Binds

by Rebecca Espinoza

  www.facebook.com/rebeccanespinoza

  Copyright © 2013 by Rebecca Espinoza

  Edited by Lori Sabin

  Cover design by Okay Creations www.okaycreations.net

  Formatted by Fictional Formats fictionalformats@gmail.com

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  For Judy, Wow, Grammy, and Mrs. E.

  This book would not exist if it weren’t for all of YOU.

  The bell above the shop door jangled, announcing a visitor. Ophelia was seated in the middle of the floor, playing with the collection of antique Japanese Shishi dogs, something that she had been repeatedly told not to do. She looked up at the scrolled ironwork clock hanging behind the register. 8:43, seventeen minutes until her mother’s shop, Whimsy, would be open.

  A tall man with dark brown hair dressed in a black business suit walked through the door. The man was thin but walked with the presence of a larger frame. In his late thirties, his face was handsome with a square jaw, clear pale complexion, and dark brown eyes that hinted at knowing something no one else did. Behind him, a boy, a few years older than Ophelia’s nine, hurried into the shop, and Ophelia was reminded of one of those small birds that follows around large wild animals she had seen on TV recently. The bird sometimes perched upon a hippo’s back, but the hippo never seemed to take notice if the creature was there or not. Didn’t really care, Ophelia thought.

  The man glanced around the store, seemingly looking for help. His face puckered in distaste, as if he were lowering his standards just by breathing the air contained within the space. His gaze traveled over Ophelia dismissively. Her mother came through the beaded curtain that divided the store from the entrance to their home in the back and stopped. She saw the man and inhaled a deep breath through her nose.

  “Oberon.” The way she said the name gave Ophelia the impression that it was a filthy word.

  “Morgan.” The man took his hat off and held it over his heart; a condescending curl of his lips and then the hat was back atop his head. “I heard you were still selling baubles and trinkets, how nice to see the small business owner can survive in this country. Although, I’m sure these knick knacks,” he picked up a voodoo doll with the tips of his thumb and index finger, held it up with a shake of his head, and plopped it back down on the shelf, “don’t exactly fly out of here without some of your own personal type of intervention.”

  “You break it, you buy it,” Morgan replied. She smiled, raised an eyebrow and the doll fell over, slid off the shelf and landed with a thud on the ceramic tile floor.

  “I don’t need to be reminded of that, Morgan. I just spent the last twelve years with one of those types of purchases. Speaking of which, I didn’t see you at the service yesterday. I was sure you would want to say your goodbyes, she was your best friend after all.”

  Morgan’s forehead puckered for less than an instant, long enough for Ophelia to take notice, before the aloof expression returned like a drawbridge that had never been let down.

  “Friend or not, my goodbyes were made the day Mary said yes to you. If you expect me to believe that you were surprised when I did not come to her service, then you must think I am a fool. Why are you here, Oberon?”

  “To see you, of course,” Oberon said as he stepped forward, laid his hands palms down on the counter, and leaned pleadingly towards Morgan. “I chose wrong, Morgan. I’ve known it every day for the last 12 years, lived with it every day for the last 12 years. And now I have the freedom to exonerate my heart, out loud, and to the person who has the ability to hold it. I came here as soon as I could.” He smiled a wolfish smile, clearly proud of himself for getting through the declaration of love without a chuckle.

  “Your heart? Really, Oberon? You’re going to come to me with declarations of the heart? The fact that you are brazen enough to stand in front of me the day after you laid your wife to rest and tell me that you made the wrong choice illustrates that point. It wasn’t a matter of choosing wrong. There was no choice.” She walked to the front window of the store and turned the wooden sign around to indicate that the store was open. “Now, if you have no further business here, I will ask you to please leave. There are trinkets and baubles to be sold. Ophelia, please return those figures to their shelves.”

  “Ophelia, is that your daughter?” Oberon turned to look at the child again, this time with a more appraising eye. “Her father was common, was he not? Does she possess any talent at all? My offspring,” he pointed to the boy at his side, the first time he had acknowledged him since walking into the store, “is quite useless. Twelve years old and still hasn’t come into any power. Shocking, really, that two full bloods would produce a common, but Mary wasn’t as powerful as I had hoped when I acquired her.”

  Ophelia looked at the boy and saw that even though his eyes were submissively working holes into the floor, his fists were clenched and red with the effort. He looked up and they caught each other’s eye. His gaze was icy and she found herself feeling fearful of him, although she didn’t know why. She had never been afraid while in her mother’s presence.

  Morgan was holding the front door, both in an attempt to prop it open for the day and to show Oberon his way out, but she abruptly slammed it closed, marched over to him and pointed a finger into his face. “You need not concern yourself with my child. As for yours, I would watch what I say if I were you. It may come back to bite you.”

  She turned to Ophelia, “Phee, go inside the house and start on your chores.”

  Ophelia had never been more relieved to be dismissed in all of her life, even if it was to do chores. She felt an urgency to get away from the boy. Sadness and anger draped around him like a tailored garment. She rushed through the curtain, the beads clinking and swaying behind her.

