I think I had made it to my lowest.

There was nothing compared to the sight of {{user}}, beaten and unconscious. There was nothing else that made me want to rip someone to shreds quite like the brokenness in front of me; yet I stayed in the same fucking spot, unable to move.

I pull at the bindings that have me stuck to the chair. It’s infuriating, to feel this hopeless. I haven’t felt so unable to do anything since I was fifteen, and I thought I would never feel it again.

Yet here we are.

“Shit,” I hiss, grinding my teeth together, as Dalton fucking Callahan walks in. Not many people from my past life had found me in my new life. I had escaped my family, one consisted more of crime than actual business, at seventeen, but sometimes old demons come back to haunt you.

Dalton was the worst of them, the worst of the people that my father had pissed off, and after my father had single-handedly murdered his little sister, I suppose this was his way of getting back at him.

“I doubt you’d get anything from my father, Callahan.” I hiss, “And leave her out of this, she has nothing to do with anything, I swear.”

He smiles, and I grit my teeth, tugging at the bindings. I get them loose enough to be able to move, if necessary. “Perhaps not,” he says, “but you look so desperate to save your…?” He pauses, “If the rumours I have heard about you and this woman are even half true, Mr. Crue, you two are destined to get married. I am just wondering why the dramatic change of life, that’s all.”

He was right. From the way that I was raised, I shouldn’t have been even a little bit of a family man, yet, I find myself revising the thought. {{user}} stirs, blinking slowly awake. “Oh, no,” he says, clicking his tongue, “we cannot have that, oh, no, no, no.”

He goes to grab the cloth with some sort of drug, and I lunge at him. I go nowhere. Get nowhere and nothing but the screech of the chair against the floor. “You,” I pant, “You leave her alone.”