4. Chapter Four

Chapter Four

Clara

H ogan’s angry words came out slurred, almost indecipherable now if it weren’t for the fact that I had lots of practice listening to his drunken tirades. His speech grew sloppier by the second, and as he lumbered toward me, he started to sway dangerously.

I didn’t believe in shit like God—sure, I was a big Christmas fanatic, but for sentimental reasons and how I associated it with a life I’d never get back.

But in that moment, I prayed to God or whatever was listening that Hogan would drop dead before he could get his hands on me.

That look in my fiancé’s eyes, the one that revealed all the ways he intended to hurt me, reminded me that even if God was real, he wasn’t going to save me.

Clara saves herself.

Hogan lurched forward and made a swipe at me with his meaty arms. I shot to the other side of the kitchen and grabbed the large meat cleaver from the knife block.

Hogan snarled, flecks of antifreeze froth and saliva hanging from his chin in disgusting tendrils oozing all over his “Hogan’s Happy Hogs” polo shirt. “Why are you fighting back? You should know by now how useless that is. I always win, baby. Know why?”

I glared daggers at him as he continued on his rant while the festive music played in the background, oblivious to the domestic nightmare.

“Y—you’re not one of the chicks in those pervy lady books you’re always reading. This isn’t fantasy land, Clara. Come back to reality… Where…” he groaned as the poison seemed to take its toll on his body. “Where you’re nothing.”

My teeth clenched, my palms turned slick with sweat, and somewhere, deep in my being, I felt a fire burst to life.

I swiped at him with the knife and a scream jerked from his mouth as it caught him across the chest, a shallow cut running between his nipples. He stumbled back into the breakfast table, collapsing into the chairs. The furniture scraped against the linoleum as his huge form crashed to the floor.

Recognizing the precious few seconds I’d been given, I debated running. I still wasn’t a murderer. I could run away and leave these mountains forever. But then my shop would be gone, along with the dream of buying the old Kringle building across the street. I’d lose my parents' old cabin. I wanted to go back to it one day, but I couldn’t while Hogan was still alive, haunting this town like a drunken ghost of Christmas past.

If I left, I was sure I’d never see Bastion again.

I jumped on top of Hogan before he could get back to his feet, and with both hands on the hilt, I slammed the cleaver’s deadly edge towards his throat.

He caught my wrists with a roar and using all his strength—which was still a lot—threw me off him. My frame slammed into the cabinets beneath the sink and the door sprung open with the force. The mostly empty antifreeze bottle tumbled onto the linoleum.

A terrifying expression warped Hogan’s face. He knew that wasn’t where he’d left the antifreeze. Before I could react, he was on top of me with his hands around my throat. “You poisoned me?”

As his sausage fingers tightened around my throat, restricting my airflow, darkness crept in around my field of vision.

Clara saves herself. I kept repeating those words in my head like the lifeline they were.

This wasn’t over yet. In Hogan’s drunken, half-poisoned stupor, he seemed to have forgotten one important detail: I was still holding the cleaver.

I brought the blade down onto his nose, cleaving it in half. Blood gushed down his face, splattering my “Christmas calories don’t count” apron. He released me with a howl of pain and I bolted to my feet, slipping on the blood quickly pooling on the ground before plucking my purse from the kitchen counter and scrambling outside into the snow.

I bolted to the car, my shaking hand plunging into the purse in a desperate search for my keys.

I hadn’t looked back. I didn’t know just how much I’d managed to hurt him. But Hogan Humphries was a tough bastard, and if he had so much as a shred of life left in him, he’d come out here and use it to rob me of mine.

My fingers closed around my keys and a curse dropped from my lips along with a puff of cold breath as I unlocked my Subaru and flung myself inside the driver’s seat.

I jammed the keys into the ignition. The engine sputtered to life and my headlights bathed the garage door in a blinding white glow.

Hogan appeared on the porch of his house on the next pound of my heart. His face had a savage wound running from the bridge of his nose down to his lips where the cleaver had split them in half. Blood dripped on the unshoveled walkway as he stumbled in front of my car, the bright drops of red staining the fresh snow.

It wasn’t until he was in front of my car, with the headlights lighting him up like a grisly Christmas decoration, that I noticed the weapon in his hand. He’d grabbed the shotgun he usually kept mounted over the mantle.

“Oh fuck …” Unholy terror zipped up my spine as Hogan raised the shotgun and pointed it at the windshield. Then, clarity set in and the fear was gone as quickly as it had come. I knew what to do.

I shifted the car into drive and rammed the gas pedal. The wheels spun on the icy driveway before the car shot forward and slammed into Hogan—pinning him to the garage door with my bumper.

The gun dropped from his grip and he sagged against the car’s hood, sputtering blood.

I paused, allowing the staticy cover of It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year to filter from the radio into the quiet of the car cab as I debated my options.

There was nothing stopping me from reversing, and leaving. I could go right to the police station. Maybe there was a chance I could get away on the grounds of self defense. Though, odds seemed pretty damn slim.

My stomach flipped as I stared into Hogan’s eyes. No. This bastard didn’t deserve to live another day. If he did, he’d hunt me down and make me pay for this night.

Stealing my nerves, I reversed the car… Only to shift it back into drive and ram into Hogan a second time. Then a third. My head started to whirl from the impact of the car crushing into the garage door, again and again. I didn’t care.

I rammed the grill of my Subaru into my fiancé—my soon to be ex-fiancé—until he was nothing but a bloody mass stuck to the garage door.

Finally satisfied, I pulled the car back for a final time and cut the engine before climbing out to survey the gory scene. There was no doubt about it. Hogan Humphries was dead. His corpse was nothing but a pulverized mass of meat and bone slumped in the driveway.

My attention slid away from the fresh corpse to the front grill of my car.

There was something really wrong with me since the only grief I could seem to summon was for my poor little wreath I’d spent hours on perfecting. The bow was stained with blood, the branches twisted and little bits of flesh gunking up the pine needles.

Instead of freaking over the fact that I’d literally just killed a man, with his brutalized corpse smeared over his garage door, all I could think about was fixing my precious wreath.

Untwisting the ties that held it to the grill, I tugged the wreath loose and went inside to fix it.