3. Livia
Livia
The man's scream splits the air.
It’s a high, sharp, pathetic noise. The kind of sound an animal makes when its leg is caught in a steel trap.
I am standing by the adjacent booth, the damp rag hanging limply from my fingers. I don't know the man on the floor. I’ve served him a few cheap beers over the last month, but to me, he is just a nameless face in a sea of regulars.
But when the giant in the dark suit presses the tip of a switchblade into the back of his hand, drawing a bright bead of blood, the man begs.
"Please."
His voice cracks. It is wet and thick with terror.
The bass from the jukebox is still vibrating through the floorboards.
The red neon sign in the window is still buzzing.
But my brain abruptly cuts the feed. The audio warps.
The red light shifts, bleeding into the harsh, yellow glare of a cheap kitchen bulb.
The smell of spilled beer morphs into the sickening stench of stale whiskey and unwashed clothes.
It isn't a nameless man in a suit pinning someone to the sticky floor.
It is my father. And the person crying, the person bleeding on the linoleum, is my mother.
"Please."
My chest violently seizes.
A cold, blinding rush of adrenaline hits my bloodstream.
It’s a physical shockwave. Twenty-two years of survival, twenty-two years of keeping my head down and my mouth shut, evaporates in a single millisecond.
The trauma doesn't ask for permission. It doesn't calculate the odds or look at the bespoke suits and the guns holstered at their waists. It only knows one pattern.
Stop the monster. Protect the victim.
The damp rag slips from my fingers, hitting the floor with a soft slap.
I don't realize I am moving until my feet are carrying me forward. I step out from the safety of the wooden tables and walk directly into the center of the aisle. Right into the center of the kill zone.
The younger man, the one with the cruel smile pinning the victim down, snaps his head toward me. His hand instantly drops to the bulge at his waist.
"Don't touch her," the man with the knife says.
His voice is low and dark. The younger man freezes, his hand hovering over his weapon.
I don't look at him. My eyes are locked entirely on the giant holding the switchblade.
I stop two feet away from him. My chest is heaving, pulling in jagged, desperate breaths of the stale bar air. Up close, his size is overwhelming. Even crouched over his victim, he is a mountain of dark wool and lethal intent.
He slowly turns his head and looks up at me.
His eyes are black. Completely soulless. They are the eyes of a man who has never been told no in his entire life.
My hands act before my brain can catch up to the sheer, suicidal insanity of what I am doing. I step forward, reaching out, and shove my hands flat against his chest.
It is like shoving a brick wall.
He doesn't budge. He doesn't even sway. The fabric of his suit jacket is soft, but the muscle beneath it is rigid and unyielding. The heat radiating off his body burns right through the palms of my hands.
"Stop," I hiss.
My voice isn't a roar. It isn't a threat. It is a harsh, trembling demand ripped from the bottom of my lungs. Nobody breathes. The man on the floor even stops whimpering, his terrified eyes darting up to my face as if I were a ghost.
I brace myself.
My stomach clenches, my shoulders instinctively pulling in.
I know how this goes. I know the physics of male violence.
You interrupt them, you challenge their authority, and the backhand comes.
I squeeze my eyes shut for a fraction of a second, waiting for the crack of his knuckles against my cheekbone.
I prepare my body for the impact, calculating how to fall so I don't hit the edge of the wooden booth.
One second. Two seconds.
The hit never comes.
I open my eyes.
The man hasn't raised a hand to me. He is completely still. The switchblade in his right hand is pointed at the floor. He is staring at me, his dark eyes searching my face with a terrifying, heavy intensity.
For a split second, I see something flicker behind the obsidian wall of his gaze. It isn't anger. It isn't the blind, drunken rage I used to see in my father's eyes. It is a pause. A hesitation.
He looks at my shaking hands, still pressed flat against his chest. He looks at my pale face. He sees the raw, unadulterated terror I am trying so desperately to hide, and he simply stops.
He slowly stands up.
I have to crane my neck to keep looking at him. He is over six feet of pure, predatory dominance. The sheer mass of him blocks out the rest of the bar.
He doesn't back away. Instead, he takes a slow step into my space.
My instincts scream at me to retreat, but my spine hits the hard wooden edge of the booth behind me. I am trapped.
He takes another step, closing the distance completely. He is so close I can smell him. He doesn't smell like cheap cologne or sweat. He smells like bergamot, dark woods, and the cold, metallic tang of gunpowder.
He lifts his arms, planting a large, heavy hand on the wooden table on either side of my hips.
He cages me in.
I am completely engulfed by his shadow. The heat of his body wraps around me, suffocating and heavy. My breath hitches, my chest brushing against his expensive suit jacket with every frantic inhale.
He lowers his head, leaning down until his face is mere inches from mine.
"What do you think you are doing?" he asks.
His voice is a low, rough murmur meant only for me.
I swallow hard, my throat is sandpaper-dry. "Let him go."
"He stole something that belongs to me."
"I don't care," I whisper, my voice shaking despite my desperate attempt to keep it steady. "You are not doing this. You are not hurting him in front of me."
