Empire

by Lili St. Germain

  If I’d had anything left in my stomach I would have surely thrown it up. Instead, I curled back into the foetal position and pulled the sheets over my face.

  The other side of the bed was empty; I wondered where Dornan was. Reluctantly, I sat up again, scanning the room for him.

  He was sitting on the end of the bed, staring at me intently, something in his hand.

  ‘Hello, Mrs Ross,’ he said, his voice sticky-sweet with fake enthusiasm, his teeth bared in a large grin that didn’t reach his dark eyes. Oh God, what had I done now?

  ‘Morning,’ I said, crossing my legs in a yoga pose and arranging the blankets around me like a protective shroud. It had to be a hundred degrees out, the sun blazing a path straight to my eyeballs, but the room was as cold as ice. I rubbed my hands down my arms as goosebumps sprang up on my skin.

  ‘You okay?’ I asked Dornan. Something was up. Better to get it over and done with. Rip the bandaid. It was always about making the pain as quick as possible. No point extending our misery.

  Dornan dropped the grin, his eyes on mine. He ran his tongue over his teeth and looked at whatever he was holding. I let my eyes follow his, but his big hands were mostly obscuring the object.

  ‘Can I trust you?’ he asked me.

  I raised my eyebrows. ‘What kind of question is that? Can you trust me? Can I trust you?’

  I didn’t even see the blow that hit me. Something in his hand, hard and blunt, smashed into the side of my head, just above my left ear, and I went down faster than an old Vegas casino with a wrecking ball and some explosives. That is to say, I flew off the bed and onto the floor, the the carpet cushioning my fall.

  ‘Wrong answer,’ Dornan said coldly, standing above me. I rolled onto my back, taking in his expression: serious, distant.

  Shit.

  I opened my mouth to speak as he held up a cellphone. My cellphone.

  The burner cellphone John had given to me.

  ‘You hit me with a fucking cellphone?’ I asked, getting up on my elbows as the side of my head throbbed painfully. ‘What if I was pregnant, you fucking idiot?’

  He kicked me in the stomach for that. I made an oomph sound as he crouched beside me, his hand stroking my hair. ‘If you were pregnant,’ he mused, ‘you drank enough last night to destroy any baby’s brain cells. Besides, you just finished your period three days ago. You couldn’t be pregnant, unless we made a baby in the apartment before we left yesterday.’

  My mouth hung open in shock as he rubbed circles on my stomach with the tip of his finger. ‘It could be happening right now,’ he said, tracing a path from my pelvis right up to my belly button and jabbing his finger in hard enough to make me wince. ‘What do you think?’ he asked. ‘Would it be my baby, Mariana? Or would it be someone else’s? Because if there’s even the slightest chance it isn’t mine . . . I’ll stick my hand inside you and rip your fucking womb out.’ He made his free hand into the shape of a claw and made a pulling motion in the air.

  If I thought I’d known fear before, I didn’t. Not until that moment.

  I swallowed, incredulous, that image in my mind completely fucking disturbing. ‘What is wrong with you?’ I exclaimed. ‘Seriously, what the fuck is wrong with you? You bring me here and marry me and then this?’

  I was stunned, but he had the phone. He had the phone! He was going to kill me. I would die here, now, in a hotel room in the middle of the fucking desert, and it would be a fitting end to our union.

  ‘I’m going to ask you one more time,’ he said, standing and holding a hand out to me.

  With great reluctance, outweighed only by self-preservation and the desire not to be kicked again, I accepted. He hauled me to my feet and took me by my arms, backing me into the kitchenette. Brazenly, I reached for a bottle of anything to hit him with, but he was faster. He grabbed my wrist and bent it so hard I thought it would snap.

  ‘Fuck!’ I yelled.

  He responded by hitting me again with the phone, the plastic smacking into my cheekbone. I gasped for air, my head flying back, my body pinned by his hips.

  ‘Fuck you,’ he said. ‘You see this?’

  He held the phone in front of my eyes and I squinted, trying to focus.

  ‘What?’ I half-asked, half-begged. ‘What?’

  ‘Blood,’ Dornan said. I saw the dried red blood on the phone and my entire body stilled. A tiny speck of red. It looked innocent enough. Innocuous. Dazed, I felt my cheek for broken skin. My scalp. None. I wasn’t bleeding.

