Chapter 329 - 0329: Go Ahead And Scream

Chapter 329: Chapter 0329: Go Ahead And Scream

Elena’s Point Of View

"Let me go, Graham! Stay away from me!"

My voice didn’t even sound like mine anymore. It emerged as a raw, jagged shriek that ripped from the bottom of my lungs, tearing at my throat as I thrashed in his grip. The rough wool of his expensive suit jacket scratched brutally against my bare collarbone, and the smell of his cologne... a scent I once found comforting but now turned my stomach, filled my nose, suffocating me.

How many times had I buried my face in that same jacket, seeking comfort after a long day? The memory felt like it belonged to someone else entirely.

"Never, Elena!" Graham’s voice came out completely unhinged, booming in my ear as his fingers dug into the skin of my back with terrifying, bruising force. He breathed like a feral animal, his chest heaving violently against mine. "I did that before! I let you walk away, and that was exactly how that bastard found his way into your life! That was my mistake! But not anymore! I’m not repeating it ever again, do you hear me? You belong to me! You are my wife!"

The possessiveness in his tone made my skin crawl. This wasn’t love... it was ownership, pure and simple. The man I’d married had never spoken to me this way, had never looked at me with such wild desperation.

"We are divorced, Graham!" I screamed back, twisting my torso with every ounce of strength I had left, trying to create even an inch of space between us. My bare feet kept slipping on the polished hardwood, finding no traction. "Look at the reality! We signed the papers! You have a child with Lillian! We are over!"

"Then I’ll marry you again!" he shouted, his face turning an ugly, sweaty maroon under the bright foyer lights. His eyes were wide, bloodshot, and totally blank... like the man I had lived with for years had completely evacuated his own body, leaving behind this desperate, snapping creature. I searched those eyes for any trace of the Graham I once knew, the one who used to laugh at my terrible jokes and bring me coffee in bed on Sunday mornings. Nothing. Just this hollow, frantic stranger.

"You’re a nutcase! Let me go!"

Panic, cold and sharp, slammed into my chest as I felt a sudden, terrifying looseness around my torso. The knot of the white bath towel... my only shield was slipping. It unraveled from the violent friction of our bodies rubbing together as we wrestled. I could feel the cold air of the foyer hitting the bare skin of my waist as the fabric began to sag under his heavy hands. The vulnerability was overwhelming, stripping away not just physical protection but every last shred of dignity.

The sheer terror of being taken advantage of, of being stripped naked and left completely defenseless in my own hallway by a man who had lost his mind, turned my blood to absolute ice. My vision blurred with sudden, hot tears of pure fright. This was my home... my sanctuary, and he was violating it, violating me, in the most fundamental way.

"Graham, please!" I sobbed, my voice dropping from a furious scream into a desperate, broken whimper. The fight was draining out of me, replaced by bone-deep exhaustion and fear. My hands came up, palms flat against his stubborn chest, pushing with everything I had. "Graham, please, just look at what you’re doing! Let me go!"

"Only if you agree to come with me," he muttered, his jaw clenching as he used his superior weight to press me back against the heavy wooden banister of the staircase. The edge dug painfully into my spine. "Only if you promise right now to pack a bag and walk out that door with me. We can leave Houston tonight, Elena. Start over somewhere new, just the two of us. Just say yes."

The delusion in his words was almost as frightening as the physical assault. Did he really believe we could just erase everything that had happened? Erase Lillian, erase their child, erase Jaxx, erase the divorce?

"I can never go with you, Graham!" I cried out, the tears finally spilling over my eyelashes and tracking hot paths down my burning cheeks. "Are you insane? I am never doing that! I am with Jaxx now! Just let me go! I’ll scream, Graham! I swear to God, I will scream this entire neighborhood down!"

He let out a sharp, hysterical bark of laughter that sent a shiver straight down my spine. His grip on my upper arms tightened until I knew there would be purple fingermarks there by morning... physical evidence of this nightmare. "Then scream, Elena! Go ahead and scream! You think I care? You think anyone will get here in time to stop me?"

