by Corri Lee
“Pleasure to be of your disservice.”
Quick back and forth skits like that were the full extent of our interaction these days. I knew I’d been distant over the past months so we’d dropped out of touch a bit, but this was extreme.
“Emmy, it’s time to get dressed.”
I looked up at Esme dubiously, keeping still to let my sister’s apparent girlfriend add the last touches to my make-up. From the shoulders up, I was all glamour model. Everything south was yet to be completed.
We’d agreed—or rather, I’d insisted—that I would initially try the dress on alone and call Caroline in when I’d finished... reacting. An hour had been left open before guests started to assemble to get any last adjustments in, plenty of time without being in a rush.
The garment bag was unbelievably heavy. Ivy helped me carry it up the stairs and kissed my cheek for good luck before we left. All that remained was to open it and try it on.
Come on. I needed this dress to fit. If it didn’t, I’d see it as the next and last sign that this marriage was all wrong. A single stitch, I’d spot it in a minute and surrender...
A perfect fit. I almost wished I’d tried it on once before I’d been painted up because it was such an effort not to cry with relief. The bodice was immaculate and well-shaped, the laces at the back only tight enough to look decorative rather than supportive.
I looked like a bride. I was ready to go out there and get my man. And since there was nothing to do with the dress, I could have a careful glass of wine and unwind for a while. If I’d felt like it, I probably could have asked to move the ceremony forward.
I took one last good look at myself before shouting down to Caroline. She was going to work her pompous butt off for me while I had her there, so I almost wanted to find a loose bead or thread.
Not a thing. But something was missing, and I’d been upstairs too long. A creaking floorboard triggered the answer—veil! My veil was not in the garment bag like it should have been. Perfect.
Sensing someone in the doorway, I grabbed for a towel to cover most of my dress. “It fits but you forgot my fucking—”
“Lost something, Miss Tudor?”
Slowly, I felt all the heat slowly drain out of my face and head south towards my stomach. It only took a small turn to the left to see exactly who was standing in the doorway behind me.
It was the last face I ever imagined to see. A face of darker times. The face of deception. A face so powerful, I was already floored before I saw it for the first time.
The face of furious abandonment.
“Calloway.”
“How the hell did you get in here?”
“I have my ways, Miss Tudor.”
“I’m sure you do. I’d just like to know why you’d use them to break into my home.”
“This is not your home.”
His first step was a lunge that brought him far enough into the room to close the door behind him. He was too quick and precise, in everything in fact. Every move he had was calculated and well-planned. One false move and he could easily grab me, or worse.
“Why are you here, Calloway?”
“I’m here to take back what’s mine.”
“Nothing here belongs to you.”
I hated to admit it, but the same visceral magnetism still existed between us. His dark hair was longer and unruly, his icy blue eyes still stony yet strangely enrapturing. His body screamed ‘sex’ as an afterthought, total domination his priority. The moment I let helpless attraction rule me, he’d have caught me in his tidy trap.
That was his style. He lured women in with a wink and a smile, then physically and emotionally bullied modifications into her until she looked acceptable to be seen at his side. No aspect of her life would be free from control. A number of women were thrown away, taking tales of his abuse to broadsheets and lawyers. One was so desperate for his love, she remained his assistant after being binned off for a Russian dentist.
Calloway had never risen a hand to me. I’d been the only woman to stand my ground and he’d subsequently fallen completely in love with me, even knowing that I couldn’t love him back. We only shared a bed to fuck—a bed too similar to Natasha’s. Dreams of Blaze kept me from sleeping by his side, and mostly from sleeping at all. We mostly cohabited, socialised and ate together.
All that had amounted... to this?
As I’d suspected, Calloway was in front of me in one more gliding step, far too close for comfort. The small patch of exposed skin between my shoulder blades pressed back against the mirror, and the ruching crumpled and gathered at the small of my back. It was ludicrous that in this situation, with my mad ex-boyfriend pinioning me mere minutes before my wedding, I was dripping with concern that my train would crease.
