Chapter Four
Isobel
Something was sketchy about Damien. It wasn’t about his personality. I had known that he was a psychopath from the minute I set eyes on him.
Something about his lifestyle was off.
He made shady calls. He’d disappear for hours and lock himself up in his study.
He left home early before I woke up, so I never saw him.
And when he came back, he’d creep up behind me when I was groggy and slip into me from behind, fucking me so hard until I had come at least twice before he cuddled me possessively to sleep.
He was like a ghost that haunted me. I never really saw him, but I felt his presence. It almost made me think he was a figment of my imagination.
After curling up on the couch in the library to read and filling myself full with wine, I got bored. Being married to Damien was like bondage. I could never really go anywhere unless it was with him. It frustrated me as much as it got under my skin.
Who knew clearing off my debts would make me a prisoner? It was highly ironic.
I left the library, and I was supposed to make my way back to the room to take a shower. But exploring the east wing of the house was tempting, so I caved in. Most of the time, the maids reminded me that the east wing belonged to Damien and was off-limits.
I didn’t care right now. If he wanted to protect the east wing so badly, then he should have been home. With me.
The hallway was quiet. Something about the air was colder. I felt the chills settle deep in my bones. The icy air danced around my skin, hardening my nipples against the material of my dress.
The lighting here was dim, illuminating the dark red walls with abstract paintings and crimson carpets. No one was in sight, and that should have been more than enough reason for me to turn around and leave, but I didn’t.
I kept on walking until I got to the last door on the floor. I looked over my shoulder, swallowing softly. Then I convinced myself that since no one was around to stop me, I wasn’t doing anything wrong.
So I let myself in.
The room smelled like wood, with a hint of leather, and Damien’s signature scent, which suggested he used the place frequently. It was a study with large, imposing shelves stacked with strange files. The massive mahogany desk was a little disorganized with papers lying on it.
The half-filled glass of whiskey made me realize that he must have had to step out while he was working. In all the weeks we’d been married, I had come to know Damien as a neat freak. He wouldn’t leave the space disorganized if it weren’t important.
Curiosity niggled at the back of my mind, making me indulge in the papers on the desk. They were boring sales papers, eliciting a snort from me. I inhaled the whiskey, catching a whiff of something that reminded me of him.
I slumped into his seat, tucking my hair behind my ear as I proceeded to raid his desk drawers. They were all papers until I opened the last one.
It was an old brown file.
Hesitance gnawed at me. I should shut the drawer and head back to my room to wait for Damien to get home. But I found myself prying it open.
My eyes widened as they landed on the picture hanging on the front page.
It was a picture of me in a short powder-blue dress. I was barefoot, grinning from ear to ear as Maria dragged me through the streets. Maria’s shadowy figure wasn’t the highlight of the picture. It was me. It looked like it was strategically captured by someone who had been watching me for a while.
I remember that night.
It was a few days after I mysteriously lost my job at the diner due to my boss, Dean, being murdered. I had been down, not wanting to socialize, but Maria dragged me to the club to get me drunk.
She said I wouldn’t feel anything anymore. And she was right.
My fingers trembled incessantly. Why did Damien have this picture of me? I tried to breathe in, but every breath I dragged in punctured my lungs like an arrow. Tears instantly blurred my vision.
I was horrified when I scanned through the content of the file.
It was like a series of biodata pages, all about me. Even the explicit information about my life. It chronicled ... me.
“Oh, my God...” My shaky hands gave the file away. “I-I don’t understand ... oh, my God...”
Tears streamed down my cheeks. The obvious reality stared me in the face, but I didn’t want to believe it. I didn’t want to admit that truth to myself.
My lungs burned so much. I began pulling out other drawers like a maniac, and I let out a scream when I saw two pistols lying in one of the drawers.
I slapped my palms over my mouth, wanting to stifle my sobs as much as I could.
Who was this man?
I rushed to my feet, leaving the papers to drop to the floor with a thud. The world spun on its axis, feeling as though it was about to crash beneath my feet.
