46. Deirdre
Deirdre
A s my father collapses to the floor, I know that he’s dead. Yet I can’t stop the question from bubbling up out of my throat, as if I need more confirmation than what my own eyes just saw.
“Did you… Did you kill him?”
“Yes.” Elio steps over my father – my father’s body – and crouches in front of me once more, tipping my chin up until my gaze is snapped away from the blood pooling beneath my father’s head.
“What do you think I usually do to men who steal things from me?”
“I’m not a thing to be stolen,” I whisper.
“No,” he seethes, eyes flashing. “You’re my wife. Which makes what he did infinitely fucking worse. He took you. And then he sat on that fucking couch and he watched .”
He drags a vicious hand through his hair, revealing a crusted patch of dried blood at his temple. My hand trembles violently as I raise it to the bloodied place. Elio’s eyes close, and a look of pain that I don’t think is related to his head wound flickers over his features.
“We have to go,” he murmurs, catching my fingers in his and opening his eyes. “It’s time to go home with me, Songbird.”
Home with him. Home with the man who killed my father. Home to a life I don’t even know how to inhabit now.
Elio doesn’t wait for me to stand up or answer. He scoops me up and carries me from the room. How many times has it been like this for us? Him carrying me through some kind of maelstrom into the dark, hushed safety of his cage beyond?
How many times will it happen again?
Elio gives instructions to someone, but I don’t see who it is. I’ve turned my face into his lapel and my body doesn’t know if it wants to vomit or sob, so I just hold myself shaking and silent against his chest.
“I’m going to get Caruso to take us back,” Elio says above my hiding face. “You three stay here and clean up this fucking mess. There’s a boat and lots of water out there. Go feed the fucking sharks.”
“What about that girl,” says the other person, and by the voice I think it’s Curse. “Bridget. She ran off somewhere.”
“I don’t give a fuck about what happens to her,” Elio snaps. “She can go find some new sugar daddy to leech off of or go starve in the fucking jungle for all I care. Just clean this place the fuck up, pay the staff enough to keep them fucking quiet, then get out.”
“Understood.”
With my face pressed into Elio’s chest the way it is, I barely notice when we pass out of the house and into the sunshine.
I feel it on me, but I don’t see it. I don’t even move when Elio carefully fastens a pair of protective earphones over my ears for a helicopter ride back out over the water.
After that, we’re in a car, then in a plane, then in a car again.
And then…
We’re home.
Elio carries me inside, taking me all the way up the stairs to our bedroom.
He spent an obsessive amount of time cleaning the wounds on my hands and knees on the flight back here, hunched over my body, vibrating with tense focus as he pulled little slivers out one by one.
My palms and knees are freshly bandaged now, and I had ice pressed to my mouth for most of the drive here.
My skin is going to heal.
It’s the rest of me I’m not so sure about.
He sets me down on the edge of the bed, passing into the other bedroom and then reappearing with a fluffy robe that he sets down. He doesn’t speak as he bends over me and begins to undo the many minute fasteners on the back of my wedding gown. What’s left of it, at least.
He peels the dress away from my back, rubbing the tips of his fingers into the red spots the dress has chafed me.
So delicately, like he’s handling an injured child, he peels one sleeve down my limp arm, then the other.
Hooking one strong arm around my back, he lifts me just enough to slide the skirt out from under my bottom.
Once it’s off, he lets the whole thing fall to the floor.
I sit there and look at the dress crumpled on the floor, naked apart from my panties, and I begin to weep.
I don’t ever remember crying like this. Maybe once, when they told me Mom was gone. Great, sucking sobs that make me feel like I’ll never take in a real breath again.
I’m lifted up again, and this time when I’m set back down it’s in Elio’s lap.
He presses the scarred side of his jaw against the top of my head, hushing me quietly, sliding his tender leather touch up and down my bare spine.
And it feels so wrong, to crave comfort from him now.
Now, when I watched him kill in front of me, for me, yet again.
But this time he wasn’t killing some faceless soldier.
He killed my father.
“Did you know?” I choke out between strangled bouts of crying. “Did you know about the debt that killed my mother?”
His hand stills. Only for a moment. Resuming stroking, he quietly says, “Yes.”
I cry even harder for a moment, not sure if what he just admitted should make me feel better or not.
“Were you ever going to tell me?”
“I don’t know.”
My father deserved to die.
