by Anna Zaires
I could stop fighting and buy into the fantasy, embrace this darker version of the fairy tale.
“Sara…” His strong palm curves around my face, framing it with aching gentleness, and the pain that spears through my chest is as potent as it is perverse. He’s looking at me like I’m his everything, like he wants to make my every dream come true. It’s what I’ve always wanted, always needed—but not with my husband’s killer.
Gathering the crumbling pieces of my sanity, I close my eyes, shutting out the silvery lure of that hypnotic gaze. No choice, I remind myself as his lips descend on mine with another searing kiss. No choice, I chant silently as I hear the ripping of a foil packet and feel his hair-roughened legs press against the tender insides of my thighs, opening them wider to let his cock nestle against my sex. No choice, I cry out in my mind as he thrusts inside me, stretching me, filling me… making me burn with scorching need.
It’s wrong, it’s sick, but it takes less than a minute before I come, his hard, driving rhythm hurling me over the edge with an intensity that wrenches a scream from my throat and brings tears to my eyes. My body shudders in dark ecstasy, clenching around his thick length, and I cry out his name, raking my nails down his back as he continues fucking me, taking me to the peak twice more before he comes himself.
In the aftermath, I lie draped over him, our limbs tangled together as he lazily strokes my back. With my head pillowed on his shoulder, I hear the steady thumping of his heart, and the glow of sexual satisfaction gives way to the familiar tangle of shame and desolation.
I hate him, and I hate myself.
I hate myself because something perverse inside me was glad for his ultimatum.
It felt good not to have a choice.
“You won’t be moving in a couple of weeks,” he murmurs, not pausing in his gentle stroking. “The lawyer couple no longer owns this house—I do. Or rather one of my shell corporations does.”
I should be surprised, but I’m not. I must’ve expected this on some level. My fingers tighten, crushing the corner of the pillow. “Did you threaten them? Kill them?”
He chuckles, his powerful chest moving underneath me. “I paid them double what the house is worth. Same goes for your would-be landlord. He’s well compensated for the lease you broke.”
I close my eyes, so relieved I could cry. I don’t know what I would’ve done if someone else had suffered because of me, how I could’ve lived with myself.
When I’m sure my voice won’t shake, I pull back and meet his shadowed gaze. “So that’s it? We’re just going to go on like this?”
“We are… for now.” His eyes gleam darkly. “Afterward, we’ll see.”
And tugging me back down to his shoulder, he drapes his arm around me, holding me as though that’s where I belong.
Part III
41
Sara
* * *
As the days pass, we fall into a bizarre pattern of domesticity. Every evening, Peter makes a delicious dinner for us, and the food is already waiting on the table when I walk in. We eat together, and then he fucks me, often taking me twice or more before we fall asleep. If he’s there in the morning when I wake up—and he frequently is—he also feeds me breakfast.
It’s as if I acquired a house husband, only one who does black-ops-style assassinations in his spare time.
“What do you do all day?” I ask when I come home after a particularly grueling day in the hospital and discover a gourmet meal of lamb chops and beet-based Russian salad. “You don’t just stay here and cook, right?”
“No, of course not.” He gives me an amused look. “What we do takes a lot of logistical planning, so I work with my guys on that, and also take care of the business side of things.”
“The business side of things?”
“Client interactions, securing payments, investment and distribution of funds, acquisition of weapons and supplies, that sort of thing,” he replies, and I listen in fascination as he gives me a glimpse into a world where insane sums of money exchange hands and assassination is a method of business expansion.
“We do a lot of work for the cartels and other powerful organizations and individuals,” he tells me as we polish off the lamb. “The Mexico job, for instance, was a case of one cartel leader hiring us to eliminate his rival so he could move into his territory. Other clients of ours include Russian oligarchs, dictators of various flavors, Middle Eastern royals, and a few of the better-run mafia organizations. Sometimes, if we’re between jobs, we’ll take on some smaller gigs, dealing with local thugs and such, but those pay next to nothing so we consider them pro-bono work, a way for us to stay sharp in downtime.”
“Right, pro bono.” I don’t try to hide my sarcasm. “Like my work at the clinic.”
“Exactly like that,” Peter says, and grins. He knows he’s shocking me, and he’s doing it on purpose. It’s a game he plays sometimes, horrifying me and then seducing me into welcoming his touch despite the revulsion I feel—or should feel.
It’s part of the sickness of our relationship that almost nothing he says or does has any lasting effect on my desire for him. My inability to resist him is a bleeding ulcer in my chest, and I can’t heal it no matter what I do. Each time I eat the food he makes, each time I sleep in his arms and find pleasure in his touch, the wound reopens, leaving me sick with shame and crippled with self-loathing.
I’m living in domestic bliss with my husband’s murderer, and it’s not nearly as terrible as it should be.
Part of the issue is that after our first time, Peter hasn’t hurt me. Not physically, at least. I feel the violence within him, but when he touches me, he’s careful to control himself, to stop the darkness from spilling out. It helps that I can’t fight him outright; with his kidnapping threat hanging over my head, I have no choice but to comply with his demands—or so I tell myself.
