A few disclaimers before this chapter kicks off. Slight trigger warnings in this chapter, although nothing terribly graphic. If you want to skip anything/have any other reservations, please don't hesitate to shoot me a message.
Also, school starts up again for me on Monday so if things move a bit slowly for a few weeks there is a 99.9% chance that that is the reason why. I had intended on finishing this story by the end of the summer, but me + time goals never seem to work out as planned.
Anyway, thanks for your patience, it is much appreciated.
Chapter 13:
A hand wraps around the collar of Quinn's t-shirt and pulls her to her feet.
Quinn feels the phone receiver slip from her hand. It hits the wall hard before swinging by its cord like a pendulum. On the way back, it bounces sharply off of Quinn's knee. She tries to cry out, but the hand around her collar is pulling her shirt so tightly around her neck that it is starting to strangle her.
Gasping for air, Quinn has no choice but to lean into the man who is holding her. Her feet march in double-time to try to keep up with the enormous steps of her captor. She can vaguely hear the man muttering to himself, but her heartbeat is pounding inside of her ears, so Quinn cannot make out any words.
The blonde can feel the pipe that she had hidden in her waistline rubbing the skin of her stomach raw. If she can just get ahold of it, she can defend herself and stop this man from choking her to death. Before she can do so however, the man releases his grip on her neck and throws her hard into the wall of an open room.
"Darlene, we have a problem."
Quinn bounces hard off the wall. Her broken hand gets wedged between the wall and her body and goes temporarily numb, but she fights through that somehow to grab hold of the pipe, which she can feel trying to wriggle loose from its hiding space in all the commotion.
The large woman with the gun turns towards the man and then towards Quinn.
Quinn studies her very carefully. She hadn't been able to get a good look at her when they were still outside, but now, Quinn notices how long and round her face is. As she seethes, her features squeeze inwards like a stress ball. Her eyes are so deep inside of her skull that Quinn thinks if they weren't such a piercing shade of blue, she would have missed them entirely. Her hair is light brown, but it's greying at the roots and the color folds down from the crown of her head like the legs of a spider.
She looks a lot like the man who had just dragged her in here. Quinn wonders if they are related. Probably. People like these two certainly weren't pleasant enough to be married. Then again, it might be a match made in heaven.
"He brought a fucking cop with him."
Quinn looks up at the man's explanation, confused at first. She is looking around, thinking for a moment that she had gotten lucky enough that Shelby had gotten the police to show up this quickly, but then she realizes that everybody is staring at her and it is her he is talking about. He thinks she's a cop.
The room grows suddenly very small in its silence.
Like magnetism, Quinn's eyes find Rachel. The brunette is giving her an anguished look, like she had been hoping for so much more for Quinn than for her to have walked into the exact same trap that she had.
Determined, Quinn buckles down and grits her teeth hard.
"I'm not a cop!" she bellows. She doesn't know why she is yelling. Maybe it has something to do with the fear. "I'm only eighteen years old, you moron!"
"Sure," the man grunts cheekily before turning back to Darlene. "I caught her sneaking around the back. She was on the phone with somebody trying to give them directions to here. It could have been backup. Wanna move?"
Quinn watches the woman's face change as she studies Quinn. The blonde cannot read the exact expression on her face. It makes it worse that she cannot tell what she is thinking or what she plans on doing with her.
Darlene stands up slowly. She rounds onto Quinn with tremendous steps like an elephant. The entire house shakes as she grabs onto Quinn by the hair and yanks her so close into her face that Quinn can smell her putrid breath.
"Who is coming to this house?" she asks Quinn with a dangerous tone.
"N-nobody!" Quinn insists, but the grip on her hair only tightens, daring her to lie again. Quinn feels her eyes start to water. It feels as though Darlene is trying to pull her hair straight out of her scalp.
"Then who the hell were you on the phone with?"
"My mom!" Quinn gasps. She realizes that it is probably not in her best interest to lie to a woman like Darlene, but she doesn't want to find out what she would do should she know that Shelby is on her way to her house; not to mention the fact that she has likely already called the police. "I'm not a cop! I'm a fucking high school student! I called my mom to see if she would come get me because I thought it would be a good idea to take Rachel to come meet her dad, but clearly I was wrong."
