53. Home
Chapter fifty-three
Home
Astoria
“I want to go home now.” The words slip out of my mouth while he’s showering me with a loofa sponge, washing the blood from my body, but I’m not entirely here. I’m seconds away from a panic attack.
I just saw my father for the first time in over twenty years and murdered him. That can’t be okay, right? I don't know anything right now. I’m numb and confused. Too much has happened in–I don’t even know how many days. I look up into his eyes, waiting for him to answer.
“Try to relax, Astoria. I don't want you going into shock. There’s a lot to discuss.”
“Am I free?”
He stops rubbing soap on me and his ice-blue eyes dig into mine. “If what you wanted was freedom then you should have killed me. I explained that to you. As long as I'm alive, there is no you without me."
“I don't understand. How many days did you have me down there? Are you going to do it again? Why don’t you just kill me and put me out of my misery if that's the case? Did my father listen to me screaming while you raped me? Did-did he hear me calling you daddy?”
He sighs, rolls his eyes and goes back to rinsing me.“Yes, he did, and now he's dead, like everyone else who has ever hurt you. Did you notice he never asked you if you were okay? All he cared about was trying to find a way to escape. He wanted to use you against me!"
I shake my head. "That's disgusting. That's–Why the fuck would you do that!" I slap his face but it doesn't turn. Julian takes one step away from me as if he's resisting killing me, staring at me in complete silence with the most intense glare. "You were there for a week and then slept on and off for three days. From here on, I am your home. You made your choice, little bird.
"You fucked me knowing my father could hear me screaming…" My whisper carries so much anger.
"And you enjoyed every minute of it." He holds a grin. I slap him as hard as I can. This time, his head does turn. Slowly he recovers, his glare telling me I'm on thin ice but I don't care.
"You sick mother fucker!" I screech and scratch at his face, trying to yank his eyeballs out.
He drops everything and steps into the shower to restrain me. My back is against the cold tile when his hands trap me. His beautiful eyes dig into mine and something stirs in my heart that renders me helpless against the love I feel for him. I want to cry but I resist.
"You dare to waste time being ashamed about what that sick fuck heard? Huh? Every time I remembered he was there, I fucked you harder. Do you know why?" he asks through his teeth. "I wanted him to hear his daughter getting fucked by the only daddy that ever really mattered in her life. I wanted him to know you were mine. Think of it as my request for your hand in marriage."
I try to yank my wrists out of his hold but he kisses me until every cell in my body is screaming for him to fuck my every hole. A whimper escapes me. Slowly, he pulls his lips away. My gaze drops to them, needing them to kiss and suck every curve of my body. I'm panting, so fucking desperate, my pussy and asshole throbbing for him.
"You can't go back to your little house, pretty bird."
“Why?”
“Astoria." He pauses. "I killed a member of the Cartel to save you.”
“What? Cartel? That’s not true. You’re lying. You’re fucking with my mind again,” I yell but deep inside I know he's not.
“No, I’m not. Sebastian was part of the Cartel and his specialty was human trafficking.”
I shake my head as my memories of Sebastian melt. They were all fake–the smiles, the nice dinners, the compliments, the passionate love-making, the promises of safety. They were all lies. The betrayal and his horrific intentions quake my brow with pain. No one has ever really loved me. My breath hitches and I cover my mouth keeping the agony inside while it gets trapped in my chest. I say nothing else as Julian dries me, then leads me out of the bathroom toward the bed.
“Bend over the bed so that I can help you with the branding.”
I stare at him for too long, trying not to break down. I mean, how much more can I take? I just murdered my father, have been raped and branded, and now I’m told my husband was in the Cartel and wanted to traffic me?There were signs. God dammit, there were signs, and I ignored all of them.
“Astoria…” His palm cups my left cheek.
It feels good, but foreign between us, so I pull away and do as he originally demanded.He takes the bandage off my thigh, rubs some ointment, and covers the burn again. I hiss a few times, but it doesn’t hurt as much anymore.
“You need to rest.”
I blindly obey him. It's when I realize it’s still there, my instinct to always do as he says, like some goddamn chihuahua. There’s no part of me I hate and find more repulsive than that. Inside, I grieve for the whole person I used to be and ask myself again and again, why the hell didn’t I kill him? Why? But I don’t like the answer to that question. I didn’t kill him because I’m in love with Asher and addicted to Julian. I'm not really alive in his absence.
He covers me with the blanket, making me feel as if I were his little girl. I watch him dry his gorgeous body. He grabs his cell phone from the desk a few feet away and passes it to me then climbs up in the bed next to me. I read through the messages Sebastian and Julian have been exchanging for almost all three months we knew each other. “This can’t be. His family–”
“Fake. It was all fake–”
“But why?”
