My eyes narrow on my father-in-law, I promise they didn’t stand aside casting blame on others when the sins of their own flesh is still very much alive and directly in front of the entire family’s eyes.
“Roman, son, I will not repeat my question.”
Okay, so something happens right now, at this moment in the story, I’m not certain who the winning Heather is, but I do know without any doubts, whatever identity game my defensive coordinator, Mace and my offensive line Mac have been lost in, has ended.
My contentment and conspiracy melds together. My shy and weak, non-confrontational tendencies fuse with my outgoing, strong, and never bites her tongue. Positive and negative, good and evil, love and hate, smitten and cynical, all of my rights and wrongs…My Mac and Mace, all of it just merges.
And the second the words fall from my mouth, I’m grateful for the insane, paranoid parts of myself; but most of all, I’m proud when I hear my loyal, unwavering voice respond to my hypocritical father-in-law’s question, “Roman is doing exactly what every good father is supposed to: absolutely everything in his power to make sure his child is safe and his family is happy. And he’s doing it even though he knows the repercussions of what he does today will haunt and hurt him every day for the rest of his life.”
Both Payne men are blinking at me in shock when Roman steps forward and embraces me, one arm circling my shoulders as his other arm circles my waist.
“Mouse, baby, please. I’m so out of my comfort zone right now, I can’t tell you how much I love you, but I need you to listen, because if you don’t our daughter will be raised by neither of her parents. Please. Heather, I beg you, please just do this one thing for me, for Ivy? Please?”
I refuse to allow myself the lazy, agoraphobic tendencies I used to enable myself. I’m not taking the liar’s way out, I’m taking the hard way out, the untraveled path.
I swallow past the lump in my throat and look up at my husband waiting for him to continue.
“I’m going to handle this. This is my family’s mess and I will fix it, okay angel?”
I nod before looking down, hoping to keep my determination hidden within my eyes.
It may be his family’s mess, but the bottom line is, it’s messing with me. Dolores has already stolen too much time from my daughter and me. She doesn’t get to have any more.
I don’t know how yet, but even if it’s the death of me, she’ll get not a minute more than she’s already taken.
Chapter 26
It’s been over two months since Winter came into our little dysfunctional family consisting of me and my sister playing house with Winter as our child when the harsh realization that mother truly loves Roman more than her own son begins to plague me.
Most of the time, Winter’s accomplishments are enough to direct my dark brooding thoughts to happier ones filled with pride for my new daughter. Winter has done exceptionally well with her conditioning, conforming like a good girl to her part in our twisted labyrinth of lies and deceit that make up the setting of our new lives.
I still test her, and I will admit I feel pride when I say she very rarely flinches when I call her by the name she was born with. Winter Ivy now only responds, recognizing her new name, Winter Angelina.
For the first time since her mother was mine, before she defied me and fought me, before she broke my plans and ruined it all, costing her the loss of her daughter, I feel contentment.
Peace.
I feel happiness.
With only two plagues dampening my grand plans, I still feel the optimism needed to continue this charade. The first plague being my ignorant, incestuous sister and her inability to tell the difference between reality and fantasy. I’m often pushed to the point of rage by the hope I see in her eyes as she devotedly hands me her love and affection. But it’s the look of pathetic disappointment on her face when we have no spectators around to entertain that I blatantly disregard her stupid, childish romantic notions.
The second nuisance affecting my plans is the silent treatment Mother is bestowing both me and Lizbeth. It isn’t the radio silence that bothers me or pulls me away from the gratification of my successful plans, its Mother’s ability to deliver dead air.
The days turn to weeks, the weeks to months, and before our happy little family realizes it, six months have already come and gone.
Mother’s uncharacteristic continued silence is beginning to affect my happiness less and less. However, Lizbeth’s advances towards me haven’t lessened and are quickly becoming tiresome, weakening my resolve as well as my patience.
I clearly see the colors of reality and fiction blurring, reds, oranges, and yellows of happiness and peace smudge and run into the dark purples, grays, and blacks of twisted perversions and depravity, marring the picture of the perfect family we present to the outside world.
Nothing about us, or our motley crew makes sense, yet somehow it works effortlessly.
Winter has done exceptionally well in her preschool lessons, and over the last few months she’s easily situated herself amongst her peers. In the beginning I was proud of my Winter Angelina for her ability to evolve around the difficult changes her immature mind withstood. However, once the excuses I use to keep her from accepting the sleep over and birthday party invitations dry up, Winter’s mingling becomes a problem that I know will sooner or later need to be addressed and dealt with.
As for the way Lizbeth and I spend our time day to day, I’ve become the one thing I’ve fought becoming since the birth of my plans for revenge. The thing I’ve always been: I am a cleaner of other people’s kill.
This shitty town with its pathetic employment opportunities has forced me into a profession I vowed to never do again.
Though it isn’t Roman’s kill, I’m still peeling the skin, gutting their entrails, and cleaning other men’s kills at Atchafalaya Processing & Taxidermist.
Lizbeth was lucky enough to find a part-time job as an assistant librarian at The Orleans Parish Library, making it easier for her to work around Winter’s school hours. She’s still able to take her to school and pick her up afterward.
