Backcountry Escape by Nicole Helm

Author:Nicole Helm
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2020-02-05T19:41:15+00:00

Chapter Thirteen

Felicity may have lived with her father only until she was four years old, but as she waited to take him out, she realized she’d learned quite a few things from him.

Silence was the first thing. Stillness the second. If you were silent and still, it was hard to become a target. And in a house with her father, she was always a target.

He had to find her first, though.

She’d learned to fold in on herself, to meld into her surroundings with everything she had. She’d learned and honed those skills before she’d learned how to speak or walk—or so she thought. So she felt.

Life with the Knights, and the slow—very slow—bloom of maturity and adulthood had helped her unlearn those impulses. She’d figured out how to speak and move and dream and believe without folding in on herself. Without hiding.

But a person never unlearned their early impulses completely. As her father huffed and puffed toward her, she struggled to stay in the present. Hard when she was hiding just as if she’d been that toddler struggling to hide from another one of her father’s rages.

But she had a plan this time. She had fight this time. Her father didn’t get to terrorize her anymore.

She moved with his movements, keeping her body shielded by the large rock she was hiding behind. She was careful of where and how she stepped—even a pebble tumbling down the side of the crevasse she was tiptoeing around might bring his attention to her.

Though, based on all his heavy breathing, maybe not.

She kept her breathing even, that old hiding trick in full force as he passed the rock she was behind—as she moved around it so she could surprise him from the back.

She didn’t even need to push him. As she jumped out, guttural scream piercing the quiet air, he jerked, tripped and tumbled down the steep cliff.

He landed with a thud, and then moans of pain that echoed and grew louder and louder. He writhed on the hard ground below and Felicity looked down at him. She felt inexplicably furious.

She’d won, for the moment. Done exactly what she planned to do, and still the fury swept through her like a tidal wave.

“Do you feel big and powerful now?” she called as she considering kicking some rock down on top of him. Or maybe throwing the heaviest rocks she could lift. She wanted to torture him. She wanted to cause him all the pain he’d caused her. She wanted to...

She stopped herself, and the fury. She wasn’t like him—didn’t want to be. She didn’t need to terrorize him just because he’d terrorized her. It wouldn’t solve anything or erase anything.

Still, it surprised her how badly she wanted to.

“Felicity.” He said it in the same tone of voice she remembered. Pleading. Apologetic. Therapy had taught her that an abuser’s strongest weapon was his ability to make himself seem truly sorry, truly sympathetic.

“Maybe you should answer the question. Do you feel big and powerful now?”

“I was only following orders, Liss.

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