Survivor Read online

  Survivor

  Sam Hall

  Contents

  Author Note

  Foreward/Trigger Warning

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  What comes next?

  Other upcoming releases

  Stalk me!

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Survivor

  Survivor © Sam Hall 2020

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except for in the case of brief quotations for the use in critical articles or reviews.

  Cover art and design by Mibl Art

  The characters and events depicted in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Author Note

  This book is written in Australian English, which is a weird lovechild of British and American English. We tend to spell things the way the Brits do (expect a lot more u’s), yet also use American slang and swear more than both combined.

  While many people have gone over this book, trying to find all the typos and other mistakes, they just keep on popping up like bloody rabbits. If you spot one, don’t report it to Amazon, drop me an email at the below address so I can fix the issue.

  [email protected]

  This goes out to survivors of violence everywhere. Many of you will be on a long and tough road, taking every bloody draining step towards something better. Warriors, all of you.

  Foreward/Trigger Warning

  This book has been one of the hardest to write. I had to rewrite the first few chapters no less than three times to get it where I needed it to, which never happens to me. The start is usually easy, it’s the end that’s hard.

  There’s a reason for this.

  I’d read a lot of books where a female main character experiences abuse and finds love again, and was never quite sold on them. They told one of the many views on how recovery after abuse works, which is fine, but I had ideas of my own I felt needed to be expressed. I’d grown up in a household where lashing out and hitting people, or screaming the most vile shit you can think of was the norm. I was gonna transform this sub-genre, bring all that experiential knowledge to the manuscript, and it was gonna be awesome!

  Sam, meet hubris. Hubris, meet Sam.

  This is not the way it turned out, and this is important. The path to recovery after you’ve experienced the unique form of domestic terrorism that is physical or emotional abuse is many, varied, and often life-long. The progress can be glacially slow as the survivor works through the nuclear bomb that was dropped into their lives. The psychological changes that are wrought by being in an abusive situation so alien to those who haven’t experienced it, it’s bloody hard to even frame within a story. Especially mine.

  The Pack Heat series was my attempt to create a woman focussed, child focussed society. Where men were toothsome, ready, willing, and wanting to both do the dishes and rock your world. ;) It’s not perfect. Any culture that privileges one group over another is going to create inequity. So, with Jules’ story that had taken the form of extremes of sexual, then emotional exploration, I’d set readers up to expect that. But how was that expectation going to mesh with the story of a DV survivor?

  Lately, with the idea of ‘cancel culture’—or as I like to call it, people using the same tools big institutions have used in the past to control narratives—readers are increasingly strict about what is or isn’t OK. One focus is the way abuse is represented in novels. Often a ‘insta-motivation,’ it’s used carelessly to spur the hero on, sweeping in and saving the day. I hope I didn’t do that in this book.

  What I tried to do is take two people, Flick and Kade, and show a tiny bit of the suffering created by abuse and a very simplified pathway out of it. In reality, Flick and Kade may have dropped into quite severe depression or PTSD. They would have experienced that fun, ragged path getting past trauma is, where you try so many things only to have them fail, fail, get a bit better, get a lot worse, maybe improve. The heroic effort of continuing to try to recover, to be willing to attempt new things with no guarantee it won’t make things worse and re-traumatise you, isn’t really represented. I could either write a semi-clinical observation of how this shit works, or I could write a story.

  That was the hardest thing to accept about writing this.

  So, if my dream had been dashed, what could I do instead?

  For me, I still feel weird describing myself as a romance writer. I’m the least romantic person I know, so it just feels ridiculous! But the perception of the field has moved from Barbara Cartland and her pink frou frou (which you have my complete endorsement to like) to what I like to think as relationships based stories. Romantic, friendly, familial—that’s what I see as the core to modern romance, in all their many forms.

  So what did this mean for Flick? If I couldn’t write all the gory, grinding details, what could I do? Instead, I created this world that was totally woman and child centred, where there was little chance for survivors to be re-traumatised by an unthinking or uncaring environment. Where the characters were seen, understood, and cared for with all the many resources of a community. Where men and women come together, seeing a woman’s child as an important part of the equation, and honouring and respecting the parental relationship. Where women’s consent and agency is sacred. Where every woman carries around with her a wild, 300 kilo wolf inside her that’s willing to coach her away from self-blame and recriminations and kick the fucking arse of anyone who’d hurt her. Paranormal romance is all about fantasy, so why not have the perfect survivor fantasy, as I saw it?

