Cold-Blooded Beautiful

by Christine Zolendz

  Nothing in this life is impossible.

  Peek through his cell phone.

  Look through the history on his computer.

  Watch his eyes wander at a restaurant.

  Listen quietly in the shadows as he speaks to one of his friends.

  Think about the dark thoughts in your own mind and about the monsters that hide under your bed. Think about the things you’re ashamed of thinking, feeling, and doing. Anything is possible.

  Nobody in this world is completely innocent.

  For three weeks after losing my baby, David kept a steady line of drugs flowing through my veins, and he was so ingenious about it too. Every few days, he’d change the way he’d administer them to me. Some days, they were straight into my blood stream with syringes. Some days they were gassed into the air, saturated into a cotton cloth and held over my mouth and nose, or just ingested into my stomach with a small sip of water. Minutes where I was conscious, I could fight him; fight taking the drugs, but everything was so cloudy and chaotic, I never knew what was real and what were the hallucinations.

  Every day, I was chained and shackled to our bed, and every day, he’d remind me of how nobody was coming to save me. How I was crazy and a criminal for what I’d done with the fake company that he created. After two weeks, my body was so weakened and frail from the constant line of drugs, it began purging itself and shutting down. To live, I pretended to believe him, pretended to understand that I was his, nothing more than a piece of property, one of his assets. Pretend it was okay that he could do what he wished to me without my consent.

  It’s not enough to gloss over it, is it? You want to know more, feel more, huh?

  My so-called husband was an uncontrolled, undisciplined sadist. Forget everything you’ve learned about dominant men, and the kink of BDSM, because a sadist is something I’m not sure you truly understand. Dominants, men or women, get off by controlling the sexual experience they give to their submissive partners. They will inflict pain or pleasure. It could be physical or emotional to intensify the experience for the submissive person. Even if the pain is unpleasant, they’re doing it, knowing that the submissive is finding some sort of pleasure in the act.

  A sadist, not so much. A sadist is someone who hurts you for his or her own pleasure, never yours. They get off on the pain they inflict on you, or anyone, and they don’t give a shit about your pleasure. Oh, I’m sure that there are some sadists out there that enjoy pleasuring their property, but not my husband, not the man I found out I was married to. I want you to see the whole, ugly reality of a true violent undisciplined sadist, not only to get you to understand what happened to me, but also to stop you from romanticizing any option that I should have fought for my marriage, because I had made a vow. I vowed to marry someone who wasn’t real. The real David was a sick man. I sure as fuck didn’t sign up for everything he did to me. If Aurora wanted him, she could have him. I would wrap him up, tie him with a bow, and leave him on her doorstep. May they find happiness together, because I would never be happy with a man who demanded me to do the things she did, never.

  On an extremely cold morning, I was awakened with the icy blast from a bucket of water that was poured over my head. “Wake up, my little pet,” David’s voiced cooed in mock tenderness. There was nothing tender about David. His insides were as hard as rock, and black like coal.

  It took me a few minutes to focus my eyes and climb out of the drug-induced slump my body had been forced to endure. Sitting up as straight as I could in the bed, I lifted my chin to him. A mumbled slur fumbled out of my lips and he laughed.

  He laughed at my inability to speak.

  He laughed at my weakness.

  Thick rough hands clenched my throat, pulling me up off the bed, over the soft white cotton sheets I once adored. I couldn’t take in any air. In fact, I couldn’t breathe at all. Warmth flooded my body, sparks of adrenaline-fueled fire burned across my skin, and I struggled to draw air into my lungs. My eyes stung and burned with pressure. His were dead of any emotion or expression. “Kneel,” he demanded, releasing my neck, watching my body crumple to the floor.