“The way I remember it, Emmeline, is that I went away to see my family for Thanksgiving with a nice British girlfriend waiting at home for me. My trip home was delayed for a day by snow so I tried to call you, but I only got your voicemail.
“I left ten messages, then I saw them; the reports that you’d hooked up with good old Blaze again in England. Do you have any idea how humiliating it was to try and explain that to my parents after spending days telling them how wonderful you are?”
His hand slammed down flat against the mirror next to my head and I desperately tried not to fixate on the way he’d used present tense. This man was clearly dangerous and not looking for love. Mistaking anything as tender and gentle could have been fatal.
“Well? Do you have any idea?”
“N-no, I don’t. I’m so sorry.”
“Sorry! Oh, she’s sorry!” Calloway pushed back from me, running his fingers angrily into his glossy black mane, shaking with pent up fury. “Sorry, sorry, sorry. How many people are going to say that to me before someone really means it, Emmeline? How many roads must a man walk down for a genuine apology?”
Those last two words were screamed in my face, hot, pungent breath burning my skin. From the stench, I’d have put bets on him clearing out a whole liquor cabinet before he’d arrived. Who knows; maybe that cabinet was mine and he’d been lurking all day.
I stared him dead in the eye because it was all I was capable of—that and breathing so shallowly in case the sound of it pissed him off.
“He took you away from me, and look what happened to you. You tried to cut yourself open because of him.”
Automatically, my hands crossed to meet the wrist of the other, defending my actions and defending Blaze. “How do you even know about that?”
“Oh, I have my ways.”
“So you keep saying but never explaining.”
Seeing some of my usual spunk seemed to please him. With a hack of bright laughter, he retreated once again and pulled a silver whiskey flask from his pocket. Like his damned money clip, the flask was intricately engraved with the initials, C.R. Calloway Ryan: tamer and torturer.
“What do you want?” I asked calmly, willing my legs to stop shaking. “You got yourself a new girl. Why do you want me?”
“It’s a matter of principle, Miss Tudor.” He came at me again, though this time made me feel sick. His hand brushed down the left side of my face, the right side victim of his lips and nose kissing and nuzzling. “You’re so fucking beautiful. You belong to me. I’ve come back for the soul with whom mine mated with under the glow of lightning.”
Souls mated under the glow of lightning? That sounded so much like—
“Souls mated by thunder. You. It was you who sent the ring.”
“Don’t you like it?”
“Are you shitting me? Even if you weren’t an absolute nutter, sending a wedding ring to a woman you’re not romantically involved with is creepy.”
“Who says we’re not romantically involved?” Calloway leaned closer and drew a long, distressing breath against my neck. I managed to keep myself from recoiling, but I couldn’t control the goose bumps of disgust mistaken as a thrill. “Ah, a reaction. See, I still share a romantic connection with you. I sti
ll feel the same degree of what you might call love. Except I’m mighty pissed off that you ran away.”
“I swear, none of it was planned. I hoped he wouldn’t be there that night.”
“Did you hope he’d be with his wife?”
I had the same draining, twisting feeling in my gut that I’d had when Calloway first walked in. How could he possibly have known about Natasha? Why?
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. Blaze doesn’t have a wife. Not yet.”
“You mean, ‘anymore’.”
Run.
My little heard conscience spoke only one single syllable, which ran out true and clear. But where was the way out of this difficult situation? The window or in a body bag, it felt like.
“Blaze is entitled to have had a life before me,” I bluffed. “I had mine.”
“But it wasn’t really ‘before’, was it? Now she’s dead. Boohoo.”
I felt heat in my nostrils again and recognised it fast enough to stanch the blood with the towel I’d tried to cover up with before it started to flow. To my alarm and surprise, Calloway swooped in with a monogrammed handkerchief at my neck, trying to catch a few rogue droplets that had wandered free.