It’s the only way I can justify what’s happening, how I’m beginning to need the man I hate.
If all he wanted from me was sex, it would be easy, but Peter seems determined to take care of me as well. From the romantic home-cooked meals to the nightly cuddling, I’m showered with attention, pampered and even groomed at times. We don’t go out on dates—I assume because he doesn’t want to show his face in public—but with the way he treats me, I could easily be his highly spoiled girlfriend.
“Why do you like doing this?” I ask when he’s brushing my hair after washing me in the shower. “Is this some kind of weird kink of yours?”
He shoots me an amused look in the mirror. “Maybe. With you, it seems to be, for sure.”
“No, but seriously, what do you get out of this? You know I’m not a child, right?”
Peter’s mouth tightens, and I realize I inadvertently hit a nerve. We don’t speak about his family much, but I know that his son was only a toddler when he was killed. Could it be that in some twisted way, I’m a substitute for his dead family? That he fixated on me because he needed to care for someone… anyone?
Could my Russian killer need love so much he’d settle for its perversion?
It’s a tantalizing thought, especially since by the end of the second week, I find myself growing addicted to the comfort and pleasure Peter provides. At the end of a long shift, I physically crave the neck and foot rubs he often gives me, and it’s a struggle not to salivate each time I pull into the garage and smell the delicious aromas from the kitchen.
I’m not only becoming used to my stalker’s presence in my life; I’m starting to enjoy it.
Or at least some parts of it. I’m still far from enthusiastic about the bodyguards who follow me wherever I go. I almost never see them, but I can sense them watching me, and it both unsettles and irritates me.
“I’m not going to run, you know,” I tell Peter when we lie in bed one night. “You can call off your watchdogs.”
“They’re there for your protection,” he says, and I know it’s something he has no intention of compromising on. For whatever reason, he�
�s convinced that I’m in some kind of danger, something that he, of all people, needs to protect me from.
“What are you afraid of?” I ask, tracing the hard ridges of his abs with my finger. “Do you think some madman might invade my home? Maybe waterboard me and kill my husband?”
I glance up to find him grinning, as though I said something funny.
“What?” I say, goaded. “You think this is a joke?”
His expression turns serious. “No, ptichka. I don’t think that at all. For what it’s worth, I’m sorry for hurting you that time. I should’ve found another way.”
“Right. Another way to kill George.”
Feeling sick, I push away from him and escape into the bathroom—the only place my tormentor lets me be alone. Sometimes, I almost forget how everything began, my mind conveniently skipping over the horrors of our early relationship.
It’s as if something inside me wants me to fall in line with Peter’s fantasy, to pretend that all of this is real.
* * *
“So you never told me what happened between you and George,” Peter says as we’re having a leisurely Sunday brunch some three weeks after his return. “Why weren’t you the perfect couple everyone thought you were? You didn’t know what he really did, so what went wrong?”
The piece of poached egg I’m chewing sticks in my throat, and I have to gulp down most of my coffee to wash it down. “What makes you think something went wrong?” My voice is too high, but Peter caught me totally off-guard. Usually, he tends to avoid the topic of my dead husband—probably to foster the illusion of a normal relationship.
“Because that’s what you told me,” he answers calmly. “While you were on the drug I gave you.”
I gape at him, unable to believe he went there again. Ever since our conversation about the bodyguards last week—and my subsequent crying in the bathroom—we’ve been tiptoeing around the topic of what he did to me, neither one willing to poke at that raw wound.
“That’s…” Suppressing my shock, I compose myself. “That’s none of your business.”
“Did he beat you?” Peter leans in, his metallic eyes darkening. “Hurt you in some way?”
“What? No!”
“Was he a pedophile? A necrophiliac?”
I take a calming breath. “No, of course not.”
“Did he cheat on you? Do drugs? Abuse animals?”
“He started drinking, okay?” I snap, goaded. “He started drinking, and he never stopped.”
“Ah.” Peter leans back in his chair. “An alcoholic then. Interesting.”
“Is it?” I ask bitterly. Picking up my plate, I walk over to dump the remnants of my breakfast in the trash and put the plate in the dishwasher. “You like hearing that the man I knew and loved since I was eighteen—the man I married—transformed after our wedding without apparent cause? That in a matter of months, he became someone I could hardly recognize?”
“No, ptichka.” He comes up behind me, and my breath catches as he pulls me against him, brushing aside my hair to kiss my neck. His breath warms my skin as he murmurs, “I don’t like hearing that at all.”
“I just… I never understood it.” I turn around in his arms, the old hurt welling up as I meet Peter’s gaze. “Everything was going so well. I finished med school, we bought this house and got married… He was traveling a lot for work, so he didn’t mind my residency hours, and in return, I didn’t mind all the travel. And then—” I stop, realizing I’m confiding in George’s killer.
“And then what?” he prompts, his fingers curling around my palm. “What happened then, Sara?”
I bite my lip, but the temptation to tell him everything, to expose the full truth for once, is too strong to deny. I’m exhausted from pretending, from wearing the mask of perfection everyone expects to see.
Pulling my hand out of his grip, I walk over to sit down at the table. Peter joins me there, and after a moment, I begin talking.