  I knew it wasn’t my blood.

  ‘Whose blood?’ I asked. ‘Yours?’

  He cocked his head to the side, eyes raging like a wildfire burned inside his skull. And it probably did – my psychotic husband. I stumbled over the word. Husband. Seven letters, my death sentence.

  ‘How stupid do you think I am?’ he said.

  I held his gaze. ‘Stop. Stop! Just ask me. Just tell me what’s going on, because I don’t understand!’ My voice got louder as I spoke, rising to a feverish pitch by the end of my sentence. I didn’t know if I was yelling or begging at that point. All I knew was, he had that hand on me, the one he’d just threatened to disembowel me with, and I couldn’t stop shaking, and he had the phone.

  ‘Is. This. Your. Phone?’

  ‘Yes!’ I screamed.

  His eyes lit up like wildfire. Oh God. OhGodOhGodOhGod.

  His face gave away nothing. I wondered if it would be the last thing I would ever see.

  I tried not to struggle as Dornan traced a finger underneath each of my eyes, in the hollow part, the socket, and it took every ounce of self-restraint not to flinch. I was half-convinced he was going to poke my eyes out, but his finger travelled down to my mouth. He pushed it between my lips and I let him, because more than anything, I really did not want him to hit me with that fucking phone again.

  Had he found phone records? I deleted John’s number every time I called him. Still, a lot had changed in ten years. It was 2008, and you could find almost anything you wanted information-wise if you looked in the right places.

  ‘It’s not what you think,’ I said around his finger, needing to break the unbearable silence that stretched between us.

  ‘I don’t believe you,’ Dornan whispered. I couldn’t respond, because his finger was halfway down my throat, but I shook my head anyway.

  He dropped the phone onto the counter that he had me pinned against and brought his free hand to my throat, squeezing.

  Idiot. He had a finger in my mouth. I bit down as hard as I could, and suddenly I was flying through the air again.

  ‘You fucking cunt!’ Dornan yelled, as I crashed into the bathroom door.

  Dazed, and with blood in my mouth – his, not mine – I scrambled to my knees, crawling away from him.

  I wasn’t fast enough, and the only escape in this room was the goddamn door anyway. He was between me and that precious exit, so I had nowhere to go.

  There was never anywhere to go.

  How many times had I repeated that thought to myself lately?

  Too many.

  Hands found my hair and yanked me up. I decided I was going to shave my head so he couldn’t use my hair as a weapon against me anymore. For now, wanting to keep my scalp, I followed his momentum as he tossed me onto the bed.

  ‘This finger is very fucking important,’ he said, holding up his bloodied index finger. ‘I use it to shoot people. I use it when I ride. I use it when I fuck you.’ He leaned down so that his nose was touching mine, his breath hot on my mouth. ‘If you’ve damaged it, I’ll cut yours off. I’ll cut all of them off.’

  ‘Don’tbesuchababy,’ I said, my words slurring together. He slapped me across the face, but I barely felt it. Something had dulled in my head when it hit the bathroom door. My thoughts were slow. My pain receptors slower.

  A hand wrapped around my throat and squeezed, Dornan’s expression resigned as he stared down at me. ‘Whose fucking blood is it?’

  Tears were streaming out of my eyes of th
eir own accord, an entirely reflexive response. I felt like I was about to die.

  ‘Mine,’ I said. ‘The blood is mine.’

  He shook me. ‘You’re LYING!’

  Jesus, fuck, he was going to kill me.

  ‘I cut myself!’ I gasped, fighting for breath, for the ability to speak. ‘You know I cut myself. It’s my blood. I swear.’

  Dornan appeared torn. ‘You promised me you didn’t do that anymore.’

  ‘I started doing it again,’ I lied.

  He loosened his fingers a little and I tried to get up, but he wasn’t having that. Staring twin bullet holes into my head, he straddled me, one knee on either side of my chest. I tried to push him off, but he was too heavy. Too strong. His knees squeezed my ribcage until I thought my lungs would burst.

  ‘Keep talking,’ he ground out. ‘Why? Why should I believe you? Why would you start hurting yourself again?’

  ‘I found out my whole family was dead.’