“It was his thing.” Julian shrugs.
It’s too much for me to bear, all the lies. I know Julian is waiting for me to respond, but I don’t want to look at him. I sit up and stare at the sheets, ashamed that my stalker, kidnapper, torturer, rapist had to save me from the man I thought to be the good guy, the man I married . The idea of him saving me doesn’t fit with everything else that has happened between us–all the sick shit he’s done to me.
“Why did you save me?”
He pulls me so that I turn to face him. He's sitting up too, now. “No one else gets to have you. Not even death. You’re mine.” He pauses and I can tell he’s itching to say something but holding back.
“What?”
“Did you love him?”
“No. I loved the life he was showing me." It's the truth. "He never asked me to marry him. I just suddenly found myself in a white dress I’ve never seen with his mother–”
“She wasn’t his mother.”
I sigh. “I didn’t know how to say no to the life I’ve always dreamed of; a family that sat down for dinner and joked around, a boyfriend who worked hard, dressed nice, treated me like a queen, never forced his dick into my ass, never enjoyed hurting me.” Julian's eyes narrow into slits of rage, but I don’t care.“He never hit me, or branded me, or impaled me, or forced me to live a year in the dark, or got me pregnant when I begged him not to, or hid my baby’s body from me–”
“I didn’t hide anything! You left, God dammit! At the very first chance, you left us!”Julian yells then stands up, obviously wanting to put some distance between us to avoid killing me. I flinch at the shouting and the anger in his words. Standing at the edge of the bed, naked, he sucks his teeth and pushes his hair back. “You willingly fucked him. Right?” His voice is deeper, raspier, and his eyes are that of the devil.
"Julian–"
"Do you realize I haven't touched another woman since the day I met you?" he whispers but each word carries a world's worth of bitterness.
His question steals all my courage and forces me to swallow deep. “Julian–”
He closes his eyes and raises his palm. “No. Give me a minute, Astoria.”
The tension in the room is electrifying. How can he not understand? "Julian. You can't demand love and loyalty from me when all you do is torture my body and mind." I don't know how else to explain it. "We are here, together. What happens now?”He's still calming himself, refusing to look at me.
It seems to take forever. He's in a trance when he says, “I buried the remains of our child underneath the almond tree, where you and I used to sit, every day.” He swallows hard and meets my gaze. "D-do you remember what really happened?" There's a sob stuck in his throat.
Julian returns to me as I shake my head and wince at the pain. My eyebrows quiver. The memory crashes onto me. “I knew something was wrong. It had been hurting all day and then… it happened… I tried so hard to keep him inside but it hurt so–bad and no matter how much I squeezed... When you started massaging me, I knew there was no hope. I felt the last of him slipping out."
He cups my cheek and with the softest voice says, "I know you tried. And I'm sorry. I'm sorry I left you alone even when you kept begging me not to." I collapse onto him, my body in a fetal position against his. Julian embraces me.
"He was the only reason... why we were ok–the only thing making us work–"
"Astoria." He pauses, pulls my chin up so that I'll look at him. "You're right. Without.." Julian clears his throat. "I might have never really seen you… and that's not your fault. It's all on me. I might have never woken up, but I love you. I see you now. I was willing to let you kill me so that you could be happy. Do you understand?"
I don't answer because how can I believe he even knows what love is? Silence settles between us for a while. "Was it… a boy? It felt like a boy. He moved around so much.”
Julian shakes his head and swallows hard. “I couldn’t tell. But. Every baby starts out as a girl. They have the chromosomes of the mother, which are two X’s, and then when the father’s chromosome activates, the second X from the mother stops working. So for a long time, the baby is always a girl. It’s after the fourteenth week that things change. It was our little queen.”
I swallow my tears and stare at the white sheets, but I can feel the tension in his body, and a sadness he'd never shown me before. He actually cared; he hadn’t been pretending.
“Now we learn to trust each other. I trust that you’ll never leave me and you trust that everything I tell you to do, everything I say to you, is in your best interest.” He pushes my hair back and caresses my cheek while I stare into the heaven that his eyes promise.
The pain of everything this man has done to me comes in a wave and drowns me. I shouldn’t forgive him. It’s sick. But I realize I’m trying so hard not to, that it hurts. “Asher, I…” I swallow deep.
“What? You what?”
“I don’t see how this can work. You’ve hurt me so much.”