"And where is your mom?" Darlene asks, her grip on Quinn's hair tightening still.
"Lima," Quinn gasps. "Ohio."
By some miracle, Darlene actually releases Quinn. Still, a residual pounding continues inside of the blonde's skull.
"That's a long way," Darlene tells her teasingly. "Do you have a wallet?"
"What?" Quinn asks, stunned by the question.
"What do they teach you in your supposed high school, girl?" Darlene taunts. She reaches over, tapping on the center of Quinn's forehead like she is searching for any signs of a brain. "Your wallet. Give it to me."
Quinn swallows, but digs through the back pocket of her jeans anyway to reproduce her wallet.
She hands the cheap leather to Darlene, who flips it open and immediately pulls out Quinn's license.
"Lucy Quinn Fabray," the woman reads the name on the license out loud, rolling the small plastic card inside of her fingers as though trying to determine its authenticity. "Born July 17th, 1994. Address 786 Elm St. Lima, Ohio. 5'4", 110 pounds. Brown eyes."
Quinn swallows as the woman rattles off Quinn's demographic information with the air of a threat before pulling out her high school ID card.
"William McKinley High School, huh?" she asks.
"Yeah…" Quinn mutters, but Darlene doesn't linger on the school ID for very long; instead, she finds something that interests her far more; Quinn's credit card.
"Platinum…" Darlene releases a whistle that is low with approval. "Is daddy rich, Lucy?"
"Very," Quinn breathes. She finds that as long as Darlene calls her by a name she hasn't gone by since she was a child, she can pretend like this isn't her situation at all.
"I guess it's better than having Peter for a daddy, huh?" Darlene laughs over her shoulder towards Rachel. The brunette only swallows. Luckily, Darlene doesn't seem to be looking for a response. Instead, she slips Quinn's credit card back into the wallet and then puts the entire thing into the pocket of her robe.
Darlene turns back to Quinn, pulling herself up to full height, which is impressively tall.
"I've got no use for this one, Joe," she waves to the man that had blown Quinn's cover in the first place. "Get rid of her."
"No!"
Rachel's reaction is swift and immediate. Quinn is still trying to work out what Darlene means by get rid of her.
After a couple of seconds, it clicks. Darlene does not intend for Quinn to make it out of this house alive tonight.
Strangely, Quinn finds that this knowledge does not cause her any panic. Besides, Rachel is doing enough panicking for the both of them.
The brunette is pleading for mercy for Quinn. She stands up from the table and tries to rush towards Quinn, but they are on opposite sides of the room and there is a sadistic psychopath standing in between them. Darlene stops her quickly.
Quinn places all of her focus on Rachel. She remembers how calm she feels every time Rachel touches her, how she wishes that she had given in and kissed her back last night now that she knows it may have been her only opportunity to ever do so.
She spots this man; this Joe start to approach her.
She is a death row inmate and he is the executioner. Quinn stares at him, wondering if this oaf of a man is really going to be the last thing she ever sees.
"Please, I'll do whatever you want!" Rachel's desperation is almost obscene compared to Quinn's calm. "Just leave her alone! I'll come with you! Please don't hurt her!"
Rachel sounds far away, like she is on the shoreline and Quinn is under water. It takes Quinn a moment to realize that this is because her heart is beating a fantastic cadence inside of her ears, blocking her ability to hear.
Rachel is begging for somebody to do something, but nobody is moving. Quinn realizes that it will be up to her to fulfill Rachel's request for her to stay alive.
Joe reaches out to grab onto Quinn and the blonde braces herself for a fight.
She reaches underneath her shirt for the pipe that is still hiding there. She wraps her broken hand around it because it is her dominant one, and even though she knows this will hurt like hell, it will be nothing compared to what will happen to her if she doesn't give it her best shot.
In one fluid motion, Quinn pulls out the pipe and swings. She finds her mark easily, and with a satisfying crunch, lands a blow just underneath Joe's jaw.
The man takes a lumbering step backwards, dazed. His eyes cross as blood shoots like a geyser out of his mouth. A humbling silence follows.
Quinn doesn't stick around long enough to see if it will last. She hovers over Joe, ready to deliver another blow that will hopefully take him out for good when somebody calls out from behind her.