  Shock registered on Dornan’s face. ‘What?’

  The truth, now. My eyes filled with tears and spilled over.

  ‘Your father had them killed,’ I whispered.

  I could barely make out the expression on Dornan’s face anymore. My eyes weren’t focusing, and I wanted to pass out.

  His fingers tightened. This is it. This is where I die. Tears leaked from the corners of my eyes as I ached for my son. For John. They’d never even know what had become of me. They’d never know that I didn’t want to be married to Dornan, or that I’d fought to get back to them. They’d just never know, and I’d be gone. I wondered, in those moments, my fingernails scratching against Dornan’s hands, if he’d burn me or bury me. Would I sink into the earth? Would he bury me in the desert? Would he just leave me here, in this room, for the maid to find when she came to make the beds and restock the minibar?

  Please, I mouthed. Dornan was killing me, and he wasn’t even watching as I died. I could feel the life ebbing from me as I starved for oxygen, my brain screaming for a single breath of air, my chest locked and shuddering. He seemed momentarily distracted, his fingers loosening a little, and I took the opportunity to twist my head to the side and bite his hand.

  He pulled his hands away, giving me an annoyed glance and a smack on the cheek, but nothing compared to what he’d been doing earlier.

  I choked and gasped for air, prompting Dornan to reach for a bottle of Evian that sat on the bedside table, courtesy of the hotel. A five-dollar bottle of water, but I would have paid a million dollars for it. He unscrewed it and handed it to me, watching silently as I chugged it down. I drank it too fast and I coughed, getting water down the front of my dress in the process.

  ‘You done trying to kill me?’ I asked.

  Dornan got off me.

  I couldn’t stop coughing. My throat was on fire.

  ‘What do you need?’ Dornan asked, as if some water or some fucking food could fix the fact that he’d beaten me ten shades of black and blue and then almost strangled me to death.

  ‘Who did you think I’d be calling?’ I asked him. I put on my best wounded face, which wasn’t a stretch. ‘Because I know you wouldn’t react like that if you thought I was calling my family in Colombia.’

  He stared at the wall. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I just . . . you get further away from me, every day. Every single day. You used to melt when I touched you. Now you recoil like I’m a monster.’

  Apt words from the man himself. He understood what he was, even then.

  ‘You know why I recoil,’ I said, my voice throaty and rough. I coughed, drank some more water. ‘I don’t trust you.’

  Dornan growled. ‘I’ve done everything for you! Everything, you understand?’

  I nodded. ‘Yeah. Still doesn’t change what you did to me. To our baby. To Stephanie. To your son.’

  ‘That’s it?’ he said. ‘That’s why you’re acting like this?’

  ‘That’s it?’ I repeated, dumbfounded. ‘Yeah. How many more innocent lives do you snuff out because what they do is inconvenient to you?’

  He didn’t respond.

  ‘Don’t you want to know how he killed them?’ I whispered. ‘How your father wiped out my entire family?’

  He levelled his glassy eyes at me, and I took that as an invitation to continue.

  ‘Your father had his men go to Villanueva and burn their house to the ground. But first they tied them up, so they burned too.’

  ‘Who told you that?’ Dornan asked. He seemed shocked. Like his father had never told him.

  ‘It doesn’t matter who told me,’ I said. ‘All that matters is that it’s true. Your father nullified his bargain with me when he killed my family. Me in exchange for their lives, that was the deal. And he killed them anyway.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

  He opened his mouth to say something else but I cut him off with a sharp flick of my hand. ‘I can’t, okay? I just . . . can’t.’

  Dornan didn’t argue. He went to my suitcase at the end of the bed and unzipped it, my skin crawling as I remembered the baby suitcase. I shook my head to try and get rid of the memory, my neck screaming in protest. I watched as Dornan lifted a grey knee-length dress and a blue scarf from the bag, bringing them over to me.

  Dornan basically dressed me in the new dress, as if I were a child. He sat beside me and watched silently as I applied heavy foundation to my bruised neck before working on my face. I was red and blue from my wrists to my head, and although I tried my best, when I was done I still looked like shit. I needed a shower and about three weeks at home, where nobody could see me.

  John. What was he going to say when he saw this?

  ‘You should have told me about your family,’ Dornan said, shame burning in his eyes.

