But he was my husband.
That was my job.
It never even crossed my mind to refuse him.
Then, like some prayer answered, he was deployed. I felt so guilty even thinking that- that I was happy that he was being shipped off to do god-knew what, maybe to never return. But that was what I felt- happiness.
He was gone and while I was still a kept woman, his little barefoot wife, I had more freedom too. I went out with girls I went to school with and had lost touch. I took a couple cheap classes at the night school. If I didn't want to wash the dishes every night, I didn't. If I didn't want to wear makeup the way he liked it (mascara, red lips)... I didn't bother. They were small things, but at twenty years old and having never known even a taste of independence, I reveled in each tiny victory.
Then he was coming home again.
I tried (and failed) to be glad for it, to have my husband back. Granted, he was rough with me in bed and he made a lot of demands on me... but he was still the boy I used to make mud pies with, who I first kissed when I was fifteen, who told me I was the prettiest girl in town. And sometimes, he could still be that sweet. I would catch him watching me as I did something stupid like ironing and ask him what he was thinking and he would say things like... 'the best thing that ever happened to me' or 'I still can't believe you're mine'. They were words that made little flutterings move through my belly. They were things that made the never-ending work tolerable.
He let himself in the apartment slamming the door, making me yelp and turn, dropping the glass I was drying. I was supposed to pick him up from the airport. I was supposed to get pretty and go greet him like a good wife, let him squeeze me too tight, kiss me too intimate for a public place. That was what was supposed to happen. But not for another two hours.
“What the fuck did you do, Willow?” he growled, dropping his bag and stomping toward where I stood frozen, barefoot in the kitchen, surrounded by shards of glass.
“I... I wasn't expecting you. You scared me,” I said, taking a deep breath.
“You fucking sayin' it's my fault you broke a glass? Who pays for that shit, Willow? Huh? Who!”
He'd never yelled at me before. Been a little gruff, a little unnecessarily forceful in his tone? Sure. But he had never outright yelled. I felt my body jolt away from the sound, fear uncurling like a snake in my belly, jaws unhinged, ready to swallow me up from the inside.
“I'm sorry, Damian. I didn't mean to...”
“No. You're not sorry. Not yet. But you're going to be.”
I didn't even register that I should be terrified when he reached down and started to unfasten his belt. In my world, that didn't pose a threat. If anything, I thought he was going to make me suck him off or fuck him or something. And, well, who could blame him for wanting that as soon as he was home after so long without it?
“Throw the rest of that in the sink, bitch.”
Bitch? Bitch?I threw the rest of the glass in the sink, my hands suddenly trembling. “I'm so glad you're hom...”
“Shut the fuck up. I know what you've been up to.” Oh, shit. Shit shit shit. He knew about the classes and the friends. Alright. That was okay. I could smooth that all over. I just needed to talk to him and say... “Fucking everything with a cock,” he accused, taking his belt and folding it in half, gripping the end tight.
“What? Damian, no! I've only ever been with yo...”
“Don't you fucking lie to me you dirty slut! I know you've been giving away my cunt to every man you could.”
Suddenly, my eyes went to the belt and I understood. Oh, god, I understood. The feeling I felt then was hard to describe. Fear, yes, but it was different than any fear I had ever known before because it was mingled with something else. It was mingled with the knowledge that unlike a random mugging on the street, that this would not be the only time. If my husband was going to beat me, he was going to keep beating me. There would be no end in sight. The nausea rose up in my throat and I had to swallow hard through it to keep it down.
“I'm gonna show you what happens when my woman steps out on me. I guess I have to teach you a lesson, huh?”
His arm lifted, cocked back, and all that was after that was the searing, indescribable pain of leather biting into my skin. It was simply... blinding. All consuming. It was all there was in the world, the pain. I lost my footing early, slamming down on all fours on the floor, feeling the glass cutting into my palms and my legs as I tried to scramble away, tears pouring down my face. But on my hands and knees, I was in the perfect position for him to whip my skirt up, rip my panties off, and apply the belt to the bare, unprotected skin of my ass. The sick came up then, leaving me gagging all over the kitchen floor as the belt broke into the already raised welts on my skin.
“You belong to me,” he growled, getting down behind me and I knew what was next. Somehow, I preferred it. I didn't even bother to say no. If it took the belt away, I would let him fuck me until my legs gave out. The belt moved upward and I felt him slide it around my neck, tightening it into a collar and pulling until I couldn't even try to gasp for breath. It was then that he pushed inside of me.
After, he left me on the floor to cry. And, lord, how I cried. I had never cried like that before in my life- loud, loud enough to alert the neighbors if they hadn't already heard me screaming through my beating, and uncontrolled, my entire body convulsing hard with the sobs that I felt would never end.
He came out when I was quieter, still crying and I was pretty sure I would never stop crying, picked me up, and carried me to the bathroom where he dropped me on my ass in the tub, chuckling when I screamed at the pressure against the open wounds across my back and bottom. I watched in horror as he moved toward the medicine cabinet and grabbed alcohol, tweezers, triple antibiotic, and gauze. He came back toward me, not bothering to look at my face as he unscrewed the cap and poured the alcohol all down my legs and over my palms, ignoring my cries of pain.