  You might not agree. If you experienced any of this, you’ll have your own ideas of how this should go, and I respect that. If mine differs, it’s not a criticism or undermining of your perspective, just a different one. I’d like to see more and more survivors’ stories published, so there is a wealth of perspectives seeping through into mainstream psyche and a deepening understanding of the complexity of recovery.

  Now to triggers. Drama is the stock of a writer’s trade. Without it, you don’t have a story. You might have a really cool unstructured literary work, but no story. Drama is often concocted artificially or naturally by writers in ways that can push people’s buttons. This book starts with a graphic depiction of domestic violence. People get hurt, sometimes very hurt. There are short but evocative descriptions of sadism against animals. Acts of violence are directed against the perpetrator. I did all of this thinking hard about whether it was needed, would it further Flick’s story, but that doesn’t mean you should read it.

  You know you. You know what’s gonna push your buttons, evoke stuff that doesn’t need d
redging up again, and send you into a spiral. I wrote this book for everyone, but particularly survivors, and I know for many, this is not a good read for them. Make your call, honour your own needs, jump into my group, and get one of us to briefly describe what happens in problematic chapters if you need it. While not exhaustive, the most challenging chapters are 1, 4, 32, and 35, but getting someone you trust to scan it before reading may be a good strategy.

  The other thing I think is going to push people’s buttons is combining a mother with the sexual excess of what a heat is in my books. A time of extreme arousal, a woman and her prospective pack work through their attraction and sometimes develop a relationship through this. This kind of wanton surrender for a mother is often problematic in our society. Women have lost jobs, lost custody of their children, and been shunned for simply engaging in fringe consensual acts, not in front of their kids, while making sure their children are safe and cared for. This juxtaposition of insatiable desire and kink vs the mother role is just seen as completely incompatible. If she’ll ‘let’ men do blah to her body, it means she’s a bad mother.

  Flick tries her damnedest to be a good mother, to look after her son with everything she has. But she also ends up enjoying a very full, varied sex life towards the end. See how you feel about that, and if keen, proceed.

  Love, strength, and endurance to each and every one of you.

  Sam.

  1

  Right now, I had to wonder how I got here.

  “You stupid fucking bitch!”

  Rick, my husband of eleven years stormed across the room at me. He’d only just got home. I’d flinched when I heard the door slam, heard the too loud roar of the car as it pulled up in the driveway, my body freezing at the sound of the handbrake being jerked up. I hadn’t even said a word to him yet.

  I got to my feet—never a good idea. Standing meant a greater surface area to attack. It was only good if you could stay on your feet, dodge or counter his attacks, and I was never any good at that. But the adrenalin that shot through my veins like electricity, the tremble in my muscles as they activated, meant my body was ready to do something, even as my brain knew whatever I tried would be useless. He was on me before I could even react, fingers wrapping themselves around my arms, digging in harder and harder as my teeth clenched hard, fighting to keep the yelp, then the screams inside.

  Don’t make a noise, I thought furiously. Don’t make a fucking sound.

  “What have you been doing around here all day? Huh? I work all fucking day, and you lay around here…”

  I stopped listening, just feeling his spittle splash my face, breathing in the sour smell of unwashed male and beer that was uniquely Rick. I’d finished all of the housework, as per usual, knowing it would be a bone of contention no matter what I’d done. Before, I’d thrown myself into it wholesale, thinking if I just got the right combination finished…

  Right now, the washing was up to date—everything hung up, dried, folded, and put away. I vacuumed every day, cleaned up his mess of empty beer cans and overflowing ashtrays. I scrubbed the bathroom and the toilet, did the dishes, cooked a dinner for our son, Kade, and myself, and even made enough for Rick, just in case. When he hadn’t arrived at his mandated meal time, I’d just sighed with relief and bundled up his plate for reheating later.

  Or to smash into his bloated fucking face, grinding the endless slabs of meat accompanied by three vegetables he always insisted we had into his skin. Just beat him over and over with it, until the porcelain was pulverised and ground into tiny vicious shards.

  Something I worked hard to keep down rose at that idea. She was a sleek black beast, one who wagged her tail, her green eyes gleaming at the thought of it.

  Stop that, I told myself. Keep your fucking head down.

  But of course, I couldn’t, not to Rick’s satisfaction. I couldn’t help but flinch away from the mask of a face, the red skin mottled by broken capillaries, much like his eyes, now buried in folds of flesh as he screamed at me. A cry built up in my chest, one I frantically struggled to hold down. But his fingers ground against my bone, my muscle, like my skin was nothing within his hands, compressed and wrenched. And then he shook me.

