Everything seemed to move slower as she felt herself grow calm, her hand never once coming to rest on her stomach as she felt it grow hollow.
She knew she had no choice, and the tiny pill she had let sit in her hand for over an hour now was growing heavy. There was no other way out.
Selfish or selfless?
He was still after her, the restraining order and mandatory prison sentence doing nothing to keep the man who had made her dreams nightmares from coming for her. He wanted her, and there was absolutely no way that anyone or anything could stop him.
He had already killed two prison guards to escape, and then had kidnapped one of her family members to get information on her.
And now the man wasn't even an hour away.
Looking down to the letter that she had written, Emily nodded.
She didn't want to leave the people she loved, the people who had brought her out of the darkest periods in her life and the people who had been there for her throughout her entire career, but this was something she had to do to save herself.
She had never done that before.
The brunette woman got herself comfortable at the head of her bed, pushing the crisp white note aside and picked up her cell phone from her bed stand.
There was someone she needed to call, someone who had been there for her through thick and thin and someone who she had loved since she had finally realized who she was and who she wanted to be. He had supported her through her crazed delusions of becoming a behavioral analysis profiler, and on her twenty-first birthday instead of taking her out for a drink, he had brought her out to the mountains to read Vonnegut and Hemingway to one another beside a waterfall.
She heard it ringing, and the vibrations quickly went through her ear and down to her heart.
The last time she would speak to anyone. Ever.
Please leave a message at the beep.
Nervously flicking her tongue over the corner of her mouth, Emily nodded her head. "Hi daddy," she cracked. "It's me, Emmy. I just wanted to call and tell you that I love you." She took in a shuddering breath, her fingers tightening around the phone against her ear. "You always believed in me, and you've always backed me up on whatever I wanted. So please, back me up on this."
Glancing down to the pill fiddling between her fingers, she sighed. "Just remember that you love me."
She hung up, lying herself down on the bed when she heard the angry banging down on her apartment door. Was it him or the beautiful friends that she had come to love? She didn't know.
Rolling onto her side, the position she had fallen asleep in since she was just a child, she set the pill between her teeth and bit down.
They'd later realize it was cyanide, the tool that she used to escape the evil man.
Her rapist.
The father of her child.