The implication in his words made my stomach drop. In time to stop him from what, exactly?

Desperate, I brought my right hand up and started hitting him... fists raining down on his shoulders, his chest, his face, anywhere I could reach. But he wouldn’t budge. He felt like a solid brick wall, fueled by whatever manic adrenaline was coursing through his veins. My knuckles throbbed with each impact, but he barely seemed to register the blows. It was like hitting stone.

My eyes darted frantically around the foyer, wide and blurry with tears. I needed a weapon. Anything. A vase, a heavy book, the brass umbrella stand, the wooden stool... anything to defend myself and stop this absolute madness from going any further than it already had. But everything was out of reach. The decorative stool where he had dumped his stupid blue flowers sat a good four feet away, might as well have been a mile. I was completely trapped, pinned between his body and the banister with no escape route.

My mind started racing in a million different directions, a chaotic loop of ’where is Jaxx, please come back, where is he, he said fifteen minutes, please, please, please. How long had it been? Five minutes? Ten?’

Time had become elastic, stretching and warping under the weight of my terror. Every second felt like an eternity, and yet I knew that help... if it came at all might arrive too late.

Graham leaned down.

I choked back a sob of pure disgust as his wet, hot lips slammed against the side of my neck. He kissed me aggressively... rough, sloppy, frantic movements traveling from my jawline down to my throat, then directly onto my bare shoulder where the towel had slipped away.

This was violation in its purest form. My skin crawled beneath his touch, every nerve ending screaming in protest. I wanted to disappear, to shed my own skin, to be anywhere but trapped beneath him.

"Get off me! Help me!" I shrieked at the top of my lungs, my voice cracking and echoing painfully off the high ceilings. The sound tore from my throat, raw and desperate, scraping against my vocal cords until they burned. "Someone help me! Please!"

Even though the houses in this exclusive estate stood well-spaced apart... separated by massive, manicured lawns and thick privacy hedges designed for the wealthy to hide behind, I prayed with every fiber of my soul that some passing security guard or a neighbor walking their dog would hear the absolute terror in my voice. Someone had to hear me. Someone had to come. The isolation that had once felt like luxury now became my prison.

My frantic screams must have startled him, or perhaps they simply enraged him further. Graham suddenly snapped his head up, his dark eyes flashing with pure fury, and he violently slammed his mouth over mine to silence me. The kiss wasn’t about desire... it was about control, about shutting me up, about breaking me down.

My eyes widened in absolute horror. I instantly clamped my mouth shut, clenching my teeth together so hard my jaw ached, refusing to let him in. The pressure was suffocating, his breath hot and sour against my face. He growled against my lips... a frustrated, ugly sound that sent ice through my veins, and then his hand flew to my hip. He pinched the soft skin there so incredibly hard that a sharp flash of blinding pain shot through my lower body. The cruelty was calculated, deliberate.

"Ah!" The gasp escaped involuntarily from the sudden sting.

He seized the opportunity the moment my lips parted. He forced his way in, deepening the kiss with a brutal, suffocating force that made me feel like I was drowning in my own home. The taste of him was stale, metallic with my own panic and something bitter I couldn’t name. My stomach lurched with revulsion. This man I had once trusted, once worked alongside, had become a monster wearing a familiar face.

Pure survival instinct took over. I didn’t think; I simply reacted. I brought my teeth down and bit his tongue with every ounce of jaw strength I possessed, clamping down until my teeth clicked together. The copper taste of his blood flooded my mouth, making me gag even as I held firm.

"Gah!"

Graham let out a sharp, agonized groan, jerking his head back instantly as a dark smear of bright red blood coated his bottom lip. His eyes went completely feral, wild with rage and pain, all pretense of civility stripped away. Before I could even attempt to run toward the door, he threw his entire body weight forward, tackling me directly to the hard wooden floor. The world tilted violently.

The impact knocked the remaining air completely from my lungs. My head slapped against the floorboards with a dull crack, and my vision went momentarily fuzzy with swimming black spots. Pain exploded through my skull like fireworks behind my eyes. In that exact moment of weakness, while I lay stunned and gasping, his frantic hands yanked upward, pulling the white towel completely off my body. The exposure felt like a second violation, cold air hitting my skin like a slap.