My head throbbed, and I wanted to believe I was deluded until I crashed into a wall.
I swung my head up and froze.
Those dark eyes watched me like a predator would watch its prey before it hunted it down. His jaw was set, clenching and unclenching, and his body felt oddly cold against mine.
I gasped, stepping backward.
Knowing what I knew now, horror bled into me, racking my body with panic that I had no control over how hard I was trembling.
“You shouldn’t be in here, Red.” He folded his arms under his chest. His biceps flexed with the movements, bunching the short sleeves of his thick dark tee that was tucked into gray slacks.
“Who are you?” My voice was thin with fear.
“Your husband.” He answered so casually, like I hadn’t just found out that he had been in the shadows, watching me like some freak for the past three years of my life. “You saw everything.” He spoke up again as he gave me a once-over.
Damien’s chill was like a calm before a storm. It turned my blood into ice and slowed my breathing.
“You’ve been watching me ... you’ve been stalking me for three years. What kind of a freak are you?” I whispered, in shock, unable to wrap my head around what was unfolding before me right now.
He strode forward.
“Don’t come close!” I snapped, staggering backward. My breath broke harshly when my back hit the desk behind me.
“You won’t tell me what to do. You are my wife. I’ll do whatever the fuck I want with you,” he said through his teeth, his eyes darkening as he closed the distance between us.
I yelped when he leaned into me, grabbing the edge of the desk so tightly, I feared he’d break it in two.
I turned my face to the side, confused about why I wouldn’t meet his gaze. I was scared of him, but I was more scared of losing my resolve.
“I saw the guns...” I whimpered. “Do you kill people? What do you even do?”
“I am obsessed with you, Isobel,” he murmured, his voice thick and gravelly.
“So much so that you are ingrained in every corner of my mind. My existence without you is fucking bleak. I’m obsessed with you, so much so that I didn’t hesitate to kill Dean and those fuckers who molested you back at the diner. ”
My eyes snapped to him, my heart thundering in my chest. “W-what?”
“I’d have killed that fucker Ned if I wanted to,” he admitted, blatantly.
My throat closed up. “You murdered Dean?”
My head was spinning so much that another round of tears welled up in my eyes.
A few days after Dean died, the bodies of several men were found in an alley close to the diner downtown.
When they identified them, I didn’t know how to feel about their deaths because all they had done at work was harass me.
I shoved that event to the back of my mind.
I didn’t expect that it’d come back to haunt me.
“And the others. For you.” His eyes flickered to my lips. “I’d kill for you, Red. I’ve done it before, and I won’t hesitate to do it again. That’s how much control you have over me.”
“Oh, my God...”
“What? You are horrified?” His lips lifted in a cold smirk. “I work with the Sicilian Mafia. I have shed more blood than I can think of. So, yes, I won’t think twice about shedding more blood because of you.”
I slapped my palms over my mouth.
It made so much sense. Too much sense, even. The secrecy. The late-night calls. His sheer ruthlessness was like a machine that had been programmed to act that way. The creepy family mansion with scary men in suits and a father who looked like he belonged in a death game.
“You are a monster.”
I choked out.
His hand gripped my waist harshly, and he spun me around. I gasped as I felt his bulge nestle between my ass cheeks. He didn’t stop there. He wrapped his hand around my throat from behind and choked me.
“Well,” he stroked my pulse, basking in the fact that he had my life at the tip of his fingers, “it’s a good thing we have forever so you get to see more of the twisted things I’m capable of.”
I hated this. I hated that, as much as I was racked with horror, my body came alive with such an intensity that it scared me. I had never been touched and felt that alive. When Damien touched me, it felt like I was being given a reason to live.
I hated that I wanted him so much that it fucking hurt. I hated that my own body, my own mind, had turned against me.
He was feral, excessively needy, and from the brutish way he touched me, anticipation settled within me like a pang.
He pushed my dress up and ripped my panties off my body. I could barely move because the delicious friction my smeared thigh created made me want to moan so hard.
“You are already so wet for me like my dirty little slut.” His dark and teasing voice against my skin tightened my body with need. “You want me so much, and you fucking hate it.” He parted my folds with his fingers, and I moaned.