"Lucy!"
Quinn freezes with the pipe raised high over her head, ready to come down with a sickening force over the back of Joe's skull. She hates that she hesitates, but there is an eeriness in the calm of Darlene's voice. She sounds completely unfazed despite the fact that Quinn had just blindsided them. Turning over her shoulder, Quinn immediately realizes why.
Darlene has Rachel pressed tight into her chest. One arm is draped across Rachel's front, holding her in close. The other is pointing the pistol to Rachel's head.
In her moment of victory, Quinn had forgotten all about that damn gun.
Quinn swallows, conflicted. Rachel is trembling. She is so tiny compared to Darlene that the woman could snap her in half with her bare hands if she so wanted to. Quinn knows that she wouldn't hesitate to do so.
"Drop the pipe, Lucy."
"Don't do it!" Rachel insists, but the only thing that her efforts get her is Darlene pressing the business end of her pistol even harder against Rachel's temple.
It digs into Rachel's skin with a bruising force. The whimper of pain that the brunette lets escape is silenced only by the clatter of metal against the hardwood floor as Quinn lets the pipe slip from her fingers and onto the ground.
"You know, I think I underestimated you," Darlene tells Quinn. She sounds almost impressed.
Quinn doesn't know how to respond. She doesn't think that this is a compliment. Then again, she isn't being dragged into Darlene's backyard to have a bullet placed in her head anymore, either.
Yet.
At the very least, she had brought herself a few more precious minutes on this Earth to come up with an escape plan. But try as she might, her brain produces nothing. She sees no way out of this.
Caught in a stare-down with Darlene, Quinn doesn't even notice Joe straighten himself out until he is spitting a wad of congealed blood at Quinn's feet.
Quinn has just enough time to catch the rage in his eyes before the back of his hand connects hard with her mouth.
The blow is stunning. It sends Quinn hard to the ground. She feels her mouth fill with blood. Seconds later, she tastes it. From her spot on the floor, she gets a perfect glimpse of Joe kicking the pipe - Quinn's only source of protection - down the hallway, far out of reach.
"Alright, everybody just calm down."
Darlene is the type who everybody listens to when she talks. Now is no exception. She walks over towards Quinn, who is still on the floor. When she moves, she doesn't release Rachel, just drags her along.
"I might have a plan for you yet, Lucy Quinn Fabray," Darlene tells the blonde, taking in the blood on her chin, the cast on her hand, and the hardened expression on her face. "Now, let us all take a breath while we figure out what we're going to do about this."
Shelby nearly misses the turn that the GPS tells her to take into Foster because it is nothing more than a small dirt road leading off the highway. In the pitch blackness of this night, she damn near drives right past it.
Her phone signal had gone out some time ago. Before then, she had managed to place an emergency call, but she isn't sure how much of her story the dispatcher managed to get before her service started to fizzle out and then drop completely.
She hopes that is enough. She hopes she hadn't forgotten any of the directions that Quinn had given her. Shelby knows that it is far from an exact address, but a drug house has got to be familiar to a police department in a town as small as this one. Right?
Shelby slows her Range Rover to a slow roll as she makes her way down the gravel path of Foster's Main St. The car hums at her, pleased to be going at a normal pace after spending the last hour travelling at speeds well over 100.
Shelby follows her GPS to Peter's house because Quinn's instructions had started from there and she cannot afford to miss any steps.
She isn't expecting to see Quinn or Rachel there, but is still terribly disappointed to find Quinn's empty BMW, with no passengers inside.
Shelby knows that time is of the essence, but she cannot help but allow her eyes to linger on the trailer that she finds at the end of Peter's address.
It is a stunning fall from grace from the mansion that he used to live in back in Lima. Shelby can still remember climbing up that garden wall to sneak into his upstairs bedroom when she was a teenager. It was so high that she never looked down. This... well, this was pathetic.
The idea of seeing Peter again is one that used to keep Shelby up at night. She used to wonder a lot about what she might do on this day, but as the years passed, those thoughts started to dwindle.
Shelby is not sure if it is the empty car, or Peter's trailer, or all of these memories, but suddenly, something churns inside of her gut.
