HUSBAND WHO, PART I
HAVEN
Two years. It’s been more than two years.
Two years since my life changed, for better or worse.
Two years since I accepted that Connor Heyward is my life, for better or worse, in sickness and health, ’til death do we part.
Two years… sometimes, it seems like Connor and I have been together forever.
At others, it’s like no time has passed at all, and this is all some nightmare-turned-dream.
That I’ll wake up in the same warehouse where my cruel captors once planned on letting me die, my broken brain torturing me with a happy-ever-after with the only man I couldn’t allow myself to admit that I wanted.
But I don’t have to worry about that now. The warehouse is gone. Johnny Winter is dead. Any of the goons who worked with him have fled, but after I finally forced myself to even write down the names of my abusers—Cam, Mickey, Noah—Connor returned with confirmation that they were dead, too.
I knew that Connor killed Cam. He eventually admitted that to me, almost as though he needed me to understand that there isn’t a single line he won’t cross when it comes to me.
Locking me in his house was nothing compared to committing cold-blooded murder and—later—arson since Dallas went back to East Hamilton with Sebastien to get rid of any trace of the warehouse.
Same with the initial facility where I was being held.
Only it wasn’t Connor or any of the other Heirs who took out the building where my cell was.
That happened when Johnny Winter found a replacement for my cage: a young ballerina from Springfield who was the baby sister to the man who ruled the local mafia.
During her rescue, Noah was killed, and the facility eventually destroyed.
The man who had been abducted with the ballerina was responsible for killing Mickey.
I don’t know how Connor found that out—or, more likely, Adrian—but just like how he confirmed that Johnny Winter was poisoned…
giving Adrian the idea to poison Jack Collins in turn…
he passed along the message that, while Connor never had the chance to track down one of the worst monsters, Mickey definitely got what was coming to him.
All the old ghosts are dead, and I wish that meant they finally stopped haunting me. No. Two years after I was taken, broken, and finally rescued, the nightmares are not as common as they once were, but I’d be lying if I said that I was back to normal.
Then again, in a way, I am. This is my new normal, the new Haven, and even if I still suffer from nightmares and flashbacks sometimes, if there’s one thing that came out of what happened to me, it’s this: I’m finally happy.
Before, I was only existing. I was waiting out a clock, hoping that, once I hit thirty and the farce of being an Offering was over and done with, I could move on, discover what it was that Haven Smith wanted to do with the rest of her life.
Sure, I’d be considered an old maid, but I would be a wealthy old maid.
Maybe I’d buy a big house, rescue all sorts of animals in need.
I still want to do that someday, but that plan’s been put on hold.
For one, I live with Connor in his—our—home and, after two years, I’m comfortable here.
Plus, I’m not ready to be in charge of taking care of another life, especially one that relies on me when I’m still in the early stages of my own healing journey.
Healing, I’ve learned, isn’t linear. With trauma like mine, there are good days and there are bad days.
Lately, there are more good days than bad, and my triggers aren’t as constant as they used to be.
It’s been weeks since Connor has needed to sedate me because I needed rest, though I have—on occasion—suggested a shot just because I know how much he enjoys himself when I give him complete control over my body.
I can’t let him do that while I’m conscious.
I just… I still can’t. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to.
Thankfully for our marriage, Connor considering himself free for me to use—no questions asked—whenever I want him works for us.
I can explore my sexuality while also satisfying my husband, but there’s no pressure when I’m not in the mood.
And if I can tell he needs me and I’m not ready, I don’t mind a good night’s sleep, especially when I wake up next to Connor, dozing contentedly because he got what he needed and, in a way, so did I.
I’m… good. If not good, then I’m definitely better than I was.
More importantly, I’m trying, but as I’ve learned, healing doesn't happen all at once.
It sneaks up on you, I swear it. One day, you realize you haven't checked every room before sitting down, worried that someone will spring out at you, grabbing you, and shoving you into their trunk. Another day, you catch yourself laughing out loud at something stupid Connor says before you can stop yourself. Eventually, you find yourself leaving the house with your husband at your side because you want to, not because he spent a half an hour cajoling you into it because you’re his wife, and he wants to take his wife out for her twenty-ninth birthday...
