Chapter 13 Dominic Royal #3
She stood up, pushed off the counter then and walked away from me, barefoot across the floor.
She stopped near the terrace doors and wrapped her arms around herself again, with her shoulders curling in just enough to make her look smaller from behind.
Out on the hills the darkness made it hard to see shit but the lights from the house glowed around her body and made the wine-colored dress look darker like rich blood.
“You know what I hate?” she asked without turning around.
I didn’t answer. I let her keep talking.
“I hate that I still would’ve took whatever you gave me.
If tonight had gone the way I wanted,” she continued, in a low calmer tone in a way that was more dangerous than the crying had been, “if you touched me, if you kissed me, if you stayed here, I would’ve taken it.
Even knowing it wasn’t enough. Even knowing you’d still go back to her. ”
She finally turned around after that, and her face looked different now not in a softer way, but it was raw with real emotions and truth. She looked broken in a way that made her look older than she was right now.
“I hate that about myself,” she said. A woman finally saying the worst thing about herself out loud.
I walked toward her slowly, but not threatening her, just enough for her eyes to stay on me. She didn’t step back this time, and she didn’t try to run. She just stood there and let me stop right in front of her.
“You should,” I said with dark eyes.
Her mouth trembled. “You really are cruel.”
“Nah,” I said. “I’m finished.” I meant that shit.
I probably would’ve let her live if she wasn’t so obsessed.
With Victoria now having power, I couldn’t risk her making no moves on my family.
She gave stalker vibes. She’d fuck around and allow her emotions to try to harm my child.
She was a breach, a very high-risk breach and she had to go. It was no way around it.
Victoria let out one more shaky breath and looked past me toward the bar again where the pills now were, the rest of the wine bottles, and everything she had set up for a night that had already died before it began. Then she looked back at me.
“If I disappear,” she asked above a whisper, “would you even think about me again?”
That was the kind of question only somebody like Victoria would ask while standing in the middle of their own demise. “Not for long,” I told her the truth.
That answer gutted her. Something in her face just…
emptied out. She didn’t cry harder after that nor did she yell, she didn’t throw the glass or nothing.
She just got real still in a way that told me whatever fight she had left was finally slipping out of her.
Then she walked back to the counter slow and steady but still graceful in that sad way beautiful women always seemed to be, even when they were falling apart.
She reached for the bottle again, turned it in her hand, then unscrewed the cap and stared down into it for a second.
“Do you know what’s funny?” she asked, looking at the pills in her palm. “I used to tell myself if I ever got you alone like this, I’d make you love me.”
I stood a few feet behind her, close enough if I needed to be, but far enough to let her feel alone in the choice. “That was never going to happen Victoria.”
“No,” she whispered. “I know.”
She put two pills in her mouth, swallowed them dry and then she reached for her glass and poured more liquor.
There was something about finally breaking that calmed people down when there was no more fight left.
She drank a lot and then poured again while I watched emotionless.
I needed the pills to do all the work, but I was prepared to suffocate her ass if I had to, but the scene needed truth in it.
It needed enough of her own hand in it that no one looking later would question the shape of what happened.
With the bottle already open and damn near gone from heavy drinking, the messages on her phone, the smudged mascara, and isolation, it was too much even when you considered the pressure of her uncle being dead, her throne being too heavy, her private life being nonexistent, and the man she thought wanted her showing up only to strip the fantasy out of her body with his bare hands, all of that shit mattered.
Victoria looked over her shoulder at me after the killing the drink and gave me the saddest smile I’d seen on her all night. “You really weren’t lying,” she said.
“About what?”
“You would never belong to me.”
“No.”
She nodded, then took more pills and this time it was a few but not all.
Then she drank again. By the time she set the glass down, her eyes were heavy, and sluggish while she began to move much slower.
She looked at me like she wanted me to come hold her, and for a second I let her keep that hope and let her stand there in it just long enough.
Then I finally walked over to her without affection, and I stood in front of her and took the pill bottle from her hand, shook more into my palm, and held them there between us.
She knew what time it was. I’m sure I looked like a monster right now and I was. She knew I was a killer.
She looked down at them first, then back up at me, and the realization that showed on her face then was colder than anything other expression she had all night. “This is how it ends?” she whispered.
“This is how it has to.”
She didn’t move, she just kept looking at the pills in my hand, breathing slower now, with tears drying in uneven lines down her face.
“You really hate me,” she said.
“No, I don’t.” That was the truth. “I just love my family more than I ever could’ve cared about you.”
That one did it. It took whatever little life was still left in her face and killed it.
She looked down again, opened her mouth, and took the pills from my hand without another word and it wasn’t because she trusted me now.
She just simply had nothing left to fight for.
I handed her the glass and she finished it.
Then her legs almost immediately got weak.
I caught her before she hit the floor and carried her to the couch, laying her down carefully like I was placing something breakable on the couch.
Her hair spread out over the end of the cushion with one arm hanging off the side.
Her breathing had changed already, and it was even slower, it wasn’t gone yet but close enough to see the rest. I moved through the room then with a purpose.
I wiped what needed wiping and touched what needed touching.
I took her phone, opened the messages between us, deleted anything that hinted at me coming there, then scrolled farther back and left enough loneliness behind to tell the story I needed told. She was a woman carrying too much and a woman drinking alone in a private house nobody knew she was at.
I took one of her own robes from the chair by the staircase and draped it halfway over her legs, so the scene looked less posed, and more truthful. Then I set the wine bottle and pill bottle on the table near her hand. Shit, it didn’t have to be neat, but it needed to be believable.
When I came back around in front of her, she was barely conscious with her eyes half-open and breathing shallow.
She looked up at me one more time, and whatever she was trying to say never fully came out the only thing changing was just the shape of my name on her mouth.
I stood there over her for a second and then I leaned down and pressed two fingers lightly to the side of her neck and her pulse was weak but still there and that wasn’t enough for me.
I looked around the room one more time, then bent over and took one of the decorative pillows from the far end of the couch and placed it over her face so there would be no marks left where they shouldn’t be.
I was leaning over her while the music continued to play and the fountain outside kept running like nothing was happening.
Her body twitched a few times, and her hands came up weakly, slower than they would’ve if she hadn’t already swallowed enough to dull everything, then they fell back.
I held it there until she stopped moving and still held it a little longer after that.
By the time I pulled back, she was completely still.
I set the pillow back where it belonged, not exactly perfect, but just close enough, and looked down at her.
She looked peaceful to me. Now she actually looked like she had gotten what she wanted all along.
I looked around the room one more time and the placement of everything from the wine bottle, the pill bottle, the glass, her phone, and her body.
The soft lighting was still isolating the property.
Everything looked like a woman who had too much and still somehow not enough.
Everything looked like she did it to herself.
I stepped outside after that and pulled the encrypted phone out.
“Yeah,” Tone answered immediately.
“Get ready.”
“You good?”
“Yeah.”
“You handle it?”
“Yeah.”
I looked back through the glass doors at the room one last time before I turned away from it. “Get the jet ready, I’m coming.” I told him, and that was that.