  “Now, I ask you to leave and please, don’t come back. Your hunger for power will not be fed by me. Not now, not ever, Oberon.” Morgan gestured him towards the door again.

  “You are a fool, Morgan, if you don’t see what we could be together, what we could do together…”

  “No!” Morgan raised her voice. “All you can see is what you could do, what you could control! I told you already, years ago, and I will tell you now for the last time. I will never align myself with you, Oberon. Never. Now, as I already said, you need to leave.”

  “I will leave today, Morgan, but I am not done, far from it. You are the most powerful Mage I have ever come across, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t someone even more so. When I find them, you will regret this. I promise you that. We could have ruled this world together. You have chosen your fate. Come on, boy.”

  He turned on his heel and stomped out of the store, his son hurrying behind him. Morgan breathed a sigh of relief but thought twice and muttered, “Oblivio” under her breath. Her daughter was her life and she wasn’t taking any chances. She had done a great job of disguising Ophelia as common, but she would prefer that Oberon take no notice of Ophelia at all.

  Oberon, stormed away from Whimsy that day, hell-bent on destroying the woman that he wanted to control more than anyone in the world. His thoughts would go to her with every decision he made from that point on in a constant obsessive struggle to become more powerful than her. He would, however, never think again about the little
girl in the shop. He hadn’t paid her much mind to begin with and so it was a weak spell that bound his thoughts from returning to her. His son, however, thought of her often. Morgan made a mistake in Binding the father and overlooking the son with her spell. It was a mistake that one day she would pay dearly for.

  Thursday: Lobster tail poached in a lemon garlic sauce, small new red potatoes, and Julienne of fresh snow peas and carrots.

  Friday: Rack of lamb with herb roasted Dijon crust, mushroom hazelnut salad, and potato leek soup.

  I scroll through the menu in front of me once more to make sure that everything will be acceptable. I blow out a breath that I hadn’t realized I’d been holding. I think for sure that Donovan will be pleased with it this time, and then I scroll back up to the top to peruse the list again. My mind wanders to the first time I saw my husband’s fury over a wrong choice for a dinner party with some of his lesser associates. Surrey roast chicken, I remember. The cook was dismissed before the last plate was cleared from the table that evening. I have taken up the task of going over each monthly menu with a fine-tooth comb ever since. That was 2 years ago, and I still make mistakes every now and then. I’d better go over it once more to be sure, I sigh.

  Details are very important to me. They haven’t always been. Not Before. Before, I was like a thistle blowing around in the yard. Free, vibrant, easy going. My mother shaped me that way, stuffed me into the mold of her self. My life seems to have been split sharply into two sections with a clean severance, like a knife cutting kernels off of a corncob. Before, it was a whole object, fully connected to itself, and after, it was scattered all over the plate; cut off, bereft. I try not to dwell too much on the Before portion of my life— what’s gone is gone and you can’t bring it back around. I try to be planted firmly in the After and that is that. Actually, I try not to dwell on much of anything, really, except for the details. The details are what keep my mind off of the past, and more often recently, wandering into ways to get out of the present.

  The memory of being found sitting in a Mercedes with the engine running in the enclosed garage off of our guesthouse comes to mind. James, my former driver found me. I remember his shocked face as he pulled me out of the car and walked me back around to the main house. I don’t think he ever told anyone about that day. I know it never got back to Donovan, and James never spoke to me about it either, but he always looked at me from that day forward as if he was waiting, waiting for me to address it or waiting for me to try again.

  The weird thing was that I had no clue as to how I ended up in that car. I won’t lie, I’ve thought about trying to end it all, many times. There would be no one to mourn me, no friends, no family besides my husband and his father. Donovan would probably see it as a loss of his trophy wife, and his father would be relieved. He has never seemed to like me anyway. Yes, I have thought about it many times. Of the ways I could end my life and escape this pristine prison, death by auto asphyxiation would seem the easiest and most pain free, but I have never actually attempted it. One minute, I had been crying behind the locked door of my bathroom, and then the next, James was staring into my eyes. I had come back to myself, as if waking from a dream, with a start, behind the wheel of the car.

  “Ahem.”

  Startled, I looked up from the menu to see the new driver, Reece, standing in the doorway. James, the friendly old man who had found me in my precarious position and had driven me around like a prized porcelain doll has retired, gone for almost two weeks now. Even though I didn’t know him on a personal level, I miss him. It’s sad that I hold onto him that way when not a part of him was ever mine. I’m sure he has a family that he retired to spend more time with, and I’ll never be anything more to him than a pampered housewife that he had to endure. He always looked at me kindly, even before the incident in the garage.