  There was a small creak at the door, the tiniest of sounds, as if a mouse had just stumbled upon us and was scurrying to find food. My eyes instantly tracked the noise, and they locked on Aurora, who crawled in on all fours with a goddamn spiked collar around her neck, violently pulled with a leash that was in one of David’s hands. Her naked body was covered in brightly colored contusions, broken capillaries and venules, damaged by whatever trauma he’d inflicted on her. Crimson abrasions covered her knees as she moved them over the coarse rug, and a small bloody laceration marred her pretty lips. It was angry and red. My hands itched to clean it, and my mind raced to find something sterile to stitch up her cuts. Oh, my God, she was acting as if she were his sex slave.

  I’ve only read about this sick shit in books. Books I usually choose not to finish, because they never end well.

  “The look of mortification on your face has my cock so fucking hard right now, pet.” Slowly, as if putting on some twisted morbid show, he stripped out of his clothing, throwing each piece at me, as I sat on the floor clawing my fingers into the plush threads of the carpet. “I’m going to make you watch me fuck her like a dog.”

  Aurora’s head lowered submissively, but her bloodied lips smiled, and my stomach rolled. Sick. Sick. Sick.

  I gave him my tears then. The last of them. Because the minute he was inside her, I was planning to hurl myself at him, and kill him with the buckle of the belt he’d just thoughtlessly thrown at me.

  He’d thought he had finally broken me, slamming his hips against Aurora like she was nothing. Fucking her so savagely that I thought he’d rip her insides.

  The one heartbeat he blinked, I attacked him, clawing his eyes, punching him and raking the metal of the belt against his skin. No technique existed in my fight, none of the combat discipline I had learned in the military; it was raw, ruthless…, and so fucking desperate. But, after a few good attacks, my arms began moving in slow motion, because they were too heavy and thick with fluids. I knew I’d surprised him, knew I had hurt him in some way, yet the blackness claimed me quickly. I raged in my semi-unconscious mind, raged to fight him, to fight the drugs, but my body just quit. I couldn’t tell you what happened after. And God forgive me, I don’t want to know. I don’t want any more of those visions. I still can’t ever feel clean enough, no matter how hard I scrub. I still feel David’s filth…everywhere.

  I was very sick, and that, I was absolutely aware of. Violently vomiting, I knew what was happening. I knew he was killing me slowly. I could feel my body shutting down organ by organ, but there was nothing I could seem to do. Most nights, I would find my conscious swim to the surface, becoming vaguely aware of my surroundings. Most times, I would feel the headboard jostling violently against the wall, and could hear Aurora’s moans and laughter as if she was enjoying my torture.

  I was almost dead when he called for an ambulance, the ink still fresh on the fictitious suicide note he penned in my name. Those morbid, carnival clown giggles and moans from Aurora, the ones I had spent my last breaths listening too, became echoed shadows of sounds. Cold, strange, invisible hands pulled and pushed my body. It felt as if I was being strapped into one of those old rickety wooden rollercoasters, my body just slumping against the cool metal of the cart, not being able to do more than listen to the low murmurs of disembodied voices talking all around me. Eventually, the little cart lurched forward and up, ascending into the warm moist atmosphere and the grinding of the metal teeth of the rollercoaster bucked and clinked beneath me. Higher and higher I soared to a place where gravity had no say, and my body hurtled up into space, weightless.

  For a few moments, I was numb. Gone.

  Dead.

  Then I was freefalling back down to earth, wind whipping past my face, tangling the long strands of hair in trails of fire behind me like a comet across the sky.

  When the world around
me slowed down, and my rollercoaster car glided into its port, my heart began beating again. My senses could pick up things again. Beeps. Hisses of a ventilator.

  Hushed angry voices fighting in whispers.

  Heartbreak.

  I listened to the low murmurs. “She was barely breathing when I called the ambulance. I gave her enough of that shit to kill a fucking whale. How is it that she is still living?” David’s voice growled low in his throat. There was a horrible screeching, as the familiar sound of a hospital cart next to my bed suddenly thrashed violently against the wall, and a clatter of items scattered across the floor. The real nightmare was the voice that he spoke to, the one that answered him back. It was my father’s voice.