She wants to scream. She wants to scream at the stupidity of those girls for getting into a car with a complete stranger who they knew might be dangerous. She wants to scream at herself for not telling Rachel the truth when she'd had the chance. She wants to scream at Peter for continuing to put her in these situations when she thought she had been long rid of him…
She wants to scream, so she does.
Bending forward in the driver seat of her Range Rover, Shelby screams as loud as her lungs will allow; and thanks to years of professional singing, that is loud.
She screams until her throat goes raw and tears blister against the corners of her eyes. She screams until she is out of breath and her voice scratches and fades and her vocal cords swell.
When she is done, she sits upright again and rubs at her tearing eyes with her fists. She had just wasted thirty whole seconds losing control. She knows that it was needed, but she cannot afford to waste anymore time. Rachel and Quinn can not afford for her to waste anymore time.
She takes her Range Rover back onto the street and immediately gets to work on Quinn's directions.
Shelby drives around for nearly five minutes before she realizes that she is moving in circles. She hadn't had a good handle on the directions even when she had been listening to them, and her emotions certainly aren't helping.
She tries not to think about what this will mean for the police officers she had tried to call to the scene.
The more lost Shelby finds herself, the more frazzled she gets. She circles around town until she is practically in tears. She tries her GPS again, but she still has no service.
Finally, she spots a man standing outside of the one bar in town, struggling to light a cigarette against the windy night.
"Excuse me!" Shelby calls from the driver's seat, rolling down her window as she slows her car to a halt. "I'm wondering if you can help me. I'm looking for a house."
The man raises an eyebrow, rendered temporarily mute by this unusual woman in an unusual car asking unusual questions.
Shelby takes his silence as a willingness to help and presses on. She gives the man a description of the house to the best of her ability without having ever actually seen it before, but it turns out, she's in luck; she only has to say a few words before the man's face sparks with recognition.
"I'd avoid that place if I were you," he warns. His voice is slow and thick with a heavy midwestern accent. He is looking at Shelby suspiciously. She doesn't seem the type who would frequent a place like that. Besides, people who go there generally aren't stupid enough to try to stop for directions.
"I know, I'm sorry. Look, I'm just looking for my daughter and her friend. They might be there."
The man looks at Shelby sympathetically and takes a steep drag from his cigarette before spitting a thick loogy out onto the sidewalk at his feet.
"A little brunette girl?" he finally asks, much to Shelby's surprise. "Running around with a blonde?"
"You've seen them?" Shelby asks. Her voice displays relief, but the way this man is looking at her is telling her not to get her hopes up too high.
"They stopped by the bar a few hours ago for dinner," the man shrugs. "Thought they just looked lost, but if they were heading in that direction, well… I hate to tell a mother how to do her job, but I'm afraid to say you might already be too late."
"Well, I've got to try something," Shelby sighs.
The man shrugs, reasoning that Shelby has a point and doesn't say anything else on the manner aside from giving her the directions that she is looking for. When she is done, Shelby offers a breathless word of gratitude before pulling her car back into drive, desperate to get back on the road.
"Hey lady," the man calls back to her before she can speed off. When she turns over her shoulder to look at him, she notices that his face is somber. "You wouldn't want to just show up to a place like that," he warns. "I wouldn't go without backup."
Shelby takes a deep breath. She thinks about the call she had placed to 911 over a half hour ago. She had hoped that they would be able to interpret something out of her directions, but she hears no sirens, sees no lights… the night is as quiet as Shelby has ever heard it.
Hopefully they are on their way. Hopefully Rachel and Quinn are there and still in one piece with enough of the tenacity that had gotten them this far left over to get them out of this, too.
"I do have backup," she tells the man, and she hopes that she is not lying.
It is mid-March and Shelby is already starting to get restless.
The final weeks of winter have been hanging on tight and have brought with them, a cold misery. The closer Shelby gets to her graduation day, the longer the days seem to be dragging on.
While her classmates are busy putting the finishing touches on their college applications or securing jobs around town, Shelby is saving every penny she can for New York.
A lot of people seem to have an opinion on Shelby's post-high school career choice, from her classmates to her parents. They sneer at her insistence that she will be famous one day.
Even her own friends seem to be losing confidence in her. Just yesterday, the entire student government club – for which she was senior class treasurer – had staged an intervention. They told her that she was wasting her potential by not going to college and she isn't sure how good of a job she did in trying to convince them that she would be wasting even more potential by not trying her luck in New York.
