Chapter 17
Curse
Aurora is so limp when I lay her legs down that, for a brain-melting moment, I think she might be unconscious.
But she reacts when I pull out of her, giving a tiny little mewl and shivering.
The lights come back on, showing me that the condom and the base of my cock, as well as her inner thighs and the creamy duvet beneath, are stained crimson.
The sight of her bloodied like this is a wedge somebody’s pounded right into the centre of my being.
It’s fucking cleaving me in two. Because half of me revels in the brutality of it, half of me loves to see how much I’m ruining her.
That putrid part of me that is only soothed by pain, that can only fully exhale with my hands around another person’s throat, is goddamn exultant.
But the other half of me, the one that has always only ever wanted to protect her – most of all from myself – is howling with the fact that I have failed her so fucking badly.
This won’t happen again.
It was never even supposed to happen twice. We’ve consummated the marriage now. The clock has begun ticking. Thirty days to Aurora’s freedom.
I don’t tell Aurora about the vow I’ve just made to myself.
My internal promise not to touch her again.
Instead, I tell her that she needs to get up, to clean herself up, and go pee before falling asleep.
She lies there so long I think she may have fallen asleep already, and I’m just about to pick her up and bring her to the bathroom myself when she rolls over and gingerly eases herself into a sitting position.
“Oh, no,” she gasps, standing up so fast it’s like the bed has burned her. “Oh, the beautiful bedding!” Her hand covers her mouth, and she looks fucking distraught. I follow her gaze to the bloodstains on the duvet. “It’s so dirty!”
I wouldn’t consider this dirty. Not when her blood is like fucking holy water to me.
Her eyes crawl to mine, and I already know she’s gearing up to apologize.
“Don’t say it,” I warn her, snatching the duvet from the bed. “I don’t ever want to hear you apologize for this.”
I’m the one who made her bleed.
And I’m the one who made her come.
Her lips press into a hard line, and without another word, she heads for the bathroom attached to this bedroom. I hear water running then, but it’s not the tap. She’s in the shower. Again.
I follow her into the bathroom, peeling the condom from my shaft, tying it off, and tossing it. There’s a line of demarcation where the condom sat snugly on me. The place where her blood touched me, and the place it didn’t. I could wash up, too.
I don’t.
With Aurora still in the shower, I return to the bedroom.
I have a feeling she’s not going to want to sleep with this bloodied blanket, so I deposit the duvet in the corner of the room, finding a big throw blanket in one of the drawers beneath the TV.
I’m just laying it over the bed when I become aware of Aurora’s presence in the bedroom with me.
When I turn, I find her crouched beside her suitcase, a pair of underwear in one hand, a pad in the other.
She stands, then flushes pink to find me watching her.
She’s still naked, fresh from her shower, and already the promise I’ve made myself wavers.
Her nakedness is all-consuming. Her skin a revelation.
I can’t stop staring at the little points where her hipbones protrude, but so fucking gently, because no part of her could ever be truly sharp.
Although, as I become aware of a stinging in the vicinity of my shoulders, where she was gripping me, I realize that maybe that’s not true.
I let Aurora put on her pad and underwear in peace, retrieving the handcuffs and waiting for her in the bed.
She comes to me after slipping on pyjamas – baggy flannel pants and a shapeless T-shirt.
Like this, with her soaked hair scraped back, wearing an outfit that has more in common with a fucking potato sack than actual clothing, she should look like a drowned rat.
But she doesn’t. She’s so goddamn gorgeous it makes my throat seize up.
She offers up her hand without argument or complaint. I close the handcuff over her wrist.
“My left wrist tonight,” she says in raspy voice. “I guess that kind of makes sense.”
“Why?” I ask as she draws the blanket over herself. “What do you mean?”
She doesn’t answer me. It’s only long after she’s fallen asleep that I remember it’s the left hand that should wear a wedding ring.
All in all, we spend three more days in the Springwater house.
I would have liked to have gotten on the road again sooner, but it took a while for the roads to be cleared of all the fallen branches and hydro wires.
I spend those three days like a moon caught in Aurora’s orbit, hovering around her, but never touching her.
She touches me, though. In sleep, she comes to me, wraps herself around me until my breath is hissing between my teeth and my throbbing cock is clenched in my fist.
Only a few days, and I’m already going into withdrawal.
Pretty grim fucking sign for my future once these thirty days are up.
But that’s still twenty-seven days away. I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it.
Or maybe I won’t. Maybe I’ll put a bomb under it.
I wonder what Aurora would do if I reneged on our agreement and didn’t grant her the divorce I’d once promised. If I told her, sure, she could go ahead and build a new life. But it will be a life with me in it, forever and always. Her lawfully wedded husband.
She’d probably hate me even more than she does now.
Or, maybe go back to hating me, because I haven’t sensed much of that hatred in her lately.
She hasn’t called me a monster, or told me that she never wants to see me again.
It’s more than a little ironic that the one thing that would probably bring her hatred for me surging back is also the thing that would force her to stay with me: me tearing up our agreement and deciding to keep her.
I suppose she could always just try to divorce me on her own, without my permission or assistance.