Between our efforts, only one pinprick of blood hit my dress. It was barely visible to the naked eye, yet Calloway erupted once again.
A bizarre scenario developed, in which I attempted to console and placate my own attacker. He knew things that made it too risky to provoke him. If I couldn’t calm him, I didn’t know what I’d be dealing with next.
But I couldn’t. He was irate and clearly drunk. Trying to touch him just got me slapped, trying to move towards the door earned me a kick in the legs. I tried both repeatedly and had taken quite a beating by the time I fell to the floor in a heap after a particularly artful slap that rivalled Esme’s.
“Just tell me what you want from me! I’ll give you anything.”
“What I want is to take you back to New York and kill that interloping bastard Blaze!” Just the suggestion of him hurting Blaze made me cry out in fear. That was my biggest mistake. Calloway saw that I’d protect the man who’d wronged me and wasn’t exactly impressed. His fingers dug into my formal up-do, forcing bobby pins painfully into my scalp. With excruciating force, he pulled me up by the hair until my toes were clear of the ground.
“But you fucked me, too. Didn’t you, Emmeline? So I came here to give you a choice. Me or Blaze. Pick me, I kill him for being obstructive. Pick him, I kill you. If I can’t have you, nobody can.”
“Sounds reasonable.” Or not. They might have sounded like options but they were really a fork in the road leading to two dead ends. I picked Calloway, I lived with Blaze’s death on my conscience and allowed myself to be slowly maimed to death. If I picked Blaze, I’d die and he’d just follow suit.
And yet, it was a no-brainer. I blurted out Blaze’s name without a seconds thought and was thrown to the ground like trash. More than anything, I hated the idea of Blaze loosing his life at the hands of a chicken-shit woman beater like Callowank Ryan.
Remembering ‘Callowank’, as Chris had so delicately dubbed him, I laughed until my sides hurt. It was probably shock that caused it, but it felt uniquely freeing to sit there and howl in the face of death. “Show me my maker, Ryan. I’ve teased him enough.”
“Stop laughing at me! You know, there’s nothing stopping me from killing you both!”
“I know.” But I was still laughing. I must have cracked but was clinging on to sanity by the finger nails. “But even if you did, everyone would figure out that I died first defending him.”
“Then I’ll kill him first and make you watch.” Not an option I was happy to consider, of course. It was enough to break my hilarity and become completely silent.
No, none of this was funny. This was distressing beyond the pale. I’d believed that Natasha was the worst phantom that could find us. I hadn’t once considered the monsters that dwell inside the living.
“You have no idea what kind of investment you’re making in murder, Calloway. Spare yourself the misery.”
“What about the misery I’ve already suffered, huh? I’m supposed to just let it go?”
“Yes!” Bloody and aching, I used the last ounce of fighting spirit to stand up straight and proud. How had nobody heard all the commotion? Why was nobody coming to save me?
That was it, I knew it. This time I’d die and nobody would be able to stop it. My own actions had led me to an unpleasant death—mine and mine alone.
“Blaze doesn’t deserve this. I’m an adult and I made the decision to leave you. I’ve done a lot of stupid things but he’s not to blame. Your problem is with me.”
“He stole my fucking girlfriend, Emmeline. He stole the last shred of goodness in my life. And that’s not his fault?!”
“No. He didn’t steal me.” A heartbeat passed. The next brought with it one last surge of bad attitude. “You borrowed me.”
Calloway drew a flip-knife from his pocket. Okay, so I was going to get stabbed to death. There might have been something sentimental about that. Maybe he’d go for my left side just to be funny.
“I’m going to mess you up something fierce, Miss Tudor. Then I’m going to watch when they find your body. Then I’m going to obliterate Blaze’s career by telling everyone how his wife really died, then I’m going to kill him. Like the sound of that?”
“Obviously not, dickhead. You think you won’t go through a personal hell of your own?”
“I was born in my hell.” He advanced. I took a step back. He moved closer in his own sleek way until my back was up against the closed door. “And you were born there, too.”