The only person who did seem to still believe in her is her boyfriend Peter. They had started dating a little over a year ago after he had moved to Lima from – of all places – New York and they have been inseparable ever since.
Shelby is in love with him. She is infatuated by this dark-haired boy with the grace and culture and confidence of someone much older. Nobody else has made her heart flutter inside of her chest so hard it hurt every time he got too close. When he was away, the pain is only worse.
Shelby is just putting the finishing touches on her red lipstick when she hears the honk of a horn from the street.
She hasn't had a lot to look forward to in recent months, but Winter Formal was something that everybody has been counting down for.
Shelby checks herself over in the mirror one last time, making sure everything is perfect. She flattens her palms against her emerald green dress, smoothing out any wrinkles before applying one last coat of hairspray to her violently teased hair to ensure that it will stay rigidly in place.
Outside, Peter is the portrait of a perfect gentleman as always.
He is waiting outside of the Rolls Royce his father had let him borrow for the occasion, the passenger door already opened for her.
Peter is wearing a dark blue suit and tie with a ruffled white undershirt. He looks stunning.
When he greets her, he grips the tip of her hand delicately like she is made of glass and kisses it before slipping her corsage around her wrist. He helps her into the car. He doesn't let go of her hand until she is safely inside of her seat.
The dance is everything Shelby ever dreamed it would be.
The high school gymnasium had been turned into the ballroom. Students are having the time of their lives and interacting like nobody cares who belongs to what clique, at least for tonight.
They know their night is only just beginning.
Whispers of an afterparty start before the DJ even plays the first song. Halfway through the dance, everybody knows which table to get their punch from if they want to lighten the mood a little more.
The dance ends at ten, but that is when the night really gets started.
Shelby gets back inside of Peter's car. She is a little buzzed, just like everybody else in her grade even though they are all driving across town for the party. The thought briefly crosses Shelby's mind that it will be a miracle if everybody makes it there alive, but she has enough alcohol in her that that is no more than an afterthought.
Shelby quickly finds out that she has never been to a party like this before. Not only is everybody in their best suits and dresses, everybody had been invited, too – an anomaly for a high school party. By the looks of the packed house, damn near everybody had shown up as well.
As the night grows later, the patrons start to grow sloppier. This is an unwritten rule of physics regarding high school parties.
Alcohol stains the fronts of hundred-dollar dresses and rental tuxedo. Shelby spots one boy passed out in the corner in a puddle of what she hopes is beer, and a girl who is dancing one minute and throwing up down the front of her dress the next.
Shelby crinkles her nose and decides that she needs some air.
She hasn't seen Peter in almost an hour. This isn't entirely unusual; Peter was a popular guy in their class, especially compared to her. People liked Peter because he was charismatic and friendly. People tolerated Shelby because often, she was there with him and they didn't have a choice.
The girl finds a bedroom upstairs with a vanity and parks herself in front of it as she begins to fix her hair and makeup. She wants to leave soon. She is exhausted, and drank a little more than she intended. Plus, with everything she just saw going on downstairs, she feels like she could really use a shower.
Shelby attempts to fix her mascara with a tube she finds laying on the vanity in front of her but flinches when she pokes herself hard in the eye.
She isn't exactly throwing up all over herself drunk like some of her classmates downstairs, but she is certainly past the cusp of buzzed.
She doesn't like this feeling. Shelby Corcoran is such a control freak that when she can't even control her own body, it irritates her.
Sighing, she throws the mascara wand back down against the tabletop and looks at herself in the mirror. She supposes she doesn't look too bad. She had put enough hairspray in her hair earlier that it hasn't moved an inch, and her makeup is just a little bit runny. She supposes that Peter has been drinking too, so he probably wouldn't even notice. Guys never notice stuff like that.
Shelby hears a commotion coming from the hallway. It sounds like a single body stumbling back and forth into the walls like a pinball. She turns over her shoulder, stunned to see her own boyfriend stumble past the bedroom she has taken refuge in.