“Next time you'll act right, Wills,” he chided as he pulled out the tweezers and went to work pulling the glass out of my skin. Once finished, he applied the antibiotic liberally and wrapped me up before pushing me onto my stomach and seeing to the cuts on my back.
See the thing was... it wasn't regret. Him taking care of me? It wasn't out of regret or out of concern for my well being. He took care of my wounds because he didn't want there to be any reason for me to ever have to go to the hospital, to ever get a chance to tell anyone what was going on.
He left me in the tub when he was finished cleaning me up. I didn't cry. I suddenly found myself out of tears. All I felt was sad. So incredibly sad.
My husband had beat me.
I was a battered woman.
I was a cliché.
But there was nothing I could do about it.
I did what every trapped, abused woman did at first- I stayed.
I stayed and I got beat in different ways, depending on my offense. Sometimes it was bare-handed spanking. Sometimes it was the belt again. Later, it was his bare fists slamming into my face, into my sides.
It was my twenty-fourth birthday when I decided I couldn't take it anymore. The night before, Damian thought the shorts I wore to the market were too revealing and when I got home, I was called my new names: bitch, slut, cunt, whore. Then he pulled off the shorts in question and he beat my ass until I wet myself.
And. I. Was. Done.
The actual word 'done' took on a whole new meaning as I sat in the bathtub where he always dealt with the aftermath of his anger on my skin and I twirled the knife around in my hand, trying to get to the point where I knew I could do it- sink it into my wrist and drag it up my arm, slicing open the vein and making it impossible for them to fix me, to give me back to him.
I was never going to belong to him again. Never. He was never going to get a chance to lay his hands on me again. He was never going to be able to be the reason I cried at night.
If that meant my only way out was to
slice myself open and take myself out of the world, then so be it.
The only problem was... Damian came home from work early. Damian came home from work and I flew out of that tub, tucking the knife behind my back when he threw the bathroom door open without knocking. There was no such thing as privacy in my life. He had once stood there and watched me pull out a tampon and nothing had ever felt more mortifying.
“Why isn't dinner ready?” he demanded, ready for a fight already.
It was three in the afternoon, that was why dinner wasn't ready. Well, that and the fact that I didn't plan to live to see dinner when I got up in the morning.
“Answer me, bitch!” he roared, closing in on me.
I don't know where the urge came from, where it had been buried all the other times he had come at me, why it hadn't surfaced before. Wherever it had been hiding, it was showing itself then, an all-consuming burst of self-preservation. I felt the handle of the knife in my hand and I squeezed it hard, feeling a calmness settle over me as I did.
“Answer me, cunt.”
“No,” I said, taking a step forward instead of in retreat like he had come to expect from me.
The confused look on his face was seared into my memory. It was the only time I let his face pop into my head, when I was trying to remember that dumbfounded look.
“What the fuck did you just say to me, bitch?”
“I said no,” I shot back, my jaw clenched tight as I kept talking. “You should be familiar with it. You've heard me scream it out every time you've beaten me the past four years, you son of a bitch.”
His brows went up, but the rage I had been expecting didn't surface. If anything, he almost looked calm, amused. A evil smirk toyed with his lips. “I guess I have to teach you a lesson, huh?”
He reached for me then and with reflexes I didn't know I had, my arm came up and I stabbed the knife straight through his outstretched palm. I should have been horrified, sickened, frozen on the spot at the sight of the blade sticking out of both ends of his hand. But, in reality, all I felt was pleasure, down to my toes, it was positively arousing.
With a smile, I ripped it back out, Damian's scream echoing off the bathroom tile and bouncing back at me.
“You stupid...”
He didn't get the rest out because then I was stabbing. Fast, frequent, unrelenting. All I saw was red- blood everywhere. All I heard were his screams and groans and curses.
By the time my vision cleared, Damian was on the floor, clutching his hand to his side, his clothes saturated with blood. He was still breathing, but my knife was lodged in one of his ribs and I couldn't pull it back out.
Horrified, but still determined as ever to be done, I flew out of the bathroom, rubbing my bloodstained hands over the comforter of the bed as I grabbed as much as I could and threw it into a bag. That included his gun and the twenty five thousand dollars cash he kept under the floorboards under our bed because he was convinced the banks were going to fail.
With that and not a glance backward, I left him.
Also, more importantly, I left that woman behind too. The victim. I was done with her. I was never, fucking ever going to be her again.
And I never was.
Sixteen
Cash
The funny thing about my anger, it's like one of those sparklers kids play with on the fourth of July. It burns bright and brilliant for a matter of minutes then fizzles out to nothing at all. I had never been the type who could use their pissed-off-edness to fuel a revenge plot. I didn't hold grudges.