“Everything changed several months after our marriage,” I say quietly. “In a span of a few weeks, my warm, fun-loving husband became a cold, distant stranger, one who kept pushing me away no matter what I did. He started having these strange moods, cut down on work travel, and”—I take a breath—“began drinking.”
Peter’s eyebrows lift. “He never drank before?”
“Not like that. He’d have a few drinks when we went out with friends, or a glass of wine with dinner. It wasn’t anything out of the ordinary—nothing I wasn’t in the habit of doing myself. This was different. We’re talking black-out drunk three, four nights a week.”
“That is a lot. Did you ever confront him about it?”
A bitter laugh rips from my throat. “Confront him? All I did was confront him about it. The first few times it happened, he explained it as stress at work, then a boys’ night out, then a need to relax, and then…” I bite my lip. “Then he started blaming me.”
“You?” A frown knits Peter’s forehead. “How could he possibly blame you?”
“Because I wouldn’t leave him alone about it. I kept nagging, wanting him to go to rehab, to attend AA, to talk to someone—anyone—who could help. I asked the same questions over and over again, trying to understand why this was happening, what caused him to change like that.” My chest constricts with remembered pain. “Things were going so well before, you see. My parents, all our friends—everyone was overjoyed with our marriage, and we had this bright future ahead of us. There was no reason for this, nothing I could latch on to to explain his sudden transformation. I kept prying and pushing, and he kept drinking, more and more. And then I—” I drag in air through a tightening throat. “Then I told him I couldn’t live like this, that he had to choose between our marriage and his drinking.”
“And he chose the drinking.”
“No.” I shake my head. “Not at first. We ended up in the classic substance abuse cycle, where he’d beg me to stay, promise to do better, and I’d believe him, but after a week or two, things would go back to how they were before. And when I’d point out his moods and ask him to see a psychiatrist, he’d lash out at me, claiming I was the reason he was drinking.”
Peter’s frown deepens. “His moods?”
“That’s what I called them. Maybe it was clinical depression or some other form of mental illness, but since he refused to see a shrink, we never got an actual diagnosis. The moods started right before the drinking. We’d be doing something together, and suddenly, he’d seem completely out of it, like he’d mentally go into a different world. He’d get distracted and weirdly anxious—jumpy even. It was like he was on something, but I don’t think he was. At least, it didn’t look like drugs to me. He’d just go somewhere else in his mind, and there was no talking to him when he was like that, no way to get him to calm down and just be present.”
“Sara…” A strange expression steals over Peter’s face. “When did you say this all began?”
“Just a few months after we got married,” I answer, frowning. “So at this point, about five and half years ago. Why?” And then it dawns on me. “You’re not suggesting that—”
“That your husband’s transformation might’ve had something to do with his role in the Daryevo massacre? Why not?” Peter leans in, his eyes narrowing. “Think about it. Five and a half years ago, Cobakis provided information that resulted in the slaughter of dozens of innocent people, including women and children. Whether it was out of ambition or greed or sheer stupidity, he fucked up, and he fucked up big. You say he was a good man? Someone who had a conscience? Well, how would a man like that feel about causing the slaughter of innocents? How would he live with all that blood on his hands?”
I recoil, the horrible truth of his words slamming into me like a bullet. I don’t know why I didn’t connect the dots before, but now that Peter said it, it makes perfect sense. When I first learned about George’s deception, it occurred to me that his real job might’ve been behind his transformation, but I was so busy coping with Peter’s invas
ion of my life—and trying not to dwell on his revelations—that I didn’t pursue the thought to its logical conclusion.
I didn’t consider that the tragic events that brought my tormentor into my life could be the same ones that ruined my marriage… that our fates have been intertwined for much longer than I thought.
Feeling like I’m about to be sick, I stand up, my legs shaking. “You’re right.” My voice is choked and raw. “It had to be guilt that drove him to drink. All this time, I wondered if it was something I said or did, if our marriage disappointed him somehow, and it was this all along. ”
Peter nods, his face set in grim lines. “Unless your husband caused multiple massacres throughout his career, this is the only thing that makes sense.”
I inhale raggedly and turn away, walking over to the window looking out into the back yard. The enormous oaks stand like guardians outside, their branches bare of leaves despite the hints of spring in the warming air. I feel like those oaks right now, stripped, bared in all my ugliness. And at the same time, I feel lighter.
The drinking, at least, was not my fault.
“The accident happened because of me, you know,” I say quietly when Peter comes up to stand next to me. He’s not looking at me, his profile hard and uncompromising, and though I know he’s battling his own demons, his presence comforts me on some fundamental level.
I’m not alone with him by my side.
“How?” he asks without turning his head. “The report said he was alone in the vehicle.”
“He drank the night before. Drank so much he puked several times throughout the night.” I shudder, remembering the smell of vomit, of sickness and lies and broken hopes. Holding myself together by a thread, I continue. “By morning, I was done. I was done with his excuses, with the endless accusations sprinkled with promises to do better. I realized that George and I weren’t special in any way; we were just another alcoholic and his too-stupid-to-see-it wife. It wasn’t a rough patch we were going through. Our marriage was simply broken.”