  Back to Reece, something about him puts me on edge. It’s odd to me that my husband would hire him in the first place. He definitely doesn’t fit the mold of the people that Donovan usually places around me; the old, the ugly, the giant muscle-clad meathead bodyguard types who have more muscle cells than brain cells. Reece is a good-looking man with his close-cropped ebony hair, striking emerald eyes, and creamy skin. He has a strong jawline that always hints at a five o’clock shadow and dimples that seem to be present whether he is smiling or not. He looks to be in his late twenties or early thirties but still retains a boyish charm in his eyes. I feel as if he doesn’t look at me but through me, as if he knows me already and is expecting me to embrace him as an old friend. I don’t like it.

  He steps a few feet into the study. “Miss Brand, I’m here to take you to the inaugural dinner, whenever you are ready.”

  “Oh crap, the dinner!” I jump up and start past Reece before remembering myself, cringing at the slip in language. I am always expected to be refined, as Donovan constantly reminds me, no matter what. “Umm, I’m sorry about that. Let me just change and we can leave. Please, give me a few minutes.”

  “No, problem,” Reece says, a crooked smile plastered to his face.

  He probably thinks I am embarrassed about using the word crap. In reality, I couldn’t care less. Curse words don’t bother me at all. In fact, in the Before years, I wouldn’t have even considered ‘crap’ a bad word. The harsher curse words would easily slip into my conversations, especially if I were talking about something I was passionate about. Donovan once told me when we started dating that he thought it was cute. What was cute for dating became intolerable for marriage. In fact, most of the things that made me me, became intolerable shortly after we married, when Donovan became the chief advisor on his father’s campaign for chancellor. At the time, I understood. Elections are hard, especially when you are running for the highest seat in the country. Our every move could be scrutinized and so I went along with it. I pulled all of the ragged edges of myself into a smooth new shape so that I could fit into the mold that Donovan needed at the time.

  That was four years ago. Chancellor Brand had been elected and just recently fraudulently reelected; Donovan has been working as his head of state ever since. Propriety is still of utmost importance to both of them, not that I give a rat’s ass anymore about the politics of it. I just prefer to keep Donovan happy. When he is happy, there is no reason to be afraid.

  “I’ll wait for you outside. The car is already around front,” Reece states as I flee the room.

  I race upstairs and fling my closet doors open. The closet is actually a room unto itself with racks and shelves full of the pieces of the proper uniform for the wife of a head of state. How could I forget? This is not going to be good. Crap, crap, crap. Thankfully, as always, our maid Elise, or ‘Donovan’s eyes’ as I like to think of the squinty-faced woman whose task it is to watch everything I do, has taken the liberty of choosing not only my dress but also my shoes and jewelry for the evening.

  I change quickly, while trying to come up with an excuse in the very likely event that we don’t make it in time. Nothing I can say will help me if I am late, but I still hold onto the possibility that he will be too busy to notice me slipping in or maybe he will overlook it this once. Fat chance.

  In less than ten minutes, I am ready and running out the door, only slowing my step once I near the car where Reece is holding the back door open for me. I am flustered with nerves and anxiety; worried about what Donovan will do to me, and Reece, as well, for it will be both of us that will be punished. Reece looks at me through the rearview mirror, probably taking in my flushed face and frantic eyes. He is new, so he probably doesn’t realize the trouble we are in. He doesn’t look nervous like a man who knows he will very soon be losing his job. We get to the gated fence that surrounds the house and I watch impatiently as the Brand family crest that covers them pulls apart to allow our departure. Reece seems breezy as he whistles the tune playing on the radio. The whistling almost pushes my nerves to the limit, and I scrape every last ounce of control I have to remain quiet and not scream at him to step on it.

&
nbsp; I am staring out of the window, noticing the first stars as they appear in the twilight sky and taking the time to wish on each one I see, wishing that we would get there before the dinner starts. “Start on the outside and work your way in,” Reece says with a laugh in his voice.

  “What?” I snap back. I already have enough to worry about as each minute passes while we are not moving, stuck in the end-of-the-day traffic. I really don’t need to worry about cryptic messages from my creepy, attractive driver as well.

  “Pretty Woman,” Reece says as if that is an explanation all itself. “You know the movie with Julia Roberts?”

  “I know what Pretty Woman is. What are you talking about? Watch the road!” This is getting exasperating. What is up with this guy and why is he trying to make small talk? Doesn’t he see the precariousness of our position? Someone, maybe one of the other drivers or one of our other terrified employees, must have filled him in about his tyrannical employer. They wouldn’t just send him out without the protection of knowledge, would they?

  “The forks. You seem nervous about this fancy dinner. I figured it might have something to do with all the forks. They would make me nervous, trying to figure out the right one to use at the right time. My little sister used to make me watch that movie all the time and I thought you might need some help remembering the fork order.” His eyes hold mirth as they meet mine, and it really ticks me off.

  “Listen, I don’t want to sound like a total bitch, okay, but you need to stop worrying about me and start worrying about your job. This dinner starts in fifteen minutes and unless we can magically make it through all of this traffic and I can get into the door in time, we are both going to be in a world of hurt. I don’t know what you were told during the hiring process, but my husband is very serious about punctuality and even more serious about consequences when one is not punctual. Please, can we hurry it up?”