Our family unit, against all odds, is seemingly running like a well-oiled machine. The only hiccups in our daily lives are caused by Winter’s incessant need to continue to ask questions.
“Where’s my mommy at? Not my Lizbiff mommy, but my real mommy?”
“Where’s my daddy at? Not my untle Seb daddy, but my real daddy?”
These fucking questions and constant nagging are like nails raking down a chalkboard, the whining, God, her immature whining tone brings me to the brink of snapping. But she always sighs and mutters a defeated, “Never mind, Daddy, I sowy, I know you can’t say me the trufe.” And instantly my heart warms for the poor child, reminding me how far she’s come and how much she is really trying to become accustomed to her new life.
And this is why I know, that even though things aren’t perfect, the job I’m forced to endure, the façade of a marriage I play a part in with my sister and the daughter of the only woman I have and ever will love, playing the role of our child with my great great grandmothers sugar plantation as the setting of this modern day tragedy which I am the director of.
Chapter 27
Sebastian has indeed been playing stronger than I ever could have imagined him equipped for. He’s not only playing it, but set up the rules and the players, all while mastering it without me knowing I was ever in the game. He’s defeated me and taken the only things I hold dear, then used my sins against my, our, father to foot his bill.
The Judas bastard. The snake in the grass at my heel as well as one of my few right hand men sworn to lay their life down for mine or my family. The coward vulture in the dark, finding scraps of pleasure while watching me fight my demons with the blood of innocent women, still seems to need me to leach from so he can feed his own sick and perverted desires.
However, that bastard brother of mine has gone too far this time. He’s over stepped his bounds, outstayed his
welcome, and now he will be stopped. And I don’t care what I have to do. He will pay for what he’s done to my wife and our child.
“Dolores and I have been in each-others’ lives a very long time, son. And no, it isn’t an excuse, but it does explain things you need to understand. Neither of us ever meant for it to carry on, especially after your grandfather announced your mother as my bride to be. Then after we married, and Dolores stayed on with the family instead of continuing her nursing courses after her mother died, father sent her with us. The second she and I were alone I knew there’d be no way I could stay away from her.
She was everything I ever wanted in life, and I was gifted a second chance to capture her. She was fierce. Alive. Free. She was the most real thing I’d ever seen. I wanted to harness it, own it, and absorb it. All of it.” My father’s tired eyes rise and settle on mine. “And so I did. She and I had the best eleven years of our life, every moment was stolen and precious, it was ours and it was sacred. I loved more in those years than any other.”
My calm façade hides my hatred extremely well. “Which son’s arrival did you hear of first, father? Your bride’s son, or your whore’s?”
His scoffing is almost laughable.
“You can dress her up with every beautiful and righteous word in Webster’s Dictionary, but a fucking whore is still just that. A fucking whore, period! Now which son?!” Both fists crack the surface of my desk at the same time I stand from my chair and tower over my father’s frame, “Which son, old man?”
Almost whimpering, he barely gets the words out, “I’ve only ever had one son, Roman, and you are him.”
Settling back behind my desk, I swipe my iPhone from the desks’ mahogany surface and dial Andrew who picks up in less than one ring, “Sir?”
“Bring Delores from the basement, I’m sure she hasn’t missed any of my father’s performance via the intercom in her cell.” My calm exterior returns as I maintain eye contact with the man in question.
When the hidden cracked door that consists of a stairway from the basement to my office swings open beside the bookcase, I watch as my father’s face drains of blood becoming as pale as the white overstuffed chair he sits on.
Dolores walks in first with her wrists bound behind her back and as Andrew crosses the threshold he quickly moves around her to move a chair next to my father but I raise my hand to stop him.
“No, she may kneel on the floor. There’s no need to keep this neither polite nor accommodating. She no longer cares for this family, and I for damn sure don’t care about her.”
After a pathetic attempt at refusing to kneel, she cries out as her knees smack the hardwood floor at the same time she loses her balance from Andrew nudging her down. Unable to use her hands to prevent her face from bouncing off the edge of my desk she lands on the floor with a sickening thud.
I nod towards Andrew, “Pull the whore up.”
Her act of defiance by not looking me in the eye pisses me off, but I remain calm.
“You don’t appreciate how highly my father still speaks of you? You must have been some good Cajun coon ass pussy back in the day.” My eyes slide to my fathers, “Where is your other son, dad? Do you know?”
He shakes his head before looking down.
“Her family? Her mother, where is she from? Start from the beginning if you must, but you will dig every piece of information out of that head of yours.”
He remains silent for several minutes then clears his throat and speaks, “I met Delores in grade school. That’s when her mother came to work for my parents. We couldn’t have been more than ten at the time. Both she and her mother’s accent were so thick I could hardly understand them. When I asked why, your grandmother told me they were from south Louisiana. That’s all I know, son.”
I nod in thought then look over to Dolores.
“How long did you know Mother was pregnant before you found out your whore was as well?”
“Less than twenty-four hours.” Dolores’s cold voice of steel cuts through the room and my eyebrow lifts in amusement.
