He spun around and swung the vase into my temple. The hit sent me stumbling back with a cry, the ceramic shattering around me and crashing to the floor. I held my head as a thick line of blood trailed down the side of my face, vision blurred with involuntary tears. Atticus once again shoved me backward, but this time, it was into the rustic wood display cabinet. 

“Lamb?” Angelica called from the bathroom at the sound of broken glass. “Are you alright?”

I fought back to the best of my ability, ignoring the cuts that stung my back in various places or the painful wound on my head. Atticus’s expression was the scariest I’d ever seen it as he grabbed a spike of glass from the broken cabinet and aimed it toward my throat.

I pushed as hard as I could against his wrists to prevent the inevitable, but it was no use. I was by no means weak, but I didn’t have the same amount of strength as Atticus did. I hissed when the glass shard began to dig into my throat enough to draw blood, tears streaming down my cheeks in pure panic.

“Angelica!” I called, kicking out, doing whatever I could to survive at that moment.

In the end, there was no need for the hysteric call for help because Delaney came bursting through the door a few seconds later. Atticus paused and turned around to regard the man, giving me a chance to push him off. 

Delaney rushed over and pulled Atticus to his feet by his collar, ripping the shard from his hand and throwing it to the ground. 

“What in the hell do you think you’re doing?” Delaney practically growled out.

“Doing what you should have done ages ago!” Atticus screamed, eyes watering up and the trembling of his body worsening. “Getting rid of this fucking waste of life!”

Panting heavily and grasping my leaking throat, my eyes flew to follow the movement of Angelica running into the room. She was dressed in nothing but a loose shirt and some shorts, the articles of clothing clinging to her still-wet body and her face now bare but no less beautiful. Her gaze ran all over the room before it finally locked on mine. I reached out a hand to her without a thought and she approached just as thoughtlessly.

Her hasty movement was abruptly halted when Delaney back-handed her and sent her stumbling to the glass-covered floors with a yelp.

My eyes widened in a mixture of shock and anger as did every being in the room. Even Delaney seemed taken by surprise by his own actions. We may have never discussed the elephant in the room, but we all knew Delaney held a soft spot for Angelica. For all the time I’d known him, I’d never seen him raise a hand against her.

What somehow managed to shock me more was the glare Angelica sent Delaney, a hand against her cheek from where he had struck her. She turned to me, grabbed my wrist, and pulled me up to follow after her. All the while, she ignored Delaney’s insistent apology and his distraught eyes.

She pulled me to her bedroom and left me there for a few seconds to get some things to treat my wounds. When she came back, she urged me to take a seat on her bed and began to gently clean the wound with peroxide before dressing it with a bandage. She pulled my hair out of the bun to part it and clean my bleeding scalp.

We were both quiet as she worked so it wasn’t hard to hear the arguing between Delaney and Atticus from a few rooms away. There was a ton of screaming coming from Atticus’s end and some sly, but calm remarks falling off of Delaney’s lips. We heard it all.

“I’ve paid off your damn debt! Do you think I’m an idiot?” Atticus’s voice was beginning to crack with the hysteric pitch it was reaching. “You say you’ve got Jules wrapped around your finger but I’ve no doubt that’s a lie, too!”

“You willing to test that little theory of yours?” Delaney asked condescendingly.

Angelica placed a finger under my chin and tilted my head up so our eyes could meet. She smiled and my stomach flipped.

“Ignore it, Lamb,” she whispered, moving to sit beside me while managing to never break eye contact for even a second. She threw an arm around my shoulders and leaned against me rocking us back and forth.

“I used to think that I could never love someone,” she said, eyes finally falling off of my own to train themselves on something distant I couldn’t see. “That it might break me. But all of that changed the second I met you. You rescued me and now I want to do the same for you. All I’ve ever wanted to do was protect you.”

“Angelica,” I started, shifting uncomfortably to escape her hold. 

“Lamb.” Her grasp on me tightened for a second, showing the shocking amount of strength she held in that seemingly frail arm. “Just let me hold you.”