His jaw tightens. A muscle twitches in his cheek. He studies my face, his eyes tracking the frantic pulse beating wildly at the base of my throat. He is dissecting me. He is stripping away the cheap uniform, the tough exterior, and looking straight into the terrified, broken core of who I am.
He lifts his right hand from the table.
I flinch, a hard, involuntary jerk of my shoulders.
He doesn't hit me. His large, rough fingers wrap around my jaw.
His grip is firm, but it doesn't bruise. He holds my face in place, forcing me to look up into his soulless, black eyes. The callouses on his fingers scrape lightly against my skin. It is the most degrading, terrifying, and intensely intimate touch I have ever experienced.
My breath stalls completely in my lungs.
He tilts my head up just a fraction more. His thumb shifts, dragging across the fullness of my lower lip.
A violent, electric shock rips straight down my spine.
I gasp, my lips parting instinctively under the rough pad of his thumb.
His eyes darken, the pupils expanding until they nearly swallow the iris. He stares at my mouth, his chest rising with breath. For one terrifying second, I think he is going to kiss me. I think he is going to completely devour me right here in the middle of this filthy bar.
"Get him up," he orders, his voice dropping an octave deeper. He doesn't break eye contact with me.
Behind him, the younger man hauls the bleeding patron off the floor.
"We are leaving," the giant says.
His thumb drags across my lip one last time, a brand burned directly into my skin.
He releases my jaw. He steps back, the sudden absence of his heat leaving me cold and entirely hollow. He doesn't say another word to me. He turns his back, adjusting the cuffs of his suit jacket as if he didn't just rip the air straight out of my lungs, and walks toward the front doors.
His men follow him, dragging the sobbing patron between them.
The heavy wooden doors swing shut behind them.
They are gone.
The silence in the bar lasts for ten agonizing seconds. And then, the noise violently rushes back in. The jukebox seems twice as loud. People start whispering, moving, picking up overturned chairs.
I don't move.
I am frozen against the wooden booth, my hands gripping the edge of the table behind my back so tightly my knuckles are white.
"Liv!"
Sofia’s voice cuts through the ringing in my ears. She rushes across the aisle, grabbing my shoulders. Her eyes are wide with panic, her face as pale as mine.
"Liv, are you crazy? Are you out of your fucking mind?" She gives me a hard shake. "Do you have any idea how close you just came to dying?"
I blink, the blurry shapes of the bar slowly coming back into focus.
"I..." My voice cracks. I clear my throat, trying to force the words out. "I'm fine. He's gone."
"He didn't hurt you?" Sofia asks, her hands frantically checking my arms, my face, looking for blood.
"No. He didn't."
"I have to clean this up," I mutter, pointing a shaking finger at the shattered glass and the smear of blood on the floorboards.
"I'll do it," Sofia says firmly, pushing me gently toward the back hallway. "Go to the back. Go take a minute. You are ghost-white."
I don't argue. I can't.
I turn and walk on numb legs, pushing through the swinging doors and stumbling down the narrow, dimly lit hallway toward the employee bathroom.
I push the heavy door open, slip inside, and lock the deadbolt with a loud, metallic click.
The bathroom is tiny, smelling of cheap bleach and damp paper towels. I walk over to the cracked mirror above the sink and grip the porcelain edges with both hands.
I look at my reflection.
My eyes are wide, feral, and completely terrified. My chest is heaving. But it isn't the fear that makes a hot, sickening wave of nausea rise in my throat.
It is the heavy, pulsing heat completely pooling between my thighs.
My knees buckle. I sink to the dirty tile floor, pressing my back against the locked door, and pull my knees tight against my chest.
I am shaking. My entire body is trembling uncontrollably.
No. No, no, no.
I squeeze my eyes shut, burying my face in my knees. I want to scrub my skin raw. I want to bleach my brain.
I fought him. I looked at a violent, dangerous man who was hurting someone, a man who represented every single thing I swore to hate in this world, and my body betrayed me.
Maybe it’s true what psychologists say. ‘Adults end up repeating the childhood they had. It is a vicious circle the mind hardly breaks free from.”
My core aches. My skin is hypersensitive, burning where his heavy hands caged me in. The ghost of his rough thumb dragging across my lower lip sends another sharp, humiliating twist of desire straight to my center.
I let out a ragged, muffled sob.
It makes me sick. It makes me want to rip my own skin off. I spent my entire life building an impenetrable fortress around my body and my autonomy, specifically to keep men like him out. Men who use their physical size and their power to subjugate the weak. Men who smell like violence.
And yet, when he caged me against that booth, when his overwhelming dominance completely swallowed me, I didn't just feel terror.
I felt a dark, violent rush of arousal.
I press the heels of my hands into my eyes until I see stars.
"It's just adrenaline," I whisper fiercely to the empty bathroom. "It's just the fear. That's all it is."
I repeat the lie over and over again in the dark, trying to force my racing heart to slow down. I try to focus on the seaside bakery. I try to picture the white subway tiles and the smell of yeast.
But all I can see are pitch-black, soulless eyes.
All I can feel is the rough scrape of a calloused thumb against my mouth.