Beauty in the Broken: A Diamond Magnate Novel

by Charmaine Pauls

  “Lina.”

  “You don’t believe me.” She utters a wry laugh. “Of course, you don’t.”

  I don’t believe Lina is lunatic crazy like her old man implies, but I do think she’s a danger to herself. Sometimes, that is. She’s not always on a hunger strike, a hermit, or suicidal. I do believe she has issues, as her history shows, and I don’t believe lying is beneath her.

  My little wife doesn’t like my silence. She doesn’t like what it implies. Throwing back the sheets with an angry movement, she prolongs her act of defiance as if it’s going to make a difference. She’s in the process of swinging her legs from the bed when she freezes. She looks down at her bare thighs, and then her crotch. Her face pales at the same time as her cheeks redden, creating a stunning contrast of shock and embarrassment. My gaze follows hers. We’re both looking at the dried cum on her black silk panties. She inhales and exhales once, twice. She wrestles with her anger. I see the battle in the rigid set of her shoulders and the stormy blue hue of her eyes when she lifts them to me.

  Her voice is chilled. It doesn’t ring like bells, but like ice cubes. “What happened?”

  We’re back to the same question, and I still don’t have an easy explanation.

  Her volume rises in panic. “What happened?”

  “Don’t worry.” I lean against the doorframe, trying to sound dry when I’m hard, harder than earlier. “I didn’t fuck you.” Only with my eyes.

  Jumping up, she yanks the underwear from her legs. She can’t free her feet fast enough. It stings, but I let it slide. Sooner than she realizes, I’ll make her sleep with her pussy full of my cum all night.

  “You ejaculated on me, you sick pervert.”

  Can’t deny it. That I did, and that I am. “I jacked off in bed. Don’t you?”

  She flushes, not the angry, blotchy red, but a full-on face red. Guilty.

  “Maybe I’ll make you show me,” I say.

  Bundling the panties in her fist, she marches to where I stand, coming to a stop with her breasts inches from my chest. She waits. I’m blocking the door to the bathroom, and I don’t move. She waits. I’m not going to apologize for something I don’t regret. It’s a stare-off. She breaks first, like I knew she would.

  “Do I need permission for the bathroom, too?” She throws the permission part in like a jab, getting back at me for what I said about the pills.

  I step aside. “The bathroom is free.”

  Her eyes slice me up in ten different ways. When she pushes past me, I grab her wrist. It’s partly to touch her, and partly to let her know I’ll let her get away this time, but the decision is ultimately mine. When my fingers close around the circumference of her delicate bones, she sucks air through her teeth and winces. I didn’t grab her hard. I’m mindful of my strength and her much smaller body. I slacken my hold and look down. Like firecrackers, my anger ignites. It’s not the volcanic eruption of earlier but rather an ongoing chaos of sparklers.

  “What’s this?” I ask.

  She pulls on my hold. “It’s nothing.”

  I lift her wrist for closer inspection. The skin is chaffed. A raw riff marks her flesh. It must hurt like a bitch. I’m angry with her for injuring herself and livid with Zane all over again for allowing it.

  “It’s not nothing.”

  She finally keeps still, succumbing to my examination.

  I brush a thumb above the aggravated line. “Why did you struggle?”

  She shrugs like it doesn’t matter, but the gesture shows the opposite of what it’s supposed to mean. There’s more than what she’s admitting.

  “Lina.”

  “I get claustrophobic.”

  “You weren’t closed in a small space.”

  “Being constrained does the same.”

  I rub my thumb over her skin. Left. Right. Left. “Will you jump through a window or run away if I don’t cuff you to the bed?”

  The ice melts in her eyes, and a bit of fire kicks in. “I guess you’ll just have to wait and see.”

  I can’t help the smile that creeps over my face. “Then I guess you’ll just have overcome your fear of being constrained.”

  This round is mine, and she doesn’t lose gracefully. She yanks on my hold again. “Let go.”

  “Get your ass into the bathroom.” I all but shove her ahead of me.