  I didn’t even know what I was being punished for at this point, and I didn’t get a chance to consider it. My head whipped back and forth on my spine. My teeth clacked down on my tongue, the taste of blood filling in my mouth. The world that I knew was completely obliterated, replaced instead by this sickening blur. I couldn’t see, couldn’t hold onto anything as the pain ratcheted higher and higher, kicking my previous apathy to the curb and replacing it with pure unadulterated terror.

  I wanted to cry out, beg, plead, and I knew it wouldn’t make a difference, but it came anyway.

  “Stop!”

  My scream rent the air, which was weird, as he was filling it more than satisfactorily with his incoherent listing of all my faults. Maybe because for once, he did fucking stop. There was a moment of complete silence, his face a ridiculous mask of slack-jawed shock.

  I wrenched free, my fingers going to where his grip still burned my skin, tears I’d worked so fucking hard to hold back falling like a waterfall now, until Rick was nothing but a goddamn blur. “Stop,” I sobbed. “Stop hurting me. I haven’t said a fucking thing. I made the dinner you wanted. I cleaned every fucking thing. You can’t keep using me as your punching bag to work through whatever’s pissed you off today. Please.”

  And that’s when it happened—a brief flare of hope passed through me when I was met by silence rather than aggression. I could almost hear the seconds tick by, blessed, blessed moments of peace.

  “Can’t I?”

  His words were uncharacteristic in their perfectly vicious calm. Rick always expressed a ‘hot’ rather than ‘cold’ anger, his screams a great messy vomit of all of the frustrations he held bottled up until he got home. That’s perhaps why his strike was almost surgical in its precision.

  He belted me across the face, and my head snapped back, my ears instantly filling with a high-pitched ring and a swollen feeling of fullness. An explosion of pain—familiar, yet no less devastating for it—burst into my face, and my eyes went wide as I lurched backwards. I wasn’t allowed to catch my balance; that wasn’t the purpose of this. It was to beat me down. So he got to work, his fist closed this time as he drove it into my nose, the sound of the crack my only warning before agony took over.

  I collapsed onto the floor, blood streaming from my face as I screamed in pain. I was dimly aware that he was dealing more damage, with his fists and his feet, but it all felt muted in the face of this. I sobbed into the carpet, bubbles of blood blowing from my nose, and my head felt like a bomb had just gone off in it. All the while, the crying, the build-up of tears and snot just aggravated things further, but I couldn’t stop. Then the other blows began to register, some dull aching things, others more worryingly sharp. His punches rained down, never seeming to slow, and my screams somehow egged him on. There was no curling up against this, no protection my body could offer. As I thrashed around on the floor, inarticulate cries doing nothing to stop him, it dawned on me. He’s trying to kill me.

  “Mummy?”

  Kade’s voice cut through the chaos. Rick stopped for a moment, and I could do nothing but just lie there, my breath coming in low, rasping shudders.

  Get up, the black beast inside me said. Protect the cub.

  “Mummy?”

  His voice was higher and warbling as he took in what had happened. Rick was usually more careful than this, making sure to keep the noise down, keep the bruises below my neckline. I rolled my head painfully up and saw my son’s white face, his heaving chest, his little fists balled at his sides, his wide eyes cataloguing every injury.

  “What did you do to my mum?!”

  I groaned, trying to say something, anything to stop Kade from marching over, hands raised. He didn’t understand this dark otherworld of adulthood. A world of alcohol and violence, where someone can tell you
they love you in the morning and then beat the shit out of you in the evening. With his childlike innocence, he thought he could raise his hands to his father with impunity. I knew differently.

  Get. Up, the voice inside insisted. Its growl had an inflection I hadn’t heard before—fear.

  I’d seen plenty of action movies where the hero, after getting the snot kicked out of him, is able to summon some superhuman level of strength to rise up and take the bad guy down. I tried something similar. Did they feel like something was breaking inside them when they did so, like I did? Did their body falter as they attempted it, did their mouth stretch into a scream when they realised partway through the lunge that they were going to fail, to not even be able to get upright? Did they have to watch the hands of a monster reach out and fasten themselves around the slender neck of the one they loved most in the world, big, broad fingers digging into pale skin, each one big enough to wreak major damage?

  NO!

  The roar inside dwarfed my own pathetic attempt to give voice to it, filling my head and driving everything else out. I rose, like a shadow, like pain itself because right now, I couldn’t feel my own. I scanned the environment, assessing each humble part of our décor as a potential weapon. There—the big marble ashtray. I gripped it and left a trail of ash behind as I brought my arm up. I closed the gap between us, hearing my son’s choked cries, and was somehow able to shut this out for the moment it took to bring it crashing down on my husband’s head with all my now considerable strength.