❛𝐃𝐎𝐍'𝐓 𝐁𝐄 𝐒𝐂𝐀𝐑𝐄𝐃, 𝐈'𝐌 𝐉𝐔𝐒𝐓 𝐘𝐎𝐔𝐑 𝐖𝐈𝐅𝐄...❜ | 𝐍𝐨.𝟑

Chapter 20- Persuasion... (Part No.1)

TW / / HINT TO SUICIDE NEAR END OF CHAPTER.
Emma's POV:
Time. It's a funny thing, isn't it? Sometimes we waste it, sometimes we spend it wisely, and sometimes we take it for granted. No one really knows how much time they'll have left - no one. Just when you think everything is perfect, one moment could change that, a prospect my wife was the cruel victim of on a repeated basis...

Time can also be perceived in many different ways - no one truly knows how long two minutes can be, until they're in moments where every second counts as a long and strenuous effort. Like exercising: you want nothing more than to get off that damn treadmill and leave it feeling as if you've accomplished something, and you're only two minutes in. Or when you're waiting for a friend to text you back after doing something cruel to create animosity between you both - the examples are endless, just like time.

However, one example I didn't venture out for is how goddamn long two whole minutes would seem when you're waiting for the man who threatened the life of your fiancée, who called you up and unexpectedly asked to meet for a cruelly brief, fleeting conversation...

The deep, energetic sound of my leather, knee-length boots echoing through the dusty, dampened walls of the crimson barn we are set to meet in, the noise of creeping anticipation setting a flutter in my tummy. Caused by my nervous bodily shifts, the wire looped around my torso scratches viciously against the slope of my bare breast, irritating my skin and deepening the butterflies fluttering through my rib cage. "I knew I should have done this damn thing myself..." the scratchy sound of the static exuding from the damned piece of machinery scathes my ear drums, loud enough to be heard from anywhere close by. "Dammit, I should have just used my phone..." I grow hot and flustered, my anger for this cursed wire building up, collided with my unsettled nerves. The part of my human where these emotions grow from baffles me: I do this every day. Walk right into danger and stare it dead in the eye, face the most villainous of mortals and throw them into a jail cell where they belong...but never has it been someone so close to me, so misunderstood and so...kind?

Kind? That's what you think of the bastard who tried to take Max and Aloura's mother from them? Fucking kind?

Sympathy fails to cloak itself from my body, a trait I envy having. After telling myself time and time again, he's just as bad as any other kidnapper, tricking my smart enough brain into believing this sordid lie, it's proven to fail me each and every time.

I just want this over with. I want to put this part of my life to bed, strap it down to the mattress and shove the process well-known to me and constantly being repeated away permanently. I need him gone. Dissolved from the earths surface, body buried far away and swept into the world's element, whether it be at the hands of my bare own, or from the doing of steel handcuffs, as I worry how deep my empathic heart will go for the man who meant everything to me, as well as the man who I'm longing to despise. After all of his pitiful heartbreaks, failed loves and destroyed relationships...I should have seen this coming. Our friendship goes beyond the line of scrimmage, so far as to commit a crime worthy of indefinite imprisonment...why, Connor? Every crush, every partner, every human who you cast an eye towards means something at some point...but why did it have to be me?

Me? The taken woman with children to put to bed every night, an older sister with siblings who long my comfort and protection, most of all, me...your friend.

I find myself growing frazzled when I realise...all of my answers to each and every rhetorical question zooming around my mind's enclosure at hundreds of miles an hour, may not be as far away as my distracted, distanced brain thought...I hear the rattling creek of each dusty old floorboard cracking beneath a heavy foot, barely withstanding the weight pressuring unapologetically into its plank. The noise of the barn door squeaking open, the sound familiar to that of a tortured animal in distress, able to create a sense of destruction inside the walls nucleus, like breaking down a person who is the depressed owner of a weak heart and brittle bones. And his breath...god, his breath...heaving upward and down, as if it's copying the rhythm of a fucking seasaw, hyperventilation at its lowest level possible.