The tip of the knife brushed against my stomach, the touch quaking outwards to the rest of my body. I suddenly realised then, that I wasn’t afraid to die. I just wanted to get it over and done with, without the slow, tedious verbal torture.
“What goes around comes around, Calloway. I’m certainly getting my comeuppance.”
“You completed my life, Emmeline. My beautiful English rose who cared for me like no other. Is it so wrong for me to want to preserve that picture?”
Every artist has his own methods and perspective of a scene, I suppose. If that’s what helped him sleep at night; sure. He was well within his rights.
“I want you to pass on a message. If I lit you up so much and you’re going to do so many awful things to my friends and family, you at least owe me this, in some form or another.”
He contemplated it briefly, straightened his shoulders and nodded. “Fine. I will pass on your message.”
A message, really? That’s what I asked for when he probably would have given me something more helpful, like a fucking phone call? How did I even respond to that? ‘Remind Blaze that the bins go out on Thursdays’? A meaningful quote or heartfelt sonata? A Broadway musical?
“Tell my family to let me go this time. Six is too many times to die. And tell Blaze I’m sorry for what I did.”
“Deal.”
The door shoved open behind me.
“Emmy, you soppy dipshit. You forgot your—”
Calloway took a split second glance away from my face, and I took the advantage. My knee met his groin, which doubled him over. An elbow to the back of the neck. A knee to face. The sound of his nose breaking was audible. The horrid crack made me wince.
A final kick to the kidneys and I was done, a hollow wreck in a heap on the floor. People crowded in around us both. Jonathan pinned down a fairly immobile Calloway down with his front on the floor, arms held behind his back, and I just stared. I stared at Calloway and I stared at the knife still in his hand.
How was I still alive?
“Emmy, holy shit!” Daniel crouched next to me and pulled me close. Until I’d leaned on someone solid, I had no idea how badly I was trembling. My tremors would have put a care home full of Parkinson’s patients to shame. “Are you hurt?”
“No. Yes.” Hurt where? On the outside, sure. Inside, it wa
s impossible to quantify the damage.
“Emmy, I’m being serious now. Did that bastard hurt you?”
“He knows. He knows about Natasha.”
Henry must have heard me. Our eyes met and he sped out of the room with a phone in each hand. If, after nearly thirty years, he couldn’t make a problem like this disappear, he’d amassed to nothing.
But I knew it wasn’t as simple as throwing money at it, as was his usual style. Calloway was already a rich man with a company of his own. Coins were frugal and irrelevant. What he needed was a bargaining chip, and a damn good one at that.
Yes, Calloway Ryan had hurt me. However, that pain was nothing compared to what I had and would inflict on everyone else. I was just a catalyst.
The wedding was provisionally postponed by an hour while the authorities spoke to everyone and dealt with Calloway. I watched on numbly as Henry’s men worked the wounded madman over, bending back fingers and jabbing bruises until he admitted that he only knew that Natasha had existed and had died by overdose. He had enough defiance in him to refuse to say how he’d found out.
My own guilt had exacerbated the fear. A public announcement that I’d been Blaze’s other woman alongside a disabled, suicidal woman would make us both look awful, but neither of us would do time for it. On the other hand, Calloway would have gladly ruined Blaze’s career over a brief affair. All he had to do was get a slightly more elaborate and exaggerated account to the media before we could, and Blaze could kiss goodbye to a star on Hollywood Boulevard.
Slowly, the uniformed bad boys started to trickle out of the house. I had no idea how much the guests outside—or even Blaze—knew about what had happened. They all could have been told that there was a dress emergency for all I knew. All would be well to them provided we caught the final glow of the sunset. Maybe nobody outside of that house apart from the officers would find out that it had ever happened.
Finally, after the last car left with Calloway locked inside, Chris stood and said it was probably time I got tidied up for the photographers. I didn’t move. With one look, he saw exactly where my head was at in that moment.