Chapter 2

“You…”

In a panic, Annabelle pulled the knife out of his broad chest, ignored the blood that splashed her face and stabbed him in the stomach with all her strength.

The force made Tad stumble backwards, and he fell off the bed.

He fell right on the path that led to the door.

The shock held her in its grip for two seconds before she quickly got out of bed.

More glasses pierced her skin while she was getting up, but in her adrenaline-stoked state, she didn’t notice at all.

She almost squealed when she saw him trying to get up. In her panic, she backed away from his direction.

“Why wasn’t the toxin working yet? Jose had said it would work immediately,” she thought in fear, wondering if all she had done would be in vain after all.

He was sweating heavily as he pinned her with a deadly glare. “You…are…dead.” he gritted out as he held onto the side of the bed.

He reached for the knife to pull it out, then thought better of it.

An insane thought came to Annabelle's mind to pull out the knife and finish him off, but she was not a murderer.

She only wanted to make him unconscious. She had thought the toxin would work. Why wasn’t it working?!

“I…will…cut…your…worthless body…into…”

“Now!” Annabelle’s mind screamed, and she ran towards the door with one thought in her head.

She would die fighting.

He grabbed her and caught the nape of her gown.

“I got…”

Annabelle turned back and punched his hand wrapped around the knife.

Tad yelled and staggered backwards.

Annabelle was crossing the threshold when she heard a loud thump in the room behind her.

She didn’t wait to see if she had killed him or not.

She tore her bloody nightgown off her head and winced as the cloth pulled at the glasses still on her back.

Blood oozed out of her back as she tossed the tattered nightgown aside the remaining top and bum shorts she wore underneath.

She picked her packed bag out of the tiny washroom where she had already stowed it.

Annabelle did not look back once at the home of her youth that had turned into a place of horror for her in the past two years.

She locked the door from outside and tossed the key as far as she could into the bushes behind their bungalow.

She did not doubt that he could get out through the windows or break the door, but she was determined to be long gone before then.

There was no back door for him to pass through, but she was not worried about that.

When he burst through that door, she would be long gone.

Before he thought of calling her mother, she would have picked Cathy, and they would be far away from the woman who couldn’t protect them from her monster.

“Or maybe you have killed him,” whispered her subconsciousness.

Annabelle took her mind off that possibility as she started walking away from the town she had known since birth.

Everywhere was dark already, and she didn’t see a soul on the street as she looked briskly towards the main road.

Stoneraine was a laidback town, and it would have been strange if people were not already sleeping in their homes by that time.

Annabelle just needed to get to Arcadia before morning.

That was where Jose’s sister would be waiting for her with Cathy.

Tears of joy stained Annabelle’s eyes as she pictured her sister’s innocent face and her arms itched to hug her at that moment.

“Soon enough” she promised herself as she kept working faster.

Tad had never allowed her to keep money of her own.

She knew it was because he knew she might want to run away.

But then Jose had handled all that.

All she had to do was give him what he had always begged her for.

Annabelle felt no regret as she patted the small cash in the pocket of her bum shorts.

What mattered was that she had pulled this off. It was too late for her, but not for Cathy.

The cold bit her exposed skin and the pain in her body flared, but she didn’t dare stop.

Tad could be dead, or he could have escaped the house already.

Either way, she didn’t want to be caught anywhere near Stoneraine by morning.

Jose had told her his sister was leaving Acadia the next morning. If Annabelle did not get there to get her sister, she had no idea what would happen to her.

All she had was a piece of paper with the number of the sister on it.

She was to call with a payphone once she got to Acadia.

What if...?

Picturing Cathy’s trusting face in her mind, Annabelle started running once she got close to the main express.

“Wait for me, Cathy. We will soon be together,” she murmured to herself over and over again to numb her pain and to keep the sudden fear at bay.

What she had not stopped to think of in her moments of desperation was just coming to her mind as the crickets called to each other and her heartbeat thumped in her ears.

What if Jose lied to her? What if no sister was waiting for her? What if he and his friend who were supposed to take Cathy away from her mom did something to her?

“Oh, you fool,” she suddenly sobbed as the possibility hit her.

He had promised that Tad would become weak and unconscious immediately. The toxin touched his blood after all, yet the bastard was still standing for some minutes.

Tears started streaming down Annabelle’s face as her tortured mind started bringing up images of a lot of things that could have happened to Cathy.

“No, please, no,” she mumbled to herself as she burst out of the path she was coming from onto the main road.

The car came out of nowhere!

Before Annabelle could turn back from the sudden movement, the car had caught her side and lifted her in the air.

She crashed hard onto the asphalt with a sickening crunch.

Her mind tried to hold on to Cathy’s image.

Then everything went black.