand drifting down to pat my ass. “But also very, very sweet.”
“Are you fondling my ass in public?”
“Yes,” she says, still grinning. “I’m allowed to do that now that everyone knows we’re married. It’s one of the perks. At least for the first year. Public butt fondling is forgiven if you’re a newlywed.”
I slide my hand around from her belly to her bottom, fighting to keep my body from responding too obviously to her closeness. “I didn’t know that. I like that perk.”
“I thought you might, but I—”
Sam d
oesn’t get to finish her sentence before Juliet collides with our knees, wraps her chubby arms around our calves, and howls, “Cake, pease cake, pease cake!” in such a pitiful way you would think the kid hadn’t been fed in a month.
“Yes, Jules, I’m so sorry,” Sam says, scooping Juliet into her arms with a laugh. “It is past time for cake. Let’s go get some. Right now.”
“Yay! Cake!” Juliet’s tears vanish, replaced by a big grin that makes her blue eyes sparkle just like Sam’s.
I stay where I am for a minute, watching my wife carry my niece across the grass to the small tent where our wedding cake sits waiting to be cut. The way Sam holds Juliet so naturally, slung low on her hip with a hand cradling Jules’ diaper-clad bottom, she looks like she was made to be an aunt, a mama.
She looks soft and sweet, but I know she is also a fighter and a survivor. I know she is as strong as she is tender and that I don’t have to be afraid that life will break her again, not as long as we’re together. And there is nothing I need in the world aside from that.
Aside from the one I love.
Halfway across the lawn overlooking the ocean, where the sun is setting slow, as if it hates to miss a moment of this perfect day, Sam stops and turns back to look at me and mouths, “I love you, too,” like she knows what I was thinking.
And I’m sure she does.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
One Beautiful Revenge is by far the hardest book I’ve ever written. Not only because I care about these fictional characters so much, but because attacks like what happened to Sam are all too common.
According to the National Sexual Violence Research Center, young women have a 20-25% chance of being raped (or of someone attempting to rape them) over the course of a four-year college career. Many of these will be multiple counts of rape, committed by several men at the same time, and an alarming number of these attacks will happen at fraternity houses.
In real life, I would never advocate the kind of vigilante justice perpetrated by the characters in this book, but it’s past time for us to take a stand against the epidemic of sexual violence in our learning institutions, our military, and the world at large. By building awareness of the problem, supporting victims, educating ourselves on how to intervene in dangerous situations, and speaking out against rape culture, hopefully we can begin to bring about a real change in our world.
