Warning: This chapter includes implications of child abuse/sexual assault, so if you're uncomfortable with that sort of stuff, then just skip the first part.

No, don't come in here.

She was curled up on her bed, leaning into the corner farthest away from her bedroom door. Strands of her hair had stuck to her face, her tears acting as the adhesive, and her palms were starting to throb as she dug her nails into them, hard. She bit down on her bottom lip and tried to steady her breathing; tried to muffle the sounds of her crying as the footsteps from down the hall slowly approached.

Please, just leave me alone.

The hardwood floors creaked with every step that was taken, but soon—too soon—it all stopped. She sucked in a low, terrified breath as she made out two foot-shaped shadows through the crack under her door and closed her eyes as the sounds of the doorknob turning reverberated in her ears like a loud drum. She watched as it rotated slowly, didn't curse herself for not bothering to lock it because it would have been a futile effort anyway, and willed that maybe, just maybe this would be the night that her mother decided to grow a backbone and put an end to this all.

She didn't, and the door crept open.

He was wearing a small grin, although his forehead was creased in faux concern at her crying. He walked over to her at that painstakingly slow pace that he had traveled down the hallway in, slowly lowering himself in a crouch at her feet as he got to her bed. She attempted to move her foot away as he brought a hand up and tried to brush his fingers against her, but he clamped his hand around her ankle at the last second, nearly cutting off the circulation from her foot. She gasped as the pain coursed up her leg, but he raised and slowly wiggled a finger at her before she could make any louder sounds.

"Now, you know daddy doesn't like when you use outside voices in the house," he said to her in a voice that one would use when speaking to a child, despite the fact that it was a fourteen year old girl—his daughter—that he was talking to.

She didn't reply. Instead, she squeezed her eyes shut and tried not to scream as her father slowly released his grip on her ankle and dragged his hand up the length of her leg and under her school skirt, his grin going so wide that he almost looked like a Cheshire cat.

"That's better, Abby. You make daddy proud."

Bela sat up in bed and emitted a strangled scream from her throat, drenched in sweat and reaching under her pillow to pull out a gun and aim it at a non-existent threat looming over her. But instead of her monstrous father kneeling before her, she found her cat, alarmed at her sudden movement and stirring away from his previous place against her thigh with a hiss. She blinked at the animal, panting, and lowered the gun to her lap.

Then, suddenly, she burst into tears.

She buried her face in her hands and let out a strained cry, her shoulders shaking uncontrollably as she sobbed. It had been like this on and off ever since she returned home from North Dakota nearly two weeks prior; she'd be sitting on her couch or leaning against the kitchen counter when she'd randomly start crying, a million thoughts running through her head. It didn't help that only recently she had started having nightmares again, ones that she hadn't had since she was fourteen years old. She had become relatively numb to her past, only thinking about it once in a while to curse her long deceased parents, but now the memories were coming back at her like vivid, terrifying blows to the chest, and she knew that it had to be somehow connected to her recently discovered knowledge of Dean and his impending fate.

They hadn't spoken since she left him back at the abandoned house, although she'd be lying if she said that he hadn't tried to contact her. He called her, left her messages, emailed her, and at one point she thought she might have seen the damned Impala driving slowly by her apartment, but she ignored it—she ignored all of it. If she was to have any hope of getting over Dean Winchester, she had to disregard all of it, no matter how hard it hurt her to do so.

Nevertheless, Dean was all she ever thought about. She wanted to hate him, wanted a reason to get over the fact that she had fallen in love with a man bound to hell, but she couldn't bring herself to do it. She would instead find herself crying again, pounding her fists bloody into the wall and screaming her anger out at the top of her lungs. By the end of her first week back, her knuckles were badly bruised and she had hung up many new pictures all over her apartment to cover the holes that she had made underneath. She was a tangled mess of anger, sorrow, and fear, and all she wanted to do was sleep, but she couldn't even do that lest she wanted to go through the nightmares. There was no bloody escape from the constant hell that she had been thrown in.

Bela had since stopped shaking and now the tears were just silently falling down her face. She pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes in an attempt to cut off the flow of tears, pressing hard until a dull ache began to form in her head and she pulled her hands away, blinking away the stars from her vision. Peru rubbed against her leg and meowed, nudging one of her hands with his nose, and she smiled weakly down at him in return. She knew that even though he was just a cat, he was still trying to make her feel better.

