My throat bobbed once, twice, three times.

Sweet, sweet bliss entered my veins as I remembered a different time. One with sunshine and rainbows and happiness and the beautiful shine of my mother's love that radiated down on me like the luminous stars in the dark night sky.

Those stars winked out the night she died, and they only just started coming back to life.

"What do you want, Colton?"

He stalked forward a step, a predator circling in, sizing up his prey. But I wouldn't be an easy target—not this time.

Fuck this asshole.

Who was he to try and threaten me—to try to make me cower in fear and tremble beneath his punishing gaze?

I'd allowed him to victimize me once before, and I wasn't going to let him do that to me again.

"What do I want? Well, I'm looking at it."

I sharpened my gaze, the only tools in my arsenal being my attitude and my words, so I made sure that they didn't miss their mark where I threw them.

"I'm not sure I understand what you mean. I'm a person, not an object. Try again."

"Shit, you got feistier since the last time we were together. What, you not enjoy yourself one time and then you're suddenly not into me anymore? That's rude, Cami. Really rude."

"That's unfortunate that you feel that way."

He could've growled with the amount of menace in his voice, with the volume of frustration swimming in his dead eyes.

He'd grown less terrifying in the past two weeks; like the happiness and contentedness that I'd been surrounded with basking in Grey's glow had eradicated the memories of our last encounter.

Like I wasn't powerless anymore.

He stalked closer and closer, and I knew I shouldn't have done it—knew I should've stood my ground, but the instinctual fear took over and that damn fight or flight kicked in, and I took one small step back.

Colton noticed. Of course, he did. He noticed everything.

Because he thought he was in control, but he didn't know that I wasn't going to take it anymore. I wasn't going to lie down and take it.

I would no longer freeze.

No, I would fight until every drop of blood left me and covered him in the evidence of his evil.

"I'm tired of you playing games. You walking around with Parker's freak of a brother at school and all around town, like I wouldn't find out? Do you know who my father is?"

Another step forward, one step back.

He kept gaining on me, and I kept letting him win, but I couldn't stop my brain—couldn't make myself stand my ground.

"Cami. Camille. Camille Astor. You know, I read up on you."

And that was when the freeze happened.

I couldn't control it—it was like I was floating outside of my body and I was screaming at my corporeal form with a vengeance, 'MOVE, DO SOMETHING, GET AWAY, FIGHT!!!' but she wouldn't listen.

That weak, powerless girl from before had infiltrated my body, and I couldn't stop it.

He finally took that final step and then we were toe-to-toe, staring at each other straight in the eyes.

They say the eyes are the windows to the soul.

Grey's was warm and irreverent—ethereal and magnificent and full of wonder like the break of dawn over a new day.

Colton's soul was black and withered and shriveled up—such a sad excuse of a soul that I wasn't even sure if it was there, anymore.

Almost like all the light had been snuffed out of his body and that was what allowed him to be so callous, so careless, so unfeeling toward the others around him.

Maybe he didn't even understand what he was doing was wrong.

And that was even more terrifying, because that meant there was no reasoning with him.

There was no explaining to him that he should stop, because why should he? If it felt good to him, what use were feelings or empathy if women were only his punching bag, a hole to use and abuse until he got what he wanted and then he could abandon them until they were needed again.

"Your mom, shot right in front of you by your dad. They found you in a puddle of her blood, all covered in it like you'd been rolling around in it with her."

It was everywhere. Red, red, red, suffocating me, covering my hands, all over my clothes. The knees of my jeans were stained scarlet and I ran my hands through my hair to get it out of my face, but—oh, it was in my hair, then.

He bared his teeth. He was an animal, unrecognizable, smoking gun in his hands.

He wouldn't stop shooting.

My hands flew up to cover my ears, and I kept screaming, screaming, screaming...

STOP

STOP

STOP

stop

stop

stop

please, please please—

He was shaking me, then he had one hand over my mouth, and that was when I lost it.

My hands flew to his shoulders and then my knee was coming up to slam into his favorite part of himself.

The piece of himself he'd used to violate me, and probably others.

It felt so good to hear his groan of pain that I almost got lost in it, swimming in a deranged sort of ecstasy that didn't allow me to see straight.

One moment, I'd been having an out-of-body experience, and then the next I'd been slammed directly back into my body and had gathered up enough energy and anger to finally put my thoughts to action and hurt him right where it counts.

Only I didn't account for how strong and angry he would be after such a painful hit.

They always told you to kick them there.

They said it would incapacitate them.

They didn't say they would recover quickly, that they would reach out with their poison tipped talons and reach into your skin and pull your soul right out from your insides and gnaw on your flesh and bones until you were a pile of skin and tissue, sinew and muscle and—

"What are you doing here, Cami? Get out! GET OUT!"

The gun went off again, a POP ringing out so loud it felt like it could've burst my eardrums.

He seemed to like the power and the sharp sting of pain that occurred after a shot.

