needs to dominate someone to feel powerful himself. The insight gives me an angle to manipulate. “That’s why you gave her so much shit . . . to break down her defenses, thinking if you could tame her, you’d actually be worth something. But you couldn’t do it. You know why?” I ask condescendingly.
He stalks around me, swinging the knife in wide arcs that get closer and closer. He doesn’t answer, so I keep talking, watching intently for an opening. “Because you’re weak. She doesn’t need to be tamed. She is beautiful in her powerful independence, just as she should be.” I see a flicker of recognition in his eyes and know he already knew that and just got off on squashing her spirit. I go in for the verbal kill. “The truth is . . . you went to battle with her, and she won, fair and square, because you’re weaker than she is.” He reacts just as I’d hoped he would, and I’m ready for his attack, but he’s slow. My God, he’s so slow. I see the knife coming from what seems like a mile away, and as he arcs toward my face with the steel, I catch the inside of his elbow with a chop and the knife clatters to the ground.
Rich punches back, and I take it on the left cheek, the pain blooming across my face and firing me up with a fresh shot of adrenaline. I hit him with a hard one-two to the ribs in return that makes him wheeze as his breath whooshes out in a gush. I shove him back, and he hits his car, bending backward over the hood as I grab him by the lapels of his jacket.
“Don’t . . . ever . . . lay . . . a . . . hand . . . on her!” I grunt, accentuating each word with a bounce of the back of Rich’s skull off the hood of his car. Rich gets his knee up between us and pushes me back, and I stumble as my shoes slip on the pavement and I lose a few inches of ground.
“She’s mine!” Rich howls as he pushes off the hood to tackle me. We roll across the pavement, but unlike my teenage wrestling matches with Chase, there’s absolutely no restraint. We volley punches, brawl for position, and I end up on top, my hands locked on his throat as I start bouncing his head again.
“She’ll never be yours,” I shout, letting go with one hand to cock my fist back. “And you’ll never hurt her again.”
I let my fist fly, and I hear a satisfying crunch as I connect with Rich’s nose. His head sags, and I drop him to the pavement, unconscious and bleeding.
Once I know the threat is incapacitated, I scramble off him. He’s unimportant right now.
Instead, I rush over to Madison, who still hasn’t moved. “Maddie?” I ask her, shaking her shoulder lightly. Panic grips me again as she doesn’t respond. “Madison? Madison!”
I check, and she’s not breathing. Reaching into my pocket, I grab my keyring, thanking my pain in the ass of an insurance company for insisting on a ‘panic button’ for my car. One push, and I’ve got full 9-1-1 support rolling to my GPS location, letting me focus on Madison.
A coldness drops over me, a thin veneer that I’ve felt before whenever I’ve been in high-stress situations. It’s what allows me to remember the CPR classes I took at work, letting me clear her airway and check for a heartbeat before giving her rescue breaths and starting compressions.
I’m still working as the police show up, three squad cars squealing to a stop with sirens and lights flashing.
“Sir . . . sir, we’ve got her,” one of the cops says. “An ambulance is right behind us.”
I collapse to my knees next to Madison, and the cop takes over as I exhaustedly beg him to save her. Another officer asks me questions, and I give a quick, disjointed accounting of Madison’s history with Rich and what happened tonight. They write it all down, handcuffing Rich when the black car comes back as his and slipping the knife they find on the ground into a plastic bag.
“Sir . . . we’ll need a complete statement downtown,” the officer says as the ambulance is about to pull off. I nod and head toward the rig. “Sir!” he yells out behind me.