44. Deirdre
Deirdre
T he two men pull me through a large, sunlit lobby into a pretty sort of sitting room with a huge, glassless window that looks out over the dock and beach.
The floors are pale hardwood, and white curtains flutter with the tropical breeze.
Gorgeous, vivid flowers bloom in pots in corners and on tables.
I stand in this beautiful room with my bleeding hands and knees and my ruined wedding dress and feel like I’ve stepped into an alternate reality.
That alternate reality feeling only intensifies when I see Bridget reclining on a white couch. The same Bridget who used to clean our house. The Bridget who’s been secretly fucking my dad for years.
The Bridget my dad chose to bring here with him instead of me. She sits up when she sees me, tossing her glossy chestnut hair behind her shoulders.
“Deirdre! Hi! Do you remember me?” She gets off the couch, the long skirt of her gauzy sundress rippling with the movement.
She’s holding some kind of drink served in a coconut.
Idly, I wonder what time it is here. She’s got to be drunk to be as happy to see me as she is.
She’s acting like nothing’s weird about this at all.
I ignore her, my eyes tracking my father as he goes to stand beside Bridget. Mr. Brigham strides to a large wicker chair and settles himself into it with an audible “ahh” sound that makes my skin crawl.
Bridget and my father sit down on the couch, and Brigham’s two men leave the room. I stay standing in the centre of them all, silent and swaying on rubbery legs, wondering what the hell is going to happen now.
I feel like I’ve been locked into a castle with a moat, and the moat is the literal fucking ocean. Elio might not have even figured out I’m here yet. He could be wasting time fighting people like Darragh, if he’s even able to fight at all right now.
My stomach twists. If he isn’t alright…
I swallow bile, staring at my father.
“How about you look at me instead of him?”
I tense, slowly turning my gaze to Brigham. He leers at me, his thighs spread, his gaze like the thin blade of a knife.
“Come sit with me. You look lonely in the middle of the room like that. And I imagine that your legs must be feeling very weak after the drugs.”
He’s right. Right now the only thing keeping me upright is my locked knees and the strength of my bones. My muscles are barely more than jelly right now.
“Come here. Now.”
His expression goes cold. Sickeningly merciless. This cannot be happening. I’ve already gone through so much. And finally, with Elio, I thought… I thought…
I thought that maybe I could one day learn to be happy.
“If I have to come over there and get you then you will lose a finger,” Brigham says. “One for every second you keep me waiting.”
He’s not joking.
It’s a silly, childish, self-pitying thought, but suddenly I’m on the verge of sobbing, thinking about not being able to play violin anymore. What will Elio think if his Songbird can’t sing?
I won’t wait to find out. Forcing my body into mindless, mechanical movement, I walk until I’m standing right in front of Brigham. The leer is back, and my insides liquify with fear when I see unmistakeable thickness at his groin.
“I said sit.”
I spin like a ballerina in a box and then fall stiffly onto his knee, sitting as far forward on his leg as possible.
“Not like that.”
He locks an arm around my waist and drags me forcefully back until I feel the nauseating press of his erection against my ass.
My father looks away, face red. Bridget sips her drink as if this shit happens every day, and I wonder what it normally is that happens in this place for her to look so blasé.
I already know that I don’t want to find out.
Brigham makes a horrific noise, something like an exhale of arousal that makes my hairs stand on end despite the warmth in here. He kneads fingers across the beaded bodice of my dress, moving downward, gathering the jagged edges of the skirt into his fists.
“I’ve had another man’s wife before,” he breathes against my neck, “but never on the actual wedding day.” One of his hands dips beneath the layers of silk to my bare thigh, teasing upward until I’m sweating and gritting my teeth against the intense need to vomit.
Maybe I shouldn’t fight the urge. Maybe I should just throw up all over him.
I almost do when a single finger nudges at the edge of my panties.
“Has your husband already had you here? I hope not. I’m rather a deft hand at deflowering virgins. But then again… I am intrigued. Let’s see how well your husband trained you, shall we?”
I cry out as I’m suddenly shoved violently from Brigham’s lap. I collapse into a clammy heap between his feet, panting, trying to get my bearings.
“You are going to suck me off,” Brigham says, so cold and matter of fact that it’s like he’s reading me the weather report. “And don’t even think about biting. The last one who tried that got all her teeth knocked out and I used her blood as lube.”
“Elio will come for me,” I say shakily. “If you hurt me, he will kill you.”
The slap comes so fast and hard that I don’t even have a chance to flinch away. Stars explode through my head, and they’re so beautiful I want to chase them, to follow them into darkness.
I taste metal. I touch my lips and my fingertips come away slick and red.
“At this rate I’ll have your blood as lube anyway.
” Brigham chuckles. “You can stop bluffing now. Elio Titone’s heartlessness and lack of serious female attachments are legendary.
He’s never done anything for a woman who wasn’t his own blood.
I highly doubt he hasn’t already hurt you himself and I truly do not believe he’ll care if someone else does it.
If he decides that he wants you back then he can come and pay for you and add a little extra on for all the trouble I’ve gone to retraining you for him.
Now get back up onto your knees and suck. ”
The commands aren’t all that different from ones I’ve heard before.
Elio has forced me into his lap, told me to get down on my knees and suck him.
But the experience is so vastly, terribly, inhumanly different from this one.
With Elio, there’s power and control. But there’s also desire.
And now, as toxic and twisted as it may be, love.
Here, with this man? In this room, my father turned away with cowardice and shame etched into his features like they’ve been carved there with a knife?
It’s like I’ve fallen down a hole into Hell.
But I can make my way back out if I play my cards right. I have to survive long enough for Elio to find me.
For him to pull me out of the flames.
Resolve like hot lead in my guts, I straighten up. I place my hands on Brigham’s knees, feeling the knobby bones, so different from Elio’s thick muscularity. His dick is tenting the white crotch of his pants, and I stop and stare, suddenly unable to keep going. To do what I have to to live.
“I thought I told you,” Brigham says, fisting my hair so much harder than Elio ever has until my eyes scrunch shut from pain, “to suck-”
There’s a bright, dark, shadow-splitting sound. The grip in my hair goes instantly slack. Bridget lets out a piercing, drunken shriek, and my eyes fly open to discover why.
All I can see is that putrid erection right in front of my face.
I tear my eyes up and away from it to discover that that cock now belongs to a corpse. My breath lurching from my lungs, I rip my hands off of a dead man’s knees, scooting backwards away on my ass as blood courses from a bullet-wound in the centre of his forehead.
Everything is happening so fast that I feel like my synapses aren’t firing quickly enough to keep up. But then a single word cuts through all the noise, slicing past the storm in my head until everything falls quietly away.
“ Songbird .”
I turn.
A lone man stands in the doorway to the room.
He doesn’t seem to fit into the airy warmth of this place.
He’s dressed in the heavy fabric of formal wear, thick leather gloves covering his hands.
He’s a looming silhouette of darkness, a blot of broad-shouldered ink, with eyes so lit by blackened rage that they look like dying stars.
I let out a sob and I reach a bleeding hand for my husband as he strides fearlessly into the sunlit depths of Hell.