He fired again, at the family pictures above the fireplace on the mantle.

He shot my picture directly through the eye.

There was blood everywhere.

everywhere

everywhere

every

where

The gun kept popping and exploding the furniture and walls around us until he finally ran out of bullets.

They were shot through the walls, decorations, the black, shattered screen of the television above the couch.

They were embedded in my mother's dead corpse on the ground beside me.

Her blood ran in a single line down the floor, leading directly to my father's standing figure.

He wasn't my father in that moment. No, he was something else, something different.

Something absolutely monstrous.

Colton flashed between himself and the vision I had of my father in my mind that kept taking over my body.

One moment, I was sitting in a puddle of my mom's blood, brushing her dark golden hair back from her head and streaking it auburn with her blood, and then the next I was pushed down to the ground below Colton's towering form.

"Why the fuck did you do that?! You fucking bitch, you didn't fight me this much before."

He fumbled with the zipper on his jeans, and I realized with a terrifying sort of clarity that he was going to do it again. He was going to take advantage of me right here and now, if I didn't do something to stop it.

He had my hands pinned beneath me on the ground, the cold laminate of the school flooring biting into my skin.

One of his knees was pressed down against my stomach, keeping me thoroughly and effectively subdued, but he couldn't use his other hand to pull himself out if he was busy trying to keep me quiet.

"HELP! HELP! Somebody HELP ME!"

When his hand came back down over my mouth, I didn't waste time.

I found whatever purchase I could on his skin and I bit.

Hard.

The coppery tang of blood washed into my mouth as he hissed and pulled away.

I used his distraction to my advantage to let out the most blood curdling scream I'd ever uttered, and the response was immediate.

His hand came flying across my face, but he'd let go of my hands.

The sting was nothing compared to the feral smile that fell onto my lips.

I was sure my eyes resembled a wild animal who'd contracted rabies, teeth stained red with my prey's blood.

I used my last remaining energy to swing my legs up and somehow bucked him off of me, but just as I was running to the door, he grabbed me around the waist and tried to grapple me to the ground once more but I held firm.

He resorted to clasping my elbows to my sides tightly so I couldn't use my hands and used his other hand to squeeze my air way.

It was poetic, in a way.

That Colton was choking me to death, just as Grey had tried to do to himself.

I would've laughed at the irony, had the pain not been so immediate and intense that I started seeing spots in my vision.

Spots that resembled stars in the pitch night sky.

Stars that had lost all their luster and shine the moment my mother's own light had been snuffed out by an evil man.

How fitting, then, that I was to find my own end at the hands of another evil man?

"Cami? You in there?"

I tried to get the air in to scream out at Alec's voice to help find me. I tried.

I really did.

But Colton's grip was too strong.

I closed my eyes.

I didn't want his face to be the last that I saw on this earth.

No, instead I conjured the images of Grey that I'd tucked away for safe keeping.

His soft reserved smiles.

His eyes when the light hit them just right and I realized that they weren't pitch black like the night sky without its stars or the moon. They were actually a deep caramel, rich with vibrant swirls of gold and amber that gave them a depth that made me want to drown in them when I saw them for the first time—really saw them.

Someone was jiggling the doorknob.

Footsteps.

Yelling.

I almost succumbed to the darkness, to that sweet, numb abyss where I could live with Grey forever in the night sky, the stars to his forever expanse of eternal, comforting darkness, never alone again.

I almost joined my mother, floating around out there somewhere.

Someone's hands ripped Colton's from my throat, though, and I dropped to the ground in a vicious coughing fit.

Alec was there, his face blurry and distorted.

"Cami? Are you okay?"

Someone was restraining Colton, but I couldn't see them. I could only think of Grey.

"We're going to take her to the hospital."

Yes, the hospital. Then I could be with Grey, I could be there for him.

"Yeah, I need to go there too. I'll ride in the ambulance with her."

"Alright. I'm going to have to notify her parents when she regains consciousness."

"I think she's a foster child. I'll try to get her guardian's contact information."

"I'm here, I'm here. What in the world has happened?"

My eyes were closed, but the action hadn't stopped around me.

"We need to contact this girl's legal guardians."

"I'm one of her legal guardians. She's a foster, and we're having her at our home. What's all this about?"

"It seems your foster child was attacked by one of your students, Mr. Hartingrove. We're transporting her to the hospital right now."

There were hands touching me, but I couldn't flinch to swat them away.

"Alright, I'll follow behind the ambulance. I was just on the way to the hospital as well."

There was shuffling, then we moved somewhere else. I was weightless, then crashed back down onto something like a bed on wheels.

We were outside. It was cold.

"Mr. Hartingrove? I'm Alec, Parker's friend...is Grey...?"

"I don't know how Grey is right now. Last I heard, he was coding. I don't know if he's alive or dead."

He sounded like he didn't care.

I suddenly wished I were dead, too.

At least then, we'd be together.