  My father. “Well, everybody is observing her closely now, so no more fillers. We can’t get caught here. If she lives through this, when she gets home, we’ll give her a round of Potassium Chloride, and then we’ll be done with this. My hands are clean of this, Stanton, clean, you hear me? But I hold you responsible for this. She was not supposed to find out. I never wanted to lose my family over this.” My father chose money over me. It was one thing to learn your husband had a secret life and wanted you dead, but to find that your father wanted you dead sears your soul with scars and agony.

  My father. My husband. Two self-proclaimed gods immersed in their own lethal capitalistic world, spoke over my body as I lay still and silent; too lost in their greed to look at me, care, or to shed a fucking tear.

  My fists clenched tightly as I thought about what those fucks had done to me. What my father allowed to happen, and what David did. I knew them now, and what brand of monsters they were, and I knew it could have been, should have been, so much worse for me. Yes, that is what I thought, because, seriously, let’s get this straight… I should have died. Reality folks; the shit he put inside me would have killed most people. I like to think I lived because I was meant to save people, and that I was meant to be greater and do more. Everybody has his or her own measure of worth, and that was mine. God had my back, not David’s.

  For hours, I pretended I was asleep on that hospital bed, lying as still as death. I waited for Jen to come, and when she did, I told her everything. My voice was barely audible, dry and cracking. “They are trying to kill me…you have to get me out of here.”

  Her eyes shined with tears, “But you…honey…you tried to…”

  “Jen,” I fumbled for her hand with my trembling one. “Go…to Mana Storage…Jersey…I can prove…”

  “You’re serious?” She leaned her head low. “Honey, you tried to commit…”

  “Jen!” I hissed desperately. My breathing faltered, eyes sprang with tears, “He did this to me. Please believe me.” I looked in her eyes. Please believe me.

  Weak and humiliated, I begged her to help me get discharged, or to escape. And she did. Jen ran down to the ER and found our homeless friend, Mr. Carson, one of the hospital’s repeat attenders. You know the people, the ones who continuously try to come into the emergency room with an array of ailments for a safe place to sleep, and a meal. She offered him all the money inside her pocketbook to lie in my bed with the sheets over his head, until someone realized he wasn’t me. With two hundred and fifty three dollars rolled into a dirty sock, he crawled under the white sheets, wearing a giant toothless smile. Then Jen helped me walk right out of that hospital, without anyone seeing.

  But that’s all over now.

  Well, you got your little glimpse of David’s brand of abuse. I could tell you so much more, little details that would make you cringe, but you know what. I don’t want to think about it anymore. You still want to know though, don’t you? Think of the worst shit you’ve ever heard, and multiply that by three weeks, turn up the heat and let that simmer in your brain for a minute. Honestly, that’s not the story I want to be a part of. It’s not the story I want to be remembered by, and I don’t want to be known as a victim, ever. I want to be remembered for my story with Kade, for my achievements in my life, not for some piece of shit that abused me. Besides, they are my scars, mine, and those horrible things I lived through still hurt. But, do you know what scar tissue does for your body? Makes you stronger and tougher. Makes you realize that every breath you take is a gift.

  I know I should not have lived.

  I should not be alive right now.

  Yet I was. I was alive and safe with Kade.

  The man who could turn darker than he already was, because of my scars. Because he wants to own them, take them on his flesh to erase them from mine, but he can’t. They were too deep inside me.

  I stared out Kade’s bedroom window, watching the first rays of the sun lighten the wintery sky. “Hey,” he said softly, “come to bed with me.”

  My eyes glanced over his bandaged knuckles, and a cold shiver ran down my spine. Closing my eyes, I tried blinking away my tears. Kade Grayson was the only man I’d willingly give my tears to, because I knew he’d never want them, or take any joy in them.

  “Hey, hey. No, no, Sammy, baby,” he pleaded, cupping his hands around my face and gently swiping the tears with his thumbs. “Don’t cry for me, love, please. I fucked up. I went crazy. It’s just a few scraped knuckles, Sam, you saw it.”