But by then, all her inheritance would have been transferred to me, and therefore Elio.
She’d have no money without the allowance I’ve promised her.
Not a single fucking penny to her name. Nowhere to go and no one else to turn to.
Of course, all of this is only theoretical.
I’ve got nearly four full weeks until we arrive at that point.
Not to mention that we’ve got to cut Alessandro Messina’s guts out before any more decisions get made.
Because I am absolutely not sending her back out into a world that still has that Messina worm crawling through it.
It’s with this in mind that I take Aurora and our things from the house on the fourth day of our marriage.
We continue north out of Springwater, past municipalities with absurdly sweet, storybook-sounding names.
Places like Coldwater and Moonstone and Honey fucking Harbour.
The kinds of places where somebody like Aurora should live and somebody like me should only ever pass on by under the cover of night.
It rains today, too. Not freezing rain though, thank fuck.
But it does slow us down and affect visibility as we go.
So it takes me longer than it should to notice that there’s one black pick-up truck that’s been sticking a little too close for comfort.
I keep my eye on it in the rearview mirror, balancing probabilities against each other while Aurora gazes out the window, oblivious.
How likely is it that this is just some random truck going the same way we are?
Highly. Once you get north of Toronto, to Barrie and beyond, it feels like every other vehicle on the road is some big American truck, many of them black like this one. It’s probably nothing. Nothing at all.
But I decide to pull off the highway anyway.
The truck pulls off, too.
“Hand me my bag,” I tell Aurora.
She flinches into awareness, straightening up in her seat.
“What is it?” she asks, craning her neck to look out the back window.
“Just do it.”
Snaking her arm between our seats, she grasps the handles of my bag, pulling it forward into her lap.
One-handed, I unzip it and pull out a pistol.
Balancing the gun on my lap, I continue steering with my other hand, my eyes snapping back and forth between the rearview mirror and the narrow, winding road ahead.
Now that we’re off the highway, we’ve ended up on a rural road, hemmed in by dense coniferous trees, the pavement giving way to gravel.
There doesn’t seem to be anything fucking out here. But the truck keeps following anyway.
And I decide that even if it’s not Messina driving, it’s somebody we don’t want on our fucking tails.
“Take the steering wheel.”
Aurora yelps her surprise when I open my window and use both hands to aim my gun out of it. Before I can pull the trigger, the sideview mirror on the driver’s side of my SUV explodes from impact. Glass shatters, some of it slicing into my cheek.
“Curse!” Aurora screams. I don’t stop to look at her. Not yet.
I recenter myself and aim my gun again, pulling the trigger.
A single hole appears in the truck’s windshield. A split second later, the big vehicle fishtails wildly, wheels spinning over the gravel. Normally, I’d stop my vehicle at this point, or reverse, and go finish the fucking job if the motherfucker isn’t dead already.
But I have Aurora with me, my precious fucking angel, her face pale with terror. And while she’s seen me kill before, and I have no compunction about doing it in front of her again, her safety is my only priority right now.
Taking control of the steering wheel again, I press down on the gas, sending slippery gravel flying from beneath the wheels.
“Who was that? Was it Alessandro?”
“Probably.” While there are likely a dozen men – or more – who’d gladly kill me the moment that they got the chance, I can’t think of any who would have happened to have tracked us out here. It would be far too fucking coincidental.
Did Messina know which house we were at? Was he waiting for us to leave, just so that he could follow?
Fuck. I need to get back to the highway. But going south this time. The whole point of leaving Toronto was to evade him. But if he’s followed us out here, then that plan has essentially been shot to hell. Just like my goddamn sideview mirror.
“Curse, you’re bleeding!” Aurora looks like she’s about to cry. “Oh my God, you almost just got shot!”
“But I didn’t,” I reply. I’m aiming for a soothing tone, but I don’t think it works. Or I just don’t know shit about soothing her, I guess. Because her breath starts coming in these panting little gusts, and she clutches her chest like all the organs in there suddenly aren’t working right.
“Breathe, Aurora,” I grit out. I wish I could touch her right now.
But I’ve got one hand on my gun, one on the steering wheel, and none left to lend her any comfort.
Not that my hands are much for lending comfort in the first place.
For all I know, my touch would only make this panic attack, or whatever it is, worse.
“You have to slow down. Breathe,” I say again, even as I speed up. “You’re going to pass out at this rate.”
She makes a choked sound and bends over slightly, as if trying to put her head between her knees, but she’s not quite able to because of the seatbelt. Honestly, maybe her passing out is a best-case scenario. It’ll shut down her spinning nervous system. Force her breath back down to a normal level.
But she’s wheezing, and she’s suffering, and I cannot fucking stand it. I, Curse Titone, whose greatest pleasure for most of his life has been torturing other men to death, am fucking slaughtered by this.
“Fuck!” I make my choice and dump my gun, my right hand now free. I grip the back of her neck firmly, my thumb digging in behind her left ear. “Breathe. Fucking breathe, angel!”
If she obeys, I don’t hear it. All I hear is the demonic scream of twisting metal. The crunch of rock as were forced off the road. The uncaring spatter of the rain as the airbags deploy.