  At the sink, I wash her skin before drenching it with disinfectant and applying a bandage from my medical supplies. She sucks in a breath whenever my fingers make contact with the wound, but she doesn’t complain.

  “Better?” I ask when I’m done, planting a kiss on the bandage.

  She doesn’t thank me, not that she should. It’s my fault she got injured, another mistake that happened on my watch.

  “Can I have my shower, now?”

  Her voice is like a sharpened knife, and fuck me if I don’t deserve it.

  “It’s early.” I resist the urge to smooth down her hair. It’s just another excuse to touch her. “You can go back to bed.”

  “I’m awake now.”

  Hell, so am I. We have issues to deal with, but they can wait. My body is still pumping adrenaline from the shock, anger, and a gnawing hunger that has nothing to do with food. I need that run more than ever.

  “Go ahead. I’ll have my shower after my run.”

  She’s not quick enough to hide her relief, or maybe she doesn’t care that I see it. I make her suffer a bit longer by brushing my teeth. Noticing her cosmetics are still packed in the bag as if she wants to be ready to run at any given moment, I remove every item and stack them meticulously in the cabinet and on the vanity, where they belong. The point I’m making comes through clearly. All the while, she watches me like a cornered animal. All the while, I think about her naked pussy under that nightdress. When I can’t take it any longer, I give her privacy. Pulling on my tracksuit pants and T-shirt in the dressing room, I try not to think about the only thing I can think about, how naked she is in my shower without her nightdress.

  Lina

  Damian left the bathroom door ajar. I can’t bring myself to close it, not without freaking out, but when he doesn’t come back for several seconds, I dare get into the shower. I’m not sure how I feel about him coming on my underwear while I was wearing it. What am I thinking? I’m not sure about him coming on my underwear, period. Yet, when I conjure the mental image of Damian stroking his erection, I don’t feel the condemnation I should, not even with my underwear in the picture. Not even with me in the picture. I get wet. I imagine myself watching, and I get wetter. It’s wrong, but I’m slick, and I’ve never felt like this before. I’m swollen and aching, and when my hand travels through the soapsuds on my belly down between my legs, it’s not because I’m bored or lonely. It’s because I’m turned on. Incredibly so. Enough to chase my release in Damian’s shower with the door ajar and my ruined panties in the trashcan. No washing can save them. Not when the thought of what soiled those panties makes me come so hard my thighs quiver.

  I got the bandage wet. Now that I know where Damian keeps them, I help myself to a dry one. I don’t meet my eyes in the mirror while I’m dressing, but I do look at the scars. I count them out of habit. My body is mutilated, nothing short of belonging in a Frankenstein movie, and it hurts to look, but also helps to ground me. It kills the post-orgasm buzz. My guilt vanishes.

  On my way to the kitchen, I run into Zane on the stairs. He’s dressed in tight shorts and a headband with an exercise towel thrown over his shoulder. Russell is at the door, within sight and earshot. Zane’s gaze slips to the bandage on my wrist, but he says nothing. His warning is a silent one as he shoulders me in the passing.

  “Good morning, Russell,” I say when I reach the bottom of the stairs.

  “Good morning, Mrs. Hart.”

  “Lina, please.”

  “Mr. Hart will put a bullet in me if I call you by your first name, but thanks all the same.”

  The sad thing is I believe him.

  In the kitchen, I
find breakfast waiting. There’s toast, boiled eggs, ham, and cheese. It’s too early for Jana to be in, and Zane would rather let me starve than serve me a morsel of bread, which leaves Damian. Is this his way of apologizing for last night? No. If he wanted to, he would’ve done so. I can’t fathom why he’d prepare me breakfast, but I’m not one to waste food. I eat until the waistband of my dress feels too tight before putting the leftovers in the fridge and tidying the kitchen. I slip two rolls into my pockets—hot cross buns, today—to dry on the windowsill.