By now, I was sobbing uncontrollably, tears streaming down my face in hot rivers that blurred everything into watercolor shapes. My chest hitched with each broken breath, my body shaking so violently I could barely form words. "No, please... no, Graham, please don’t do this... stop... please stop..." I begged, my voice reduced to a broken, gravelly whisper as the cold air hit my bare skin. The vulnerability was crushing, suffocating in its intensity. I had never felt so powerless, so utterly stripped of agency and dignity.

"You’re so stubborn, Elena!" Graham shouted down at me, his knee pinning my left leg as he loomed over me like a dark storm cloud. His hair hung in complete disarray, blood dripping from his mouth onto his white collar in fat, crimson drops. The crimson drops fell like accusations, like evidence of what he was truly capable of. "If you had just agreed to come with me, I wouldn’t have gone this far! You forced my hand! You always force my hand!"

The twisted logic of his words made my stomach turn. He actually believed this. He actually thought my refusal justified his violence. This wasn’t my fault. None of this was my fault. I repeated it to myself like a mantra, clinging to that truth even as everything else fell apart.

I clutched desperately at the discarded towel, gripping whatever scrap of fabric I could against my chest with one hand while using my other hand to scratch and slap at his face. My nails raked across his cheek, leaving angry red welts that welled with tiny beads of blood. I fought with everything I had left, but it was a losing battle against his superior weight and strength. He used his full, brutal strength to part my thighs with his own knees, forcing himself between them with mechanical determination.

I yelped in sharp, agonizing pain as his heavy knee ground against my thigh bone. The pressure was unbearable, radiating outward in waves that made my leg go numb. I shook my head violently from side to side against the floor, tears blinding me completely as I kept slapping at his chest, his neck, anything I could reach.

My palms stung from the impact, turning red and tender. He truly seemed possessed by something dark and terrible, something that had been lurking beneath the surface all along. He wasn’t hearing me. He wasn’t seeing me as human anymore... just an obstacle to overcome, a possession to claim.

"Please... Jaxx... please..." I whimpered into the empty air, my strength evaporating like water on hot pavement. Exhaustion crashed over me in waves, pulling me under. My muscles felt like lead, my head throbbed from where it had struck the floor, and I was losing my grip on the towel. I felt completely defeated, bracing myself for the absolute worst to happen. This couldn’t be how my story ended. Not like this. Not at the hands of someone I’d once considered my husband.

Just then... like a sudden, terrifying blur of dark motion, the heavy weight crushing me was violently ripped away.

There was a loud, tearing sound of fabric, a sharp intake of breath, and then the sound of a heavy body being launched through the air.

CRASH.

Graham was literally flung across the width of the foyer, his back slamming into the opposite drywall with a force so massive it cracked the plaster in a spiderweb pattern. Picture frames rattled on their hooks. He slid down to the floor like a discarded puppet, limbs sprawling awkwardly, momentarily stunned into stillness.

Weakly, trembling from head to toe like a leaf in a storm, I pushed myself up on one shaky elbow. I quickly scrambled to pull the white towel back over my bare, bruised body, my hands shaking so badly I could barely grip the fabric. My vision swam, blurred by a thick layer of tears as I blinked rapidly, trying to clear my sight. The world tilted dangerously, reality struggling to reassert itself after the nightmare of the last few minutes.

Through the haze, I stared at the towering, broad-shouldered figure now standing in the middle of my foyer like an avenging angel. His chest heaved under a dark shirt, his knuckles were bone-white from clenching his fists so tightly I thought the bones might break through skin, and the aura radiating from him was pure, unadulterated murder.

The air around him seemed to crackle with barely contained violence, with a rage so intense it was almost visible. I had never seen anyone look so dangerous, so ready to destroy another human being.

My voice came out small, broken, hopeful... a whisper that carried every ounce of relief and residual terror. "Jaxx?"