Page 65 of Last Man Standing

“I kept my eyes closed and asked him to take me away. I understand this place… the location…” She exhales. “It’s supposed to be a secret.”

“It is,” Dad rumbles seriously. “But now you’re here.”

In response, Mav runs a finger along his neck. She’s dead.

I shake my head and drop my gaze to my feet.

“Did you pay attention to the roads that brought you here? Could you retrace those steps in the future if you had to?”

No, Dad. She can’t. She has no fuckin’ clu⁠—

“Yes, sir. I could.”

I shoot straight and meet Mav’s eyes.

Finally, this motherfucker turns serious.

“He made it difficult to keep track, but after the third time passing the same formation of mountains, I realized we’d been circling. By putting his hoodie over my face, stealing away my sense of vision, my brain compensated and paid closer attention to other things.”

Shut up, Scarlett! Shut the fuck up.

“I noticed how often we ascended,” she doesn’t shut up. “How often we descended. How tight the curves in the road were. And there was a particularly nasty pothole just a few hundred feet from your driveway.”

Well. That’s it then. She’s dead.

“Do you understand the reason behind the privacy of our home, Scarlett? The necessity?”

“Yes, sir.” She turns silent for a beat, before adding, “My brother had dealings with a man named Richard Aster in the past. I understand who that man is to your family.”

“And knowing that, do you think it pleases me to hear about the pothole in the road?”

I push off the wall, prepared to go in and save her, but Mav’s hand crashes against my chest and pins me in place. Now it’s his turn to shake his head. No.

“You asked a very specific question,” Scarlett rasps. “I figure lying would serve no one.”

“Does that make you brave or stupid?”

She scoffs.

Fuck me, she faces death and scoffs.

“Probably stupid,” she decides. “It’s no secret I’m completely friggin’ useless during confrontation. If you wanted to kill me, I wouldn’t run away. My brain wouldn’t even think to tell me to run.” She exhales a long, tired sigh. “My therapist told me about freeze. Ya know how there’s fight or flight?”

I don’t know if he nods for her to go on, or if he’s busy loading the chamber of his gun, but she continues, “I grew up thinking there was just the two: fight or flight. But then some stuff happened to me, and I didn’t do either of those things. I didn’t fight, and I didn’t run. Sometimes I froze, and too often, I did the fawn thing where I tried to please my abuser. I didn’t understand it, I didn’t even have time to consider the why, because I was too busy trying to calm my constantly attacked nervous system. I’m ashamed to know this about myself, because I never once fought back, and stupid me, I didn’t run away either. I ran toward.”

“Your former lover,” Dad rumbles. “Roy Daniels.”

“Mm.” She exhales a sarcastic grunt. “I want to be mad you know so much about me, but I know about the pothole in the road, so…” Slowly, the scrape of a dining chair echoes across the floor. Is she sitting? Fuck, Princess. Are you fawning now? “But yeah. My ex, Roy. After my brother pulled me out of that relationship and dropped me into a therapist’s office, I learned about the other two. Freeze and fawn. Both make me incredibly angry, because what the hell? No one else freezes when bad things happen. No one else is dumb enough to want to please their attacker. People like my brother… and your son,” she rasps. “They fight. They do it well. Quickly. Confidently.” She sighs.

“They also have training.” And there goes my dad, peeling that harsh exterior off like a coat and parenting her exactly like I knew he would. Because that’s who he is. A protector. “People with training are less likely to freeze, Scarlett. A woman like you, someone who experienced the trauma you did⁠—”

“But I’ve had training, too.” She brings her coffee up and sips. I don’t know—I can’t—but I fucking know. She defers to caffeine for strength, while inside, berates herself for being weak. “I’ve learned how to fight back. How to shoot. How to run and hide. How to barricade a building and search for high ground.” The soft tap of her coffee cup being set on the table proves what I already knew. “I’ve had so much therapy it practically melts out of my ears, and I’ve had training—from my brother, from a cop friend, even from professional martial artists. Still, when I need to fight, I freeze, and when I need to run, I babble like an idiot and stumble over my own feet, because tears make it impossible to see. I’m completely friggin’ useless. So if you, or your wife, or literally any of the guards on this property take issue with me knowing about the pothole up the road, then I trust you’ll deal with it however you want to deal with it. But don’t worry, I’ll probably freeze and make it easy for you.”

Mav taps a hand to my chest and draws my focus around.

Suicide by Jameson. She’s practically begging for it.

My brows pinch tight, wrinkling my forehead and forcing a wash of dread through my veins. Is that how she’ll go out? Does she want to die?