“Yes, I have. And I cannot predict what I will do if I ever suspect you're trying to run from me again. Astoria, the way I feel about you… The things that go through my mind… at the thought of not having you. It scares me. This can't happen again. I'll always kill anyone who touches you. It can only be me. Are you going to run, pretty bird?" The last two words carry a world of tension as if he is warning me, not asking.
I shake my head, fear erasing everything else in my thoughts and memories.He takes a strand of my hair and places it behind my ear. “Then from here on, I'll treat you like my goddess. I'm going to worship you to death, Astoria.”
“What do you want from me, Asher?”
“I just want you to remember where your home is... with me inside you. I want you to breathe only for me.”
As sickening as the words are, they heat my body and melt my pussy. Our connection, whatever it is, has never been clean, it's always been sick, repulsive, and toxic. Suddenly there's nothing else I want more than for this man to ravage me. "I promise I will."
A drop of liquid falls on my thigh. I look down and see milk leaking out of my nipples. I gasp. “What did you do to me?”I snap my eyes to him, finding him staring and smiling.
“Don’t worry, pretty bird, you’re not pregnant. I will not put you through that again… unless you beg me to. But I might have added some prolactin to the last IV." His smile is devious. Any other girl would be as shocked and offended, but I just want to drink from me.
"I need you to feed me.” His eyes shift from my breasts to my eyes and his tongue drags across his lips.His mouth takes my breast and with the sucking, hurries the milk out of me, making me squirm. It had been too long since I’d felt that delicious sensation. While his left palm flattens on my back, caressing it, warming it, the other slithers inside the sheets and his fingers meet the wetness of my pussy.
“Why are you so wet, pretty bird?”
“I like it when you drink from me, Asher.” My eyes flutter closed as his fingers slide into me gently, and his thumb flicks at my clit. “Can you please keep… fingering me… like that?”
“Yes, of course, pretty bird. Whatever you desire, I’ll do.”
My whimpers are now screams, and my pussy is ready to burst from the pleasure.“Asher. I need to fuck you..”
“Yes. Yes. Come here, baby.”
He sits against the headboard and I climb on top of him. I tremble on his cock and cup his cheeks to pull him to my other breast, then rake my fingers through his hair as he sucks the milk out of me. I slowly bounce on his hard dick, enjoying every inch of it. God, it feels so good. I could never get used to it. My scream echoes off the cathedral ceiling when I arch my neck at him fucking me from underneath while still sucking me. Our moans feed off each other. His hands don’t stop caressing my body.
“I love you.” The tears stream out with the painful, shameful words. Who knew love could be shameful? But mine is. You’re not supposed to love your abuser.
Asher stops fucking me to meet my gaze, lays quick kisses between my breasts, up my neck, and jaw, to my lips. “It’s okay.”
“No. No, it’s not. I missed you. Y-you took too long to come back to me." I break the kiss to say, "It feels so wrong, Asher."
“It’s who you are, pretty bird. You forgive. You search for the good in the darkest places. It’s what makes you so amazing.”
“Then why couldn’t I forgive my dad?”
“There are some things not even God can forgive, Tory. Hence why the devil is in hell.”
I smile. “No. He’s right here in my arms, inside my pussy.”
“I like the sound of that.” He smiles and kisses my lips, but I break the kiss soon after.
“I don’t want to call you Julian anymore.”
An intense, serious expression takes over his face, sending a shiver through me. “What do you mean?”
“Can this be a new, gentler era for us? If it can, then I want to call you Asher, not Julian.”
“I see. Will you still call me Julian when I’m being bad to you?” A menacing smile spreads on his lips.
“Absolutely. But I hope I don’t have to say that name too often or too much.”
“Understood, pretty bird. Understood.” Asher slams himself into me while sucking at my breast. Pain and pleasure crash into and inside me again and again. “Pretty bird, I need to come. Please.”
I get off him and turn flat on my belly. “Please, be gentle, Asher. Please.”
“Oh my, sweet girl, I will.”
I whimper as he slowly pushes his cock into me, making me wince, but he stops, waiting for my breathing to calm. It's the sweetest gesture from him. He's never waited like this before. Suddenly my ass pulls him in deeper and it’s like coming all over again. He teases me, never pushing as deep as I need him to. “Fuck. Asher–” I pant and whimper. Again, my insides attempt to pull him deeper with no success. “Asher… Fuck… please… please.”
“Beg me for it."
"Please–Please fuck me."
"How do you want me to fuck your ass, huh?"
"Harder! Please! Please!"
"Is this what you want? Huh? Little slut?”
"Yes!" I scream as he slams the length of himself into me. I break down, sobbing at the intensity. My mind can’t decipher if I’m about to die from the pain or from the pleasure.
“Fuck!” he cusses.
THE END