Sniffing, she turned her head and read the clock on her nightstand. It was only seven in the morning, but she figured that she was definitely not going to be getting anymore sleep, so she eased out of bed and groggily walked into her kitchen. Peru followed, probably expecting to get something to eat out of the venture, and hopped on the counter next to her as she prepared herself a cup of tea.

She waited patiently, forcing herself to think about anything but the elder Winchester brother, and would have been completely and utterly lost in her distracting thoughts were it not for her cat snapping its head in the direction of the front door, hissing and jumping off of the counter before disappearing around the wall separating the kitchen and the living room from one another. Completely disregarding her tea, she frowned and followed after the alarmed Siamese.

If she wasn't in such a foggy state, she would have been on a higher alert. Instead, she was tired and sad and annoyed, and the last thing from her mind—despite having pulling one out only minutes before as she woke up—was finding a weapon. Besides, even if she had thought of it, she wouldn't have had any time to, because as she turned the same corner and brought her eyes upwards, she found herself staring into the barrel of a gun.

The man holding the pistol lifted his other hand in silence. "Don't make a sound, bitch."

She complied, and instead focused her eyes on the man behind the weapon. She saw a chubby face, pitch black, grease-slicked hair and a matching goatee, and the unmistakable scent of expensive, yet terrible-smelling cologne filled her nostrils and burned her eyeballs. Nonetheless, she narrowed her bloodshot eyes into disgust-filled slits and curled her fists at her sides.

"Now, baby, don't do anything drastic," he said, flicking his gun towards the kitchen and stepping forward, indicating her to move with him. She gritted her teeth as he called her baby, but moved backwards into the kitchen without saying a word, never taking her eyes off his. He was smiling at her, the corners of his own shit brown eyes crinkled, and he snorted once they stopped. "Long time no see, Bela."

"Luke. Hoped it would have been longer," she replied, daring to smile up at him.

He laughed, albeit ironically. "We wouldn't have had to meet at all if you'd have only given me the rabbit's foot like I hired you to. But you didn't, so I had to send our little friend after you, and after I didn't hear back from him…" he waved a hand in the air. "Well, here we are."

She bared her teeth at him. "Why are you even after me in the first place? It wasn't like you paid me in advance and I didn't deliver. You still had your money and you could have found another piece to buy from another seller."

"Do you know how much power that rabbit's foot would have given me? I could have been a god against my enemies, but you went and pocketed the damned thing for yourself," he growled, a piece of spittle flying out of his mouth and landing on her cheek. She forced herself not to frown, and instead looked him in the eye as he added, "You're going to tell me where it is, and you're going to give it to me—without any pay."

Bela stared him down, smiling defiantly. She honestly did not care if the man shot her dead on the spot, because then she'd be free of all the crying and heartache and nightmares that she was currently drowning in. So, she stood straighter, put on her best smug smile, and said, "I'd let you have it, but I don't think a pile of ashes is going to give you any luck anytime soon."

His hand tightened around the gun. "What?"

She stepped closer to him so that the pistol was barely grazing her nose. "I burned the bloody thing. Now it's no use to anyone or anything but the soil I left it on."

She left everything out about Dean and Sam and her touching the rabbit's foot, which was the actual reason why they burned the damned thing in the first place, and instead tipped her head upwards, holding her stance against Luke. He was practically boiling with rage; so furious that he raised his hand to hit her with the gun but stopped mid-air when the sound of the front door clicking shut filled the both of their ears.

As soft footsteps trailed towards them, Luke spun Bela around and pulled her backside into him, wrapping one arm around her neck while pressing the gun to her temple. She gritted her teeth at the pressure, but didn't utter a word as the new intruder stepped out from behind the wall.

Her jaw dropped as she saw Dean, tears suddenly springing to her eyes and a newfound rush of panic coursing through her body as he immediately reached behind his back in an attempt to pull out his own weapon. However, he was immediately stopped as Luke tightened his grip around Bela's neck and aimed the gun at Dean instead, shaking his head from side to side.

She could practically feel the bastard grin beside her head. "Now, just who the hell are you?"

Author's Note: Sorry it took so long! This was, by far, the hardest chapter to write, because I honestly didn't know where to take it from here. It was actually driving me insane not knowing what to do next, because I really love this fic and I didn't want to just abandon it out of nowhere, especially with school starting up (tomorrow actually, as of August 5th, unfortunately) and everything that is to follow this school-I'M A SENIOR NOW NOT THAT ANY OF YOU GUYS CARE I'M JUST EXCITED I'M ALMOST OUT OF THIS HELL HOLE-year. Anyway, thanks for reading and don't forget to review!