It was simply never the way I operated. I blamed my father. I blamed the fact that he never seemed to be anything but angry. From the day my mother died, even more so. It was like he blamed the world for her loss and he was all too happy to take that rage out on anyone who so much as stepped on his toes.
Even as a kid, I knew I didn't want to be that way. I knew it wasn't right, it didn't fit my personality. Reign had moments when it did suit him, when it did fit him. But as president of a gun running bike gang full of testosterone-driven men... well... he needed to be able to tap into that on occasion, to hold professional grudges. It was part of what made him good at what he did.
Being second in command, well, it left me more freedom to let that shit go. I didn't need to hang on to it, so I didn't.
All I needed was a good fight, a good fuck, or a good workout and the rage always slipped away, not leaving a trace, like it had never been there to begin with.
That was me.
That, apparently, was not Lo.
Which, well, I had already guessed at on my own, but walking up the stairs to see her in her clothes like they were a shield, working hard, looking like her intimidating self (which I found sexy as hell, but that was beside the point)... I knew she was going to do whatever it took to hold onto the anger she felt at me. It wasn't just anger that I left her high and dry either. It was something else, something she wasn't letting me see.
In the end, though, it didn't matter how much she wanted to hold onto it. Eventually, she would give in. And I'd be there. I'd be there and I'd get some answers and I'd get to know who Lo was after all.
When I asked her who the fuck the Damian Crane guy was, it was like I set a bomb off in my house, it was like she was holding herself off from shooting right out of her skin.
“Bad guy, huh?” I asked, going for casual, trying to take that look off her face, that look of absolute, bone-deep fear. Whoever the fuck Damian Crane was, he wasn't just a bad guy. He wasn't just a job. He was a ghost, one of her ghosts.
Finally, finally I had something to go on. Later. Alone.
“It's cool, don't tell me. Not my business. Now why don't you close all that shit down and get your plump ass up in my bed?”
“Plump?” was her immediate reaction, as it was any woman's who didn't realize plump was a damn good thing.
“Yeah, plump. Round. Thick. Bite-able.”
She made a strange snorting noise. “What happened to having to ask for your cock?” she asked, closing her laptop, giving me one of her famous brow raises.
“Oh, darlin', you're still going to have to ask for that. But it wasn't what I had in mind.”
“That's what you always have in mind,” she said, but the bitterness had left her tone and all I heard was teasing.
“True enough,” I shrugged, not offended. It was true. “But right now, I was thinking- movie and sleep.”
“Movie and sleep?” she parroted, looking at me like I suggested an orgy and ritual animal sacrifice.
“Yeah. Movie is your choice. Just not any of those shit vampire/werewolf love story things.”
“I like those vampire/werewolf love story things,” she countered with a smile that almost made me take a step back it was so genuine, open.
“Of course you do,” I smiled back, grabbing one of her romance novels out of her bag and gently tapping her on her forehead with it.
With that, I turned up toward the stairs.
“What are you doing with my book?” she called, but she was walking up with me.
“I dunno. I might find myself in need of some... literary pornography later,” I laughed.
“Gross. Give me my book back,” she said, reaching for it as she climbed the stairs and for the first time, she didn't need to use the rail to help herself up.
“What? You're allowed to use it to get you all warmed up to trip the switch but I'm not...”
“Trip the switch?” she asked, standing beside the bed and grinning.
“Yeah, you know... trip the switch, polish the pearl, diddle the skittle, double click the mouse, circle the wagon...” I trailed off to the sound of her laughter. It was like I remembered it, feminine, tinkling.
“You're ridiculous,” she said, shaking her head.
“You love it,” I shot back, reaching behind my back and hauling off my shirt. I tried not to smile when her mouth parted slightly and her breathing got a little less even. S
he was right- I'm a cocky fuck. As such, I knew I had a good body. Not huge, I was never the type of man who needed to have muscles so big they couldn't put their arms down to their sides, but I kept shit tight. I reached for my pants as I kicked out of my boots.
My hands had just pushed them off my hips when she swallowed hard. “What are you doing?”
“Shower babe,” I said, moving past her toward the hall again. I was just about to round the curve of the wall and be out of view when I pushed my boxer briefs down and gave her a view of my ass. I didn't have to look to know she was watching. I smiled the rest of the way until I got into the shower, reached down, and dealt with the epic case of blue balls she had me dealing with.
I walked back with a towel slung low on my hips to find her in the bed, changed into one of my tees. I was sure she had something to sleep in inside her bag, but she chose my clothes instead. Whether she realized it or not, it meant something.
“So what movie are we watching?” I asked, going to my closet and finding a pair of black sweats. I turned slightly to the side, ripped off the towel, and slipped into the pants.
“Ah... what?” she asked, shaking her head when the silence dragged on.
“Movie, Lo,” I clarified with a knowing smirk.
“Oh, right. Um. I don't know. Something without violence. I get enough of that shit in my life.”
I nodded, clicked through the on-demand choices, picked the most recent stupid comedy, and put it on. I climbed into my side of the bed, stretching an arm across the back of the pillows.
Cash (The Henchmen MC Book 2) Page 12