I shop sometimes. Not all the time. We’re definitely a multiple-delivery-packages-a-day household, though Connor still insists that they drop off our boxes into a large container at the end of the street so that the noise of their truck approaching doesn’t trigger me.
I’ve visited my parents’ graves at the Order cemetery. I didn’t think I was strong enough to go to the animal shelter—I was terrified that I’d have a breakdown if I saw any of the volunteers wearing the same purple shirt I lived in for six weeks—but Connor eventually talked me into it.
And that’s when I discovered that, not only did Connor pay to add an addition to the building—known as the Safe Haven wing for abused animals to get the time and care they need—but he arranged to update all of the uniforms for the receptionists, workers, and volunteers to be completely different from what they were… all sponsored by the Heyward family.
He did it for me, too. Not because I mentioned my big worry, but because he knew me so well that, long before I managed to whisper my fears out loud, the wing was already being constructed, the shirts changed, all so that, when I finally found the nerve to return to the spot where my life changed, I would see a bright new future for the strays of Harmony Heights rather than the horrors of my past.
I’m still not ready to adopt an animal in need just yet, but it was a start, and I have my husband to thank for it. The same man whose love looks more like obsession, and who’s been there for me even when I didn’t know he was… he’s bringing me back, piece by piece, just like he promised he would.
I’m not his captive any longer. I’m not his victim, either.
I’m his wife, and when I finally accepted that—when I can finally admit to myself that that’s what I’d wanted all along—the sun seems a little brighter, the flowers smell a little sweeter, and the whole fucking world feels a whole lot safer.
Winter is dead. So is Jack Collins. Adrian and Loni are as content as I am with Connor, and I’m slowly getting to know Sebastien’s sweet wife, Annaliese, who had her own struggles as a would-be Offering with the Owed who wanted to ruin her before Sebastien saved her similar to the way that Connor saved me.
I have to say, I didn’t think that Dallas would pull off being King.
So far, I’ve been pleasantly surprised. Someone needed to be on the figurative throne—and in the literal office in the Fortress—and Dallas has stepped up, taking on the role, even though Connor confides in me that he absolutely hates it.
He also hated how, as the King, he was expected to finally Claim an Offering and make her his bride—until, shocking all of us, he announced that he was married to Lucy Wright.
Lucy… you couldn’t be part of the Order of the Owed some years back and not know who Lucy was.
Even I was tapped into the rumors, hearing how Dallas was seeing a woman whose family ranked so low in the Order, she wasn’t an Offering or a future Used; she was nothing.
And that’s what Dallas’s father went after her.
He put an end to the relationship somehow, shipping Lucy off to be married to an Owed a decade her senior while torturing Dallas, making him watch as the woman he loved walked away.
Now she’s back, and though she wears a wedding ring, I know that Dallas isn’t her husband. That title belongs to a man named Julian Fairchild, but hell if Dallas didn’t show up at my home earlier with the quiet blonde, introducing her as his wife.
Like me, Lucy lived through her own trauma.
I can’t say what happened to her while she was married to an Owed, but once I heard that she had an accident…
an ‘accident’... warning bells went off in my head.
In Harmony Heights, when you’re married to an Owed, the only way out is death.
Divorce doesn’t exist. For the marriage to truly end, one of the couple has to die, and way too many women commit ‘suicide’ by jumping from great heights while the whole fucking town pretends they weren’t pushed.
Like Dallas’s mother, Therese Collins.
Like poor Lucy…
It’s not that she’s pretending that Dallas is her husband.
She honestly has no clue that he isn’t. After she…
fell… she developed a case of trauma-induced amnesia.
She doesn’t remember anything, let alone who she married, and maybe that’s a blessing.
After spending a few hours with Lucy while Dallas was busy doing something I don’t want to think about, I decided three things.
I liked Lucy.
Dallas was treating her right.
Dallas was lying to her for her own good… but he was lying to her.