Chapter 4
ROXANA
Ikeep telling myself that it is to placate Silas after yesterday evening, and not because I want to procrastinate, or better yet, avoid writing my next book altogether, that I’ve decided to play the good wife for the night.
I’ve cranked up the thermostat so I can wear the red bodycon dress Silas likes without getting cold.
I’ve set the table and taken out the ornate brass candelabras, heirlooms passed down from Silas’s grandmother.
Or was it a great-aunt? In any case, I’ve equipped them with fresh candles and lit them.
Spaced evenly on the table, they’re currently the main source of light in the room, along with the fluorescent strips underneath the kitchen cabinets.
The ground floor of our house is open plan.
An archway leads from the antechamber to the kitchen, and our long rectangular living room runs parallel to both, with the unnecessarily large dining table that Silas insisted on connecting them.
And even though Silas had the whole house refurbished when he first moved in, equipping it with no flair modern furniture—something I would have never agreed to had we already lived together—the hardwood floor is original, as evidenced by its many scratches and irregularities.
Silas hates these, but I think they give character to our otherwise characterless home.
I’m prancing around the kitchen barefoot, putting a tray of homemade Yorkshire puddings into the oven and transferring veggies and potatoes into serving dishes.
I take the wine out of the fridge—wondering if Silas will notice that the bottle’s already half empty—when the candle flames flicker and shadows dance across the ceiling almost as if in a sudden draft.
I set the bottle on the butcher-block counter and turn to the side to get the corkscrew out of its drawer.
And that’s when I notice the looming shadow in the archway, imposing and completely motionless.
“Silas, is that you?” I ask uncertainly.
I am unsettled, because even though I recognise his silhouette—I would recognise it anywhere in the world—it is very unlike him to enter the house silently and without announcing himself.
Besides ... he stands differently. Taller and firmer, with his shoulders squared broader, as if his posture had not been the least deformed by years and years of hunching over papers to be graded.
“You’re just in time. Dinner’s almost ready. Since we didn’t have one yesterday, I made roast beef. With Yorkshire puddings, your favourite,” I chirp, the sound of my voice shrill when contrasted with Silas’s silence, oppressive like a descending storm.
He doesn’t reply. He just stands there completely still, watching me, his face concealed in the shadow of the antechamber. But its intent glare is perceptible regardless on a subconscious, visceral level.
“Silas? Is something the matter?”
He steps inside the kitchen, finally, and dim though it is, light floods his face, familiar and unfamiliar at once.
It’s as if some of its well-ingrained, fatigued lines had been smoothened out only to be replaced by different ones, ones that are like the slashes of a blade, carving a cruel grimace onto his face.
“Silas, what happened?”
In a surge of panic that I would’ve never thought him capable of inciting in me, I ransack my memory for something that I could have done to anger him.
But I come up with nothing. I didn’t cheat on him, I never once spent any significant amount of money without his permission, I haven’t been anything but an exemplary little wife to him.
What then, did he get fired? Can he get fired when he’s on tenure?
A sharp smell of burnt batter stings in my nostrils, and I make for the oven to take the Yorkshire puddings out.
“Leave it.” A low, gravelly voice stops me in my tracks, its cadence flat and foreign, but its timbre one I’d recognise in my sleep.
“What?”
“I said leave it,” Silas repeats, stepping closer to me.
I resist the urge to back away from him.
“Silas, you’re scaring me.”
“Good. Terror is the correct reaction to me,” he says, and the corner of his mouth twitches in something almost, but not quite like humour.
Then, too fast for me to fully comprehend the purpose of the movement, he sweeps my carefully arranged plates, glasses and candelabras off the table with one purposeful swing of his arm.
I’m so slow to register what has happened that the sound of china breaking reaches my ears after a delay, desynchronised from what my eyes are telling me, and as if unrelated to the shards of glass and porcelain on the ground.
Breath hitches in my throat, my lungs closing in, almost like my body has decided that it’s better to suffocate than to suffer the wrath of a husband gone insane.
I’m back in that second-floor bathroom on the last day of November, reaching for the final cigarette of my life, my memories flashing before my eyes.
But before I can either die or re-acquaint myself with the ability to breathe, Silas advances upon me, the motion fluid and menacing.