"Peter!" Shelby gasps, shocked to see him in such a state. An hour ago when she had last seen him, he was certainly drunk, but not so much so that he couldn't even walk in a straight line. Now, his hair – which had been greased back for the dance – is standing on all ends. He had lost his tie and his jacket and his undershirt is untucked, wrinkled, and by the looks of things, missing a few buttons.
Peter looks up at the sound of his name. When Shelby looks him in the eyes, she notices that they are glazed over and slightly crossed. A glow has formed high inside of his cheeks. Shelby has never seen him so drunk.
"What happened?" she gasps, standing to her feet. She is feeling remarkably sober next to him as she grabs Peter by the wrists and guides him into the bedroom to sit down.
"I took a few shots," Peter hiccups. Shelby gets him to sit down on the edge of the bed and then he falls backwards against the mattress and enters into a fit of hysterics about that. "Have you ever had bourbon, Shelby?"
Shelby frowns. Bourbon was her father's drink of choice. It always made him sloppy, too.
When Shelby doesn't answer Peter, the boy takes notice. With a lot of effort, he manages to pull himself up onto his elbows to look at Shelby. His face falls. Shelby thinks she sees a hint of green flash inside of his cheeks and for a moment, she is afraid that he is going to throw up, but all he does is burp loudly before wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.
Peter looks up at Shelby. His pupils are frighteningly dilated. Swallowing, Shelby wonders if bourbon is the only thing he has been dabbling with tonight. She doubts that very much, but figures that can be a conversation saved for tomorrow.
"Oh, Peter…" Shelby finally breathes, trying and failing to mask her disappointment. "Maybe we should find somebody to drive us home. Where are your car keys?"
"It's still early, Shelby!" Peter argues.
"Peter, it's almost two o'clock in the morning," Shelby reminds him. "My curfews in fifteen minutes!"
"That's plenty of time!" Peter insists. Shelby cocks a curious eyebrow at him.
"Plenty of time for what?" she asks.
Shelby watches Peter carefully as he wags his eyebrows at her. Shelby is pretty sure that he is trying to be seductive, but he drank so much that he only looks rather silly.
With reflexes that are much faster than Shelby would have imagined given his state, Peter reaches up and grabs her by the wrist, pulling her onto the mattress. She stumbles and falls on top of him. She loses one shoe on the way down. Briefly, she thinks of Cinderella, yet, hard as she tries, she doesn't quite remember that movie involving this much alcohol.
Peter's disheveled hair tickles the underside of Shelby's chin as he wastes no time planting hard kisses against her neck that miss the mark of her pulse point every time.
Shelby isn't exactly unfamiliar with this. Her and Peter have been sleeping together since Christmas, when Shelby had included her virginity inside of her present to him. But Peter is normally the portrait of romanticism whenever they did something like this. Tonight, he is fumbling like this is his first time.
Shelby laughs a little bit at his attempt, but pushes him away.
"Okay, hot-shot, I think you've had a little too much to drink," she tells the boy. She presses a hand into his chest and forces him off of her before sitting up.
Except Peter doesn't want to stop. He pulls her down to her back again almost immediately and rolls back on top of her. Shelby sighs. Getting her boyfriend home was going to be a lot harder than she was hoping.
"And I think you haven't had enough," Peter challenges, attacking her neck again. Shelby feels his hips shift, securing her tightly to the mattress with his knees. The ghost of amusement immediately leaves Shelby's face. She is starting to get annoyed.
"Come on, Peter," she argues. "I have to go home and so do you."
"We'll be quick, I promise." He breathes hard into her neck as his hands start to wander, searching for the zipper of her dress. When he doesn't find it, he gives up and resorts to hiking it high against her thighs.
"Get off of me!" Shelby insists, her tone hardening. She bucks her hips, trying to dislodge the boy from around her thighs. He is drunk enough that it works. He stumbles and rolls away.
He is on his back, spread eagle against the mattress and for a moment, Shelby thinks that he may have finally passed out. She is just wondering how she is going to get him downstairs into the car when he sits up and looks at Shelby with an expression that makes her recoil.
"You're my girlfriend!" he snaps at her sharply. His voice has changed alongside his face. Shelby cannot place what it is exactly, but it terrifies her. "You don't get to say no to me!"
Peter has never spoken to her like this before. Shelby is still trying to recover from that when Peter reaches out and grabs her hard by the wrists, pinning her to the bed with a surprising strength given his current state.