But the guilt and the grief have got their vines winding hard around me now, and they’re tight, and they’re thorny, and I don’t know how to pull them loose enough to look at this situation with anything close to closure.
Elio’s hand feels so good on my back, but suddenly all I can see is his hand on that gun and the hatred in his eyes as he fires.
The vomit I’ve been holding back for so much of today suddenly comes rocketing out of me. Some of it gets on me, but I mostly just douse Elio’s chest with it.
“I’m so sorry,” I stammer, trying to wipe the horrible stuff off of his suit with my bare hands. Instantly, he seizes my wrists.
“Stop, Deirdre. Stop.”
Once again he’s carrying me, this time to the bathroom. He flicks on the light and the floor-heater with his elbow, then sets me gently on the counter, turning on the tap and tugging my hands beneath the warm stream of water.
“Not me,” I whisper. “Elio, you’re completely covered.”
“I’ll live,” he says flatly, taking off the bandages he worked so hard on earlier so he can wash my hands anew. He removes his leather gloves, making sure not to lose track of the platinum wedding band, which he sets carefully aside.
“Oh, that reminds me,” he says, focused on washing my hands and not looking at me. “I drafted a new will. Everything’s yours once I’m gone. So if anything ever happens and you need access to it, you can find a copy with Gabriel Hades at Hades, Mason & Gould .”
“Don’t say anymore,” I beg him as he gingerly dries my hands with a clean towel. “Please. I can’t think about you dying right now.”
And I can’t think about him taking care of me, either.
I can’t think of him in such sharp contrast to my father, who never did anything but put me in harm’s way.
First with the car accident, then selling me to Elio, then Bermuda.
My father is dead now. I already know there’s nothing left for me in his will, if he even has one at all.
And here Elio is, putting his physical health and his body on the line for me over and over again. Taking care of me so fucking dutifully that I’ll be alright even once he’s gone.
He’s still trying to make this world safe for me. Even when he won’t be in it.
“I really want to clean you off,” I murmur miserably, lifting my hands ineffectually and then letting them drop onto my legs.
“No fucking way. Keep your hands clean. We’ve both seen the kind of shit a bad infection can do,” Elio says. He picks up a cup from the counter and fills it with water. He brings it to my mouth. “Rinse.”
I do, my mouth feeling painful and swollen, the water dribbling out messily into the sink as I lean over it.
“Now drink some of it.”
“I can’t,” I moan, trying to push the cup away. But he just brings it right back up to my lips.
“ Drink .”
My stomach rebels, but it feels good on my throat, and I end up drinking more than I expected I’d be capable of.
Once Elio is satisfied with that, he undresses until he’s just in his underwear, depositing everything, including his gloves, into a foul-smelling pile on the floor.
He works more soap and water between his hands, scrubbing the suds over his chest and under his arms before rinsing and roughly drying himself.
He rinses his face and then leans his whole head down into the sink, letting the water soak through his strands.
Some of the water turns dark as it rinses down.
“Your head,” I say. I want to reach for him. I almost do it.
“I’ll live,” he says again as he rises slightly. He stays mostly bent over the sink, letting his hair drip moisture into the bowl of it before scrubbing his head with a towel.
“You need to see Doctor Morelli!”
“So do you,” he says tensely. “I want to know exactly what they fucking did to you.”
“They didn’t… I mean… You got there in time. It was just my hands and my knees and…”
And my hands on his legs and his leer in my brain and his fingers so close to –
“ And? ” he demands, fixing me with a fierce stare.
“And some kind of sedative. I think. I don’t remember much of how I got there.” I reach up and touch the side of my neck. Elio softly bats my hand away, brushing hair back from my skin and swearing.
“I’m going to get Morelli here right now.”
He turns to go, and catastrophic fear tears up my insides.
“Don’t go!”
I grasp his arm between my hands.
The same arm that aimed the gun.
I instantly let go, just like he’s burned me.
“I’m not going anywhere. I can fucking promise you that. I’m just getting my phone.”
He digs around in his pile of clothes, finds it, and makes the call, speaking in Italian before hanging up.
“He’ll be here momentarily. He’s been busy since the shit that went down at the wedding.”
“Oh, God, was anyone badly hurt?” I feel like I’m about to fall right off the counter. But thankfully, Elio shakes his head.
“Sounds like a couple people near the front had some lacerations from broken glass. Little things like that. Nothing serious.”
“But you hit your head. That’s serious!”