Chuckling, I look over at my father, “And she speaks!” I glance between them, “Is that so? Well…” More chuckles commence, “That is quite upsetting and slightly convenient. What happened then, dear old Dad? Or step whore, whomever prefers to speak.”
“I paid her.” Tears well in my father’s eyes and any respect I ever had for the man in front of me dissipates, and if I still possessed a heart after this hellish three years I’ve lived in, it would have had a string slightly pulled by the travesty of a life my father has lived. “I paid her, I told her to get rid of it,”
His face turns to Dolores and crumbles when he begs, “Why didn’t you just get rid of it and come back to me like we planned?”
The frail woman surprises me with her vigilant strength when she somehow stands from the wilted heap on the floor and leans in speaking with ice laced around her every word, “I did come back to you, I just decided to keep what was mine, love.”
Her dead eyes, almost swollen shut stop on mine, “When a man witnesses a woman give his child life, take the deepest breath needed before pushing the child from her body, a love unlike any other is also born in that moment. Viv stole that moment from me, but she wouldn’t steal the love we once shared. So I retreated, I pulled my guards up around my heart and continued to live out my life the only way I knew how, in total silence.”
I look at both traitors in front of me before nodding at Andrew.
His knee slams into the back of Dolores’s disrupting her balance and sending her face first back to the floor costing her, her consciousness.
“Andrew take her back downstairs, get started on tracking down any and all family history you get a lead on.” I look at my father before standing and walking from the office. I pause at the doorway and tilt my head to the side, “I’ll call Mother, I’m sure she’d like to be brought up on today’s events and top stories.”
After I talk to Mother, I find out she’s in LA with some of her friends from her bridge club. I explain as delicately as possible that I need her to head home when planned and not to draw out her vacations as she usually prefers to do.
I am a tired, defeated, and exhausted man as I slowly make my way into the master bedroom and sink on to the chaise lounge, kicking my shoes off.
“Rome?” My wife’s husky voice calls from the bathroom doorway drawing my eyes to her silhouette.
Her voice cracks, “I need you. I need you to take the pain away the way only you can, please,” a broken sob escapes her lips and I’m stalking towards her, “Please.” She whimpers as I scoop her up in my arms and carry her trembling body to our bed.
“Shh…I’m here. Mouse. I’ll make it go away, baby.” My chest feels like its splintering in two and I’m forced to call on a strength I don’t possess. I lay her down, stripping her body of the sheer robe before splaying her open for my eyes and pinning her wrists above her head. I lean over her, growling against the flesh of her tender neck as my hands secure hers with the sash I ripped from her robe, “Take the pain the way only I can? Mouse,” I rake my blunt nails from her wrists down her arms until my fingers circle her neck, “I can only do that with more pain, baby.” My hand tightens around her neck as I trail my fingertips from her throat down through the valley of her pert rose tipped breasts, across her abdomen and between her splayed thighs. When I feel her wetness covering her bare pussy all ready, I smile and pin her eyes with mine, “Tell me you want it. Tell me you need my brand of pain, sweet Heather.”
Her eyes roll back as they flutter closed and she arches her neck, then begs. God have mercy on us both, she begs.
“Roman, please, I need it, I need your pain to make it go away.” And I don’t need another word said.
Before sense can be made of what happens in the following second, I’m slam inside my wife to the hilt.
One hand yanks her neck and tightens even more as the other thumbs her clit and I ram my cock into her sweet wet cunt over a
nd over shouting my devotion and my love around unintelligent sounds.
The sounds of my hips slapping against the wetness running down the insides of her thighs, our breath, and moans of release with whispered tender words are the only sounds heard in our room until we cum together, her cries muted by my growls of ecstasy.
I wrap my shaking arms around her trembling sweat soaked body and rock her back and forth.
Long after she’s drifted asleep and sleep is encroaching on my conscious do I feel the pain I took from her, sear straight through my soul.
I’m lost in a balance somewhere between sleep and wake when the reality of what we’re facing as parents strikes me.
As does the reality that we may never see our daughter again. No matter what type of hell I raise, or how many lives I end, or how much money I spend, I am not the one controlling any of this.
And for the first time since I lost my little Ivy Angel, I’m fucking scared.
Chapter 28
While Roman berated his father, opening wounds closed lifetimes ago only to add insult to the injury by parading Dolores to star as a guest to a man’s crucifixion, I listened in the next room and contacted my brother Bobby. Yes, he didn’t follow in dad’s footsteps like I did, but his contacts would have to do. I don’t have a damn Andrew at my disposal. I mean, I do… Just not at my silent disposal.
I had a name. A name I’d blocked out with Mace’s assistance. I had a name I hadn’t heard mentioned since my time in Sebastian’s hell.
Lizbeth.
Hell. Yes. I had a fucking name.
After listening to as much as I could stomach and gathering what information I could, I contacted my brother and told him what he needed to know in order to get his niece back.
After dragging myself away from the detritus left of a father and son’s relationship, I stripped and took a blistering hot shower, scraping at my skin with a pumice stone, bathing away things no one else could see.
Roman's Redemption: Roman: Book II (Roman's Trilogy) Page 13