Savage Hearts

The girl is leaning back against a wide tree trunk, looking up at Todd with a mixture of horror and disbelief as he says something I can’t make out. His back is to me and he has one arm braced on the tree above the girl’s head. But it’s his other hand that attracts my attention.

I watch as he reaches up, pinching the girl’s nipple through her tank top and twisting with a roughness that makes her cry out and cringe away from him. But he holds tight, whispering beneath his breath until her cry becomes an almost inaudible whimper.

I don’t know what he’s said to her, but whatever it was, it convinces her to stand still and silent while he reaches a hand up her shirt and pinches her again, this time, skin on skin. She grimaces and squeezes her eyes shut, but doesn’t fight him. I don’t know why she doesn’t fight—there are people close enough to hear her call out and come to help her—but she’s so young and Todd is an experienced monster. Making a victim of an innocent kid is no doubt easy for him. He probably didn’t even have to try.

If I’d seen something like this even fifteen minutes ago, I wouldn’t have been able to stop myself from running to help the girl. But I’m colder now, working from a place of thought, not feeling.

And so I watch as Todd shoves her shirt up, baring her small breasts and the faint bruises already forming on her nipples. I watch as he pulls his dick out and jerks himself off to the sound of the girl’s whimpers, all while inflicting more pain with his free hand. Near the end, he twists her sensitive flesh so hard that she falls to the ground with a guttural sound of pain.

The moment her knees hit the earth, he comes, splashing the sticky fluid onto one of her tear-streaked cheeks.

Everything is quiet for a moment after, like the forest is holding its breath in silent disapproval of what’s happened, and then Todd laughs.

He laughs and tosses a napkin from his pocket onto the ground in front of the girl as he takes a step back.

“Clean up and come join the group,” he says. “But give me a head start. We don’t want to be seen together, do we? Then your dad might figure out what a slut you are.”

I barely have time to crouch down, hiding beneath the wide, green leaves of one of the giant ferns growing beside the trail, before Todd turns and starts toward me. He emerges onto the trail, not five feet from where I’m squatting, but he turns the other way, strolling back up toward the waterfall like he doesn’t have a care in the world.

But then, he probably doesn’t.

He doesn’t have any regrets, he doesn’t have a conscience, and the world will be a more dangerous place as long as he’s in it.

As I watch the girl stumble after him a few minutes later, swiping the tears from her cheeks and tightening her ponytail with trembling hands, I silently tell her I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have had to see what just happened to know what needed to be done, but I did. And now there is no more doubt in my mind.

But I’m not going to do it here.

I was wrong about being on Todd’s radar—it was the girl he was focused on—and he deserves worse than a swift, relatively painless death. He deserves to know exactly why he’s being put down, to have time to dread what’s coming next, and then to die knowing he’s not the biggest, baddest motherfucker in the jungle and that his life is over and nothing he did was worth a shit.

I’m going to get through this tour, tell Sam what happened, and let her know I no longer have any choice about what to do with Todd. I’m going to kill him. For Sam, for that kid who was lured into the woods by a good-looking older guy and ended up meeting a wolf instead of a prince, and for all the women Todd won’t live to hurt. He is a disease that infects everything he touches and he has to be stopped.

I haven’t felt called to do many things in my life—aside from loving Sam and taking care of my crazy family—but I feel called to do this. The sense that destiny is on my side for once floods through me, drawing me even more firmly to my center, focusing my thoughts on what needs to be done.

I backtrack down the trail and take the shortcut, meeting Paola and the rest of the group as they come around the loop and start toward the next zip line.

“You look better,” she says, chucking me on the arm.