“Oh, God. There.”
“This body,” he spanked my pussy hard, “is all mine.”
His buckle clattered as it came off, and I shivered when I felt the tip of his cock at the entrance of my wet cunt. I wiggled against him, desperate for friction, but it only made him chuckle at my whorish attempt to have him.
“Look at you.” His hands slid down to grab a tit, cupping it through my dress. “All desperate to have my cock.”
“Please,” I begged. I hated having to beg for anything because I always thought I was fine on my own, but right now, I begged because of how much I wanted.
“Yes, beg for it. Tell me how badly you want it.” He pinched a nipple.
“So badly,” I breathed.
“Such a slut.” He drove into me with a force that would have thrown me forward if he weren’t holding me to his front with a strong grip.
“Ah!”
“You like that?” He massaged my tits, pulling out of me and slamming back into me again.
“Yes!”
His thrusts were harsh and brutal, laced with a precision that was aimed to wreck me.
I pushed back at him, rotating my hips as unbridled moans unfurled from my lips.
My pussy walls seemed to have gotten used to his cock.
They wept around me, arousal dripping down my thighs shamelessly as my walls contracted around him.
“Your cunt is strangling me, Red.” His palms glided over my chest with such unabashed movements as his cock viciously tore through me, in and out at a ridiculously fast pace.
My tits bounced. My face was covered in sweat, and I could feel some strands of my hair sticking to my skin. My nipples were scraping against the fabric of my dress in such a sensitive friction, and when he tugged at them, my eyes rolled back in their sockets.
Ecstasy consumed me and bled into my vision. My eyes drifted shut, and I threw my head backward, letting my husband’s merciless thrusts control me. Damien’s grunts sounded like music to my ears. They reeked of so much satisfaction.
His fingers glided over my hip bone like he knew with wicked conviction that every inch of my body belonged to him.
“Maybe you are just as twisted as I am.” He rolled his hips, slamming into me again.
His fingers ran over my collarbone, going over to spread my lips in such a filthy manner.
“These hands are a killer’s hands, yet you come undone and alive when they touch you.
And the way you strangle my cock is so fucking beautiful,” he growled, increasing the pace of his thrusts.
The room swirled into one huge labyrinth beneath my vision. Worlds collided beneath my feet, and my brain felt like it had been reprogrammed into something that was solely made to please the man pounding into me from behind with the strength of a stallion.
“Oh-yes-yes-Damien.” I stuttered through moans, muttering even words I couldn’t bring myself to understand.
Damien was insatiable. Even with the way his cock mercilessly plunged in and out of me, his hands were all over my body like he couldn’t get enough of me, like the way I was screaming wasn’t enough for him.
“Your tightness drives me so fucking insane!” he grunted, digging his fingers into my hip to keep me in place.
I brought my hand to him that was around my neck, wanting so badly to keep it there.
When I saw the way our wedding bands collided under the lights, I was awestruck by their perfect alignment.
We fit together like pieces of a puzzle, each ring bearing a symbol of our eternal commitment to each other.
And for a split second, I basked in it, in my husband fucking my brains out, so much so that I couldn’t hold back my own dirty moans.
It was art.
It was perfect.
“I want you to come with me, Red. I want you to shatter around my cock like you were always meant to.” I craned my neck at his command, brushing my lips against his.
Then I kissed him hard.
I let him consume me. He kissed me back with equal fervor, our moans and grunts muffled. My body locked against him as his cock swelled inside me. Our release clashed, coursing through us like the aggressive waves of the ocean on a dark, stormy night.
Damien spilled into me, and my cunt swallowed it up without letting a single drop go.
I whimpered against his lips, cupping the side of his face and caressing it softly.
“You drive me insane as much as you keep this cold heart of mine beating,” he whispered.
I bit my lips, withholding the words that hung on my tongue.
“We should slip you into something more beautiful.”
“Why?”
“We are heading out.”
“Where?”
“We’re having dinner at my father’s mansion.”