Free The Mistress, Part Two by Lexie Ray Page A

too felt fearful. For in his eyes was nothing if not pure hatred. Haley struggled more – when she saw the evil sneer that crept on the boy’s face – to leap over the multitude of objects, and she felt angry with herself for not being able to get through all of the stuff and rescue Lucas. She didn’t want to witness this! She wanted to stop it!
    She felt immeasurably ignorant for not going back the way she had come. It would have taken just a few minutes, and she could have crawled back through the broken window and run down the alleyway to the front of the building. She thought it was quicker to climb all of the objects and go through the front door, but now she wondered why she had even thought that.
    Hell, did she even know if the door would open? It could be chained for all she knew. Why wouldn’t it be? It was an abandoned building, after all. Her rationale dumbfounded her with its fashionably late status – better late than never, though, she supposed. She stupidly hadn’t looked for another exit. Lucas had obviously gotten out somehow, and she highly doubted he had gone through all the trouble she was going through.
    She cleared a few more objects and climbed on top of a piano, a few keys playing as she went. She wanted to get enough height to see if she could see chains on the doors. But when her foot caught and she found herself looking back out the window, only to see the boy reach Lucas and grab a handful of his hair, her fears were recognized. She was about to witness an above averagely large boy hit Lucas, the closest thing to a firstborn child that she had ever had.
    “Fuck this!” she screamed, jumping from the piano back towards the direction she had come from. She hit the ground – hard. She landed roughly, her hands and feet catching her fall – just barely. Her palms had skidded across the cement floor and a fiery pain shot across them as they bled; she had also twisted her ankle when her feet reverberated against the pavement. But damn it all, she was going to go back and climb through the broken window again!
    There wasn’t time for the hopscotch bullshit she had been subjected to for the last few minutes. She looked to the window again and saw the boy jerking Lucas’s hair from the roots as he pulled him up and slammed him against the brick stoop’s post.
    She could see air pour from Lucas as he gasped, knowing that the air had completely escaped his lungs. He continued to gasp for air, and she winced as she watched him ache in pain. Suddenly, she shook herself from the view and descended back through the hallway, into the darkness and towards the broken window hidden away in the back of the building.
    She didn’t understand why he hadn’t fought back, and as she ran through the abandoned hallway of a rundown building she wondered if this was even reality. Had she lost it completely? Had she had a mental breakdown of sorts? Was Lucas really the type of boy to run into a building like this, a building that, by the looks of it, could have been a heroin addict’s dream hideout? She was petrified at the thought of this all being real.
    She knew he wouldn’t have been able to win in a battle against this boy, but to not even fight back? She couldn’t fathom it. And she could only imagine what was happening out front as she finally flung herself onto the window’s ledge – not caring if she got cut in her journey – and pulled herself with all of her might. Her imagination ran wild, and she imagined the boy drawing a fist and flinging it into Lucas’s jaw. She imagined his face burning like a flame as his teeth rattled and jaw clicked in a way that she could only ever imagine. She had never been in a fight, but seeing Lucas’s face, she knew that it could only get worse than the times before. And she had known that he had been in a fight recently. So how much worse could it get?
    As she mustered up all of her strength, her might finally allowed her to pull herself up and out of the