  “We are both so messed up, Kade. How are we supposed to deal with this? How am I going to help you deal with this?”

  “Together,” he said, touching his lips against mine.

  His answer was so calm, so final, and so wrong. I knew there was something so very wrong, because I could taste the guilt on his lips. I knew Kade. He was going to kill David, and even though I wanted David dead, I didn’t want to lose Kade. I didn’t want him lost to more violence, shattered by his own actions and demons. Nor did I want him in jail for something that had nothing to do with him. It was all over, it was all in the past. David and my father thought I was dead. Why did Kade need to know my pain? He would just be hurt by it.

  I couldn’t hurt Kade anymore, I couldn’t. I needed Kade Grayson away from this whole situation. He still needed time to heal from the tragedies in his life. I just didn’t know exactly what to do.

  David Stanton’s venom was spreading into every fragmented part of my existence, like spilled ink on a clean page, staining everything with his filth. His delusions of ruling the hospital world went beyond being the best surgeon, and spilled into categories that are more lethal. He was sick and twisted, and I needed him to stay as far away from Kade Grayson as possible. I should have just vanished when I had the chance. Less people would have been ruined.

  “No more thoughts of him, love. Not when you’re in my bed,” Kade whispered in his husky British accent, slipping warm hands between my thighs.

  Damn it, the accent was melting me. The fingers were working their magic too. “Don’t you talk all Englishly with me, Grayson.”

  “Englishly?” He asked, stilling his hands, mouth smiling against my skin.

  I loved making that man smile. “Yes, all accented, hunkified, and kissable…oh, screw it…just don’t stop.”

  His lips captured mine, and I could hear my own breathing, the small gasps and moans as my body awakened under his touch. Pulling back his head, raising his eyes to mine, he smirked, “Bring that delicious pussy to my mouth, love.”

  And there I went, slipping into our little bubble easily. Losing myself to a world full of Kade, where I was safe, innocent, and yet fucking filthy all at once. My heart hammered insanely as I straddled him, and a scorching flush spread across my chest and over my cheeks. I could feel his lips curl into a smile against my flesh, and my body shivered from the want.

  Hot breath scorched my damp skin, “You know when I was younger, I used to lick anything I didn’t want taken from me.”

  I smiled, forgetting about everything that wasn’t Kade.

  That man’s tongue is a wicked, wicked thing.

  Delicious wet heat spiraled through me. Kade’s touch was the only thing that ever washed away the contamination that David filled inside me. Kade made me forg
et, with his intense eyes, dark obsession, and his touch. His touch always made me feel cherished, wanted… completely fucking possessed.

  His tongue slid over me, in me; lips played and teeth nipped. Wet fingers slipped through, curling and stroking.

  Arching my back, I let the sensations coil and build. “Kade, oh God,” heat fanned out across my belly. Tangled whimpers and soft sighs filled my throat, until I could take no more. Before the sweet rumble of release burst inside me, I crawled down the hard tight muscles of his body. Hovering my warmth against him. His cock slipped and slid under my body, grinding and gliding along my wetness. Sitting upright, I slid myself over the long, thick length of him, teasing and taunting. Hot hands covered my breasts, fingers twisting and digging into my skin. Heart pounding. Flesh burning.

  But then he stilled.

  Dark gray eyes captured mine. Unyielding. Unrelenting.

  Sweet, sweet anticipation.

  I could hear him breathing.

  Heavy thick breaths. My breaths, shallow, and shaking.

  His hands skimmed down my skin, rough fingertips grazed over my trembling body and reached for mine. A trail of heat was left in their wake. He linked our hands, tangling his fingers with mine, squeezing tightly, and brought them in the space between us. Pulling his face leveled to mine, we sat still, eyes locked together, my body straddling his. The way his eyes pierced mine made my throat thicken, my eyes sting with emotion. An ache stirred in my chest and throbbed for him.