Shelby feels a sob form in the back of her throat, but she is so confused and so afraid that it never makes its way out of her mouth.
She feels paralyzed. She used to welcome Peter's touch. Now, she feels like his hands are physically burning her.
Her heart is fluttering wildly inside her chest. Shelby knows that Peter can feel it because he comments on it, but he mistakes it for desire and continues to push her further into the mattress.
After that, Shelby cannot seem to manage a single word. She falls limp in her fear and lets Peter do what he pleases.
She tries to block out what he is doing to her. She tries to use this time to rationalize his actions inside of her own head.
Maybe he is right. She isn't fighting back, so maybe she does want this. After all, they're dating and she has always welcomed him before. It's not like they've never slept with each other, and she's been drinking, so it can't possibly count as… Shelby can't even get the word to form inside of her own head.
The more she tries to rationalize Peter's behavior, the more she knows that everything between her and Peter is about to change.
And after it does, it will stay like that forever.
Thanks to the old bartender's direction, Shelby finds the house that she knows she never would have found otherwise.
From the road, you cannot even see a house. The driveway is long, and there are enough trees and bushes along the property that not even the distant lights from inside are visible.
A sense of dread fills Shelby. She cannot sense the presence of a single other human being. The police never came. Shelby wonders if they even know where they are going. There is also no sign of Quinn or Rachel. The only sound she hears is the distant wailing of animals in the forest.
The fog has been creeping in since the sun went down. By now, it blankets the town. The flatlands fill in with it. Everything is pitch black.
Shelby parks her Range Rover on the side of the road, keeping it tucked inside of the bushes. She remembers when she had gotten the car, how hard the decision had been to choose between the black model or the white one. She has never been more pleased with her decision to go with black.
Shelby presses her luck and checks her cell one last time in the hopes that she has enough service to call 911, but she should have known that luck wouldn't be on her side. She is on her own.
The woman hops out of her car, closing the door as quietly as she can behind her. She slowly edges her way up the long driveway, hanging inside of the shadows along the tree line. She still doesn't know what she is going to do once she gets to the house, but she needs to find a way to see that Rachel and Quinn are okay before she does anything.
Shelby walks on tiptoes. In her heightened state of alertness, she gets spooked by every gust of wind or crunch of leaves underneath her feet. The hairs are prickling up against the back of her neck. She can't seem to shake the feeling that somebody is sneaking up behind her, stalking her.
When a loud crack slices through the silence, Shelby is not expecting it.
It travels over the fog and strikes her with the force of a punch. It is loud enough that her ears are ringing.
Instinctively, Shelby throws herself to the ground in an effort to make herself as small as possible. She flattens her stomach into the dirt and throws her hands over her head for protection.
That was a gunshot.
Shelby doesn't have a lot of experience in the area of firearms, but she had still grown up in rural Ohio surrounded by hunters and gun enthusiasts. She knew the sound of a gun when she heard it.
Her heart is hammering inside of her chest as she brings her hands up and rubs them over herself, searching for the telltale feeling of warm blood pooling between her fingers. Her adrenaline is far too high for her to be able to feel any pain. If she had just been shot, she doesn't think she would know otherwise.
Her mind starts to race. She thinks about who will take care of Beth if she dies. What will happen to Rachel and Quinn?
It is only after all these worst-case scenarios pass through her mind that the blood stops rushing to her head long enough for her to form a coherent thought. She takes a deep breath, closes her eyes to concentrate, and realizes – with a rush of relief and a hint of embarrassment – that she hasn't been shot at all.
Her ears are still ringing, but through all that she can tell that the night has fallen silent again. The only thing she can hear now is her own breathing.
The sound had come from inside of the house. It isn't her who had been shot, but somebody had been, and Shelby needs to know who.
The mother picks herself up on trembling feet. She scrambles the last several meters towards the house, not bothering with silence and secrecy anymore now that her desperation level has grown tenfold.
Eighteen years ago, Shelby had made a promise to herself and to her daughter that Peter Gabbanelli would never lay a hand on them ever again. She owes it to Rachel to keep that promise. She has already failed that girl so much more than she'd ever wanted to. Now, she can only pray that she has not failed her again.