His hands encircle my waist, fingers digging into my lower ribs, and a yelp slips past my lips as he lifts me and sets me hard onto the cleared table.
His face burrows into my hair. His breath tickles me, and I giggle breathlessly.
“Silas, what are you doing?”
I press my palms into his chest, trying to push him away, force him to look at me, talk to me, explain what is happening. But he disregards my efforts, as unmoveable as a mountain.
The smell of burning gets sharper, but I don’t care.
“What am I doing?” he rasps, repeating after me. “I’m fucking a son into you is what I’m doing.”
Heat floods me from head to toe and pools in my abdomen. I let out a shocked gasp. I don’t remember the last time he spoke to me that way.
“It might be a girl, you know?” I tease him, unable to help myself, even though on a semi-conscious level, I feel inappropriate to make the remark, embarrassed the same way I would be if I told a joke and no one laughed.
“No.” A more substantial waft of his breath burns on my exposed skin as he forces the word out with controlled aggression in his voice. “No, I only make sons.”
“Okay, Daddy.” It slips out before I can stop myself, my alarm quickly morphing into intrigued excitement.
Silas only growls in response. He reaches underneath my skirt with both his hands.
I press my palms against the smooth table surface, readying to hoist myself up to allow him to pull my panties down.
But instead of doing that, he hooks his fingers around the lace, gripping it firmly.
The ripping sound is shockingly loud for so little fabric, but I have no time to dwell on that.
Because he slides the shreds of my torn thong down my legs and tosses them unceremoniously to the floor.
He straightens, pulling his face away from me, rich brown hair with very little grey in it falling into his eyes.
He pushes my shoulders, tilting me backwards so that I am propped up on my elbows behind me.
Then he grabs my hips, yanking me forward until my weight rests mostly on the small of my back.
With the skirt of my dress hitched up, my pussy faces him, unconcealed and ready for the taking.
My breath quickens, my pulse hammering in my ears.
He slides his hand up my inner thigh without hesitation, three fingers already curling into a claw. He breaches my entrance with a savage jab, and I cry out, flinching.
Rubbing my clit with his thumb, Silas lets out a displeased, guttural grumble.
“You’re not ready for me,” he says as he continues to forcefully finger-fuck me, his voice low and stern. “Today will be the only time I’ll forgive you for that without consequences.”
I let out a half-moan, half-wail as he stops thrusting with his hand and instead presses his fingertips hard into my front wall. I seize around them, a wave of bliss washing over me. I moan, closing my eyes.
“From now on, I want you to think day and night about my cock jetting my seed into you. I want you to touch yourself often enough to keep your panties constantly drenched, but never enough to come on your own,” he drones on, aligning his knuckles and then spreading them apart to stretch me.
“Because from now on, you only come when I let you. And when I arrive to take you, I expect your cunt to be starved for me and eager to milk every drop of my cum from me.”
He twists his hand around in my pussy with a squelch of my mounting arousal, and I gasp. When was the last time I was this wet on my own? When his knuckles rub over my clit, my head lolls back.
“If you let yourself be this unprepared for me again, I’m going to punish you,” he threatens with a sinister echo to his voice.
And in my mind, I’m twenty again and bent over his knee, my ass getting paddled into oblivion for whatever arbitrary reason, electric pleasure rippling through me from the Venus balls he had stuffed inside me beforehand.
“Yes, Daddy,” I drawl, my voice husky.
“Don’t call me that,” he forces through his clenched teeth, strict and angry.
Oh, this really is shaping up to be the best fuck I’ve had in three years.
“I think I need some serious discipline, Daddy. Until I get it, I’ll be calling you anything I want.”
With his hair still falling into his eyes, Silas smirks lop-sidedly, his crooked grin new and cruel, but alluring. The smell of burning is getting impossible to ignore, and the darkened room is hazier, filling up with smoke escaping from the oven.
“You won’t be calling me anything at all,” Silas tells me with an ominous edge to his voice. “Because I’ll have you screaming, not speaking. Now stay like this. Don’t move.”
“Yes, Daddy,” I trill, but he shoots me a death glare through strands of his hair before undoing his belt with a violent tug.