  Irony can be cruel. I’m one of the wealthiest women in the country, but I’ve been starving for most of my adult life. Jack found it the most effective way of keeping me in check. A hungry person will do almost anything for food. At first, withholding meals was punishment for mistakes. He made me go to bed without dinner or skip breakfast and lunch. Then it became a way of feeding his sickness, the pleasure he derived of watching me suffer. In the end, it became a bargaining chip, my body for bread. Zane was right. I am a whore. I whored myself out for food when the beatings and isolation didn’t break me, and that’s when Jack’s torturing truly started to bloom. I rub my hands over the sleeves of my dress, testing the pull of the scar tissue when I flex my muscles, but it’s not what I want to think about. I bury those memories deep down where they’re inaccessible to even myself.

  I pass the morning reveling in the freedom of having the upstairs rooms to myself, a big deal for someone who’d been locked up, but there’s something even more tempting. The sun is shining outside. At first, I go hesitantly, but when Russell doesn’t stop me, I go down the front steps and into the garden with Russell on my heels. There’s enough work to warrant the garden service that, according to Russell, comes in weekly, but I spot an old man hunched over a spade by the rose bushes. He looks to be in his sixties, much too old for this kind of work. Maybe he came with the house, like Jana.

  “Good morning.”

  He looks up, a cigarette hanging askew in his mouth. “There’s nothing good about it.”

  “I’m Lina.”

  “Mrs. Hart,” Russell says.

  The old man ignores him. “I know who you are.”

  “Oh.”

  “Zane told me.”

  “Have you been working here for long?”

  Folding his hands over the handle of the spade, he laughs softly, mockingly, as if he knows something I don’t. “As long as Damian owns this place.”

  “Which is—”

  “Six days.”

  We look at each other, me feeling like I’m trespassing and him with his cigarette smoke curling in the air.

  Finally, he mumbles, “Some of us has work to do,” before digging his spade into the soil, dismissing me.

  I continue toward the blue water of a swimming pool, glancing back at the old man and finding his eyes on me. It’s not a friendly stare.

  “Who is that?” I ask Russell.

  “That’s Andries. Don’t mind him. He’s always cranky.”

  “How old is he?”

  “Around sixty, I’d say.”

  “He’s too old to be gardening in the heat of the day.”

  “Nah.” Russell utters a wry chuckle. “He’s tougher than you think.”

  “Why would Damian employ a sixty-year-old man?”

  “He needs the job.” He stops, making me look at him. “Andries is Zane’s grandfather.”

  There’s something about the way he says it, like a message he wants me to get. I do. If Zane isn’t my friend, neither is Andries, but Andries is just an old man. Even if he’s grumpy, I worry about letting an old man weed the soil.

  “Can’t he do something else?”

  Russell shrugs. “It’s not my place to ask.”

  “Does he stay on the property?”

  He points at a cottage behind the house. “In the granny flat.”

  By the time we reach the pool, Russell is walking next to me instead of following. He shows me the summerhouse, greenhouse, and tennis courts. For the life of me, I can’t imagine why Damian needs all of this, and I can. It’s a statement. It’s what people ask first in certain conversations. “So, where you do live?” It’s a casual question, and it’s loaded. Location is everything. I, of all people, should know.

  “We better head back,” Russell says. “You’re burning.”

  I touch my cheek. “Am I?” I haven’t been outside for too long.

  When Harold fetched me from the mental institution where he had me locked up for the better part of a year, drugged and kept on the brink of starvation, he decided isolation and starvation were effective ways of control. It was easier to handle me if I left the table always a little hungry, and never left the house at all. He didn’t lock the interior doors, didn’t even force me to close them, but he locked me in, nevertheless. As long as he’s hiding my child’s body from me, he knows I’ll never escape. He knows I’ll put my life on the line to find that piece of evidence. If Damian hadn’t returned to his study after his run, I would’ve been going through his drawers already. Not having realized how tight my stomach muscles are pulled, I make a conscious effort to relax them. Impatience is like an ever-present, distant ache that gnaws at my gut. I just have to bide my time.

  Russell’s concerned voice pulls me back to the present. “Are you all right?”

  “I think you’re right. I’m not used to so much sun.”

  He still walks beside me as we go back to the house, making a point of showing me the high walls, electrified barbwire, and guarded gate. He’s in the middle of telling me how hard it would be to break in when I stop. He pauses to look at me.