  I shook my head, resisting the overwhelming urge to roll my eyes. ‘How long are we staying in Vegas?’ I asked him.

  He shrugged, standing up so that he was in front of me. ‘How long do you want to stay?’

  Oh, yeah, almost get killed, and now I get to decide how long we were staying.

  Suddenly I felt like a little girl. Not a happy one. I felt powerless. Scared. Exhausted. ‘I want a shower and some food and I want to go home,’ I whispered. ‘Can we please just go home?’

  Dornan stared down at me for a long moment before nodding. ‘Yeah,’ he said, and I wondered what was going through his head at that moment. The phone was seemingly forgotten, the urge to murder me on hiatus for the time being. He looked remorseful. I didn’t care.

  He picked up the room service menu and handed it to me. ‘Whatever you want,’ he said.

  How generous of you, I wanted to snap, but I bit my tongue, taking the menu silently. ‘I think I’ll shower first,’ I said, putting the menu to the side and sliding off the bed, the room spinning as I straightened on my feet. Dornan put his hands out to steady me, and I looked at them like they were cockroaches on me. I pushed him off, making my way into the bathroom with him hot on my heels. Guess he didn’t want me to lock myself in here again.

  Without speaking – I was still coughing – I turned around, motioning to the zipper in the back of my dress. The room spun around me like a vortex of patterned tile and dark green wallpaper. And him.

  Dornan unzipped me and I let the stupid dress fall to the floor, vowing to burn the fucking thing as soon as we were back home. I didn’t want any lasting reminders of this trip. I’d have to find a way to lose the ring, too. Maybe I’d cut my finger off in a ‘freak’ accident in the kitchen. I could live just fine with nine fingers, right?

  I wrapped my arms around myself and waited, staring at the wall, as Dornan turned on the shower and adjusted the temperature. He held out a hand to help me in, but I sidestepped it, practically hugging the tiled wall as I inched under the hot water. Avoiding any eye contact, I shuffled to the far corner of the shower, as far away from him as I could get, and slid down the wall, sitting underneath the high-pressure shower head with my knees drawn up to my chest. I covered my
face with my hands, parting my fingers slowly so I knew where Dornan was. Because, more than the fact that I couldn’t trust him, I could also no longer even try to predict what he was about to do next.

  I peered at him through a river of mascara and my webbed fingers and saw his erection clearly bulging from his jeans. I wondered how it could be that a man could find such erotic thoughts while looking at the woman he’d almost just killed, as she sat naked in the bottom of a shower and wept.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  MARIANA

  I didn’t even know what time it was. I’d showered, wrapped myself in a fluffy robe, and come back out to the bed, where I now sat. My stomach was empty and growling for food.

  ‘I’ll order us some food,’ Dornan said. To go from such violence to total normality in such a short span of time was frightening, but a relief all the same. I’d almost died just now by Dornan’s hand – literally, his hand around my throat, cutting off my oxygen – and it was time to form some kind of escape plan.

  An immediate one.

  First, though, I had to survive the here and now. My stomach grumbled insistently, so loud that Dornan heard it. ‘You want eggs?’ he asked. What a fucking gentleman, this guy. A whirlwind (forced) wedding in Vegas, almost murdering me, and now he was offering to get me eggs.

  ‘I’ll be fine,’ I said, waving my hand dismissively. ‘You go shower. I’ll order for us. What do you want?’

  ‘Surprise me,’ he said, and I cringed. Surprises were bad. I didn’t ever want another surprise in my life again.

  I waited until the shower was running and grabbed the room service menu. I did briefly contemplate the idea of running while Dornan showered, but it would’ve been for nothing. I had no money, no ID, I was an illegal immigrant, and I didn’t know Vegas. I could call John, sure, once I found a pay phone somewhere, but he’d get caught. We both would. The grip of the cartel was just too powerful.

  I decided to stay in the room and avoid having to think about any of this for at least another twenty-four hours. I settled on what I wanted to order – eggs and bacon for me, eggs and steak for Dornan – and was about to pick up the phone when the fucking thing rang so loudly, I almost fell on the floor. I answered the phone as Dornan poked his head out of the bathroom door, a towel around his waist and dripping water everywhere.