  “I know I can’t get out. You don’t have to convince me it’s impossible.”

  His expression turns aghast. “I was only trying to make you feel safe.”

  “The only place I’ll feel safe is as far away from here as possible.”

  He doesn’t reply, and I continue my stroll. After two beats, Russell falls in a step behind me. Our friendly banter is over.

  After much pleading, Jana lets me help with the lunch. I have to do something. When I suggest we eat together, she refuses, explaining it would be crossing a line Mr. Hart won’t appreciate, and I end up eating my salad alone. I’m packing the dishwasher when a movement at the window draws my attention. A bat almost flies into the glass before diverting at the last minute and heading into the herb garden. Rushing to the window, I duck for a better view. I’ve seen some bats when I was a child. We had an abandoned, detached garage where they nested. With their furry faces and tilted snouts, they look like a miniature cross between a wolf and a pig. They’re insanely cute.

  “There you are,” Zane says too cheerfully behind me. “Dami wants you upstairs.”

  I don’t ask where. I don’t have to. When I enter the foyer, voices float down from the open door of Damian’s study. One belongs to my husband, and the other I don’t know.

  Damian meets me at the door before I have a chance to knock. For a moment, he looks at me like a man who knows my secrets, but he can’t possibly know. The longer I look into his eyes, the worse it gets, because he’s a man with a goal set on unraveling me, on taking my secrets apart.

  “Lina.”

  He’s not the shivering young man I met on a cold night in June. He’s hardened, and he’s very much a man. He lets me know in the way he says my name and holds my eyes with something that borders on indecency. His voice is darker and deeper. There’s a gravity to it that comes with experience and confidence. The sound is masculine and strong. It scares me, because it makes me yearn for something I can only find at the profoundness of his maleness. It makes me long to feel safe. To feel safe, I have to submit to his protection, but to protect me he needs to love me, and he’s lost his ability to love because of Harold and me. He’ll substitute love with what equals it in his twisted mind. He’ll try to possess me. All of me.

  When he finally steps aside, I’m the fly who enters the spider’s parlor. A man with a sharp face and pointed chin wait
s inside. He sits behind a card table with his hands splayed out in a crow-like fashion over a black case, as if he’s not keen on parting with the case. He has too thin, too light hair, and his fingernails are cut too short.

  Damian skips the introductions. When he says, “Show her,” the man flips back the lid of the case, revealing five rows of brilliant, sparkling stones on black velvet.

  I’ve been surrounded by people in the business for all my life, long enough to know what a flawless diamond looks like. There are princess, teardrop, and classical cuts, all bigger than four carats. They catch the sunlight and throw rainbows over the velvet while the man behind the case looks like he’s losing a year of his life for every second he keeps that box full of rainbows open. I don’t even want to guess how much the box is worth.

  “Pick one,” Damian says.

  I tear my gaze from the diamonds to look at him. He’s not smiling. He’s insisting.

  The man starts bouncing his knee in a nervous tick. The diamond Damian is offering isn’t a token of love, not to Damian. It’s a token of status.

  “No, thanks.”

  The man regards me as if I’ve just shot him in his jittery leg.

  Damian narrows his eyes. “You need a ring.”

  “I have a ring.” Which was forced on me. I don’t need another.

  “You’re my wife. Diamonds are my business. Do you have any idea how humiliating it will look for you if I don’t offer you an engagement ring?”

  “It’s a bit like offering me the mustard after the meal, don’t you think?”

  “Lina, pick a fucking diamond.” His voice drops to a dangerously low level. “I’m giving you the choice.”

  “Like the choice to marry you?”

  “Um.” The scrawny man licks his lips. His scrawny vocal cords suit him. “The princess cut is rather nice.”

  “These are my best diamonds,” Damian says, ignoring the man. “If you don’t choose one, I’ll pick for you.”

  “Wouldn’t that make for a difference?”

  He’s on me so fast Scrawny yelps. One hand is in my hair and other around my neck. He’s not hurting me, just holding me like an animal forcing his dominance.