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But then again, if I were a better man, I wouldn’t have done the things I’ve done to have the money I have. I wouldn’t have been able to pay her papà and help keep her head above water from the dark and shadowy sidelines. And I wouldn’t have been there to take a fucking bullet for her seconds into her twentieth birthday.
“Doesn’t matter. Come on,” is all I say in reply.
Chapter 35
Deirdre
Other than the fact that we walk into my lecture late and make everyone turn and stare, today goes a lot smoother than yesterday. I’m actually able to somewhat focus, and when Elio notices me squirming to keep weight off tender places, he folds up his leather jacket and shoves it under me like a cushion while giving me a dark look that tells me not to argue or refuse him.
Which is pretty much the last thing I expect him to do. Wasn’t he the one who told me if I didn’t listen, if I wasn’t ready for school, that I’d be too sore to sit on the seats? I assumed that would be part of the punishment, but now here he is turning his own jacket into a pillow for me. Between this and the fact that he sent the letters to my students (I watched him put them in the mailbox myself as we left the property this morning) I can’t get my head around who or what he is these days.
A monster. A man. Some scarred, mangled mixture of the two.
And the fact that I seem to crave his touch more and more, the fact that I stayed bent over for him this morning, that I didn’t even wash his claim off my skin, means I don’t even know who I am, either. From the very first night he took me, there’s been this slow, steady, toxic pulse of desire even inside my rage against him. And it only seems to be getting stronger. Faster.
I almost lost my virginity to him this morning. It was only his decision to pull his cock away, and not anything I did, that kept that from happening.
Why didn’t he do it?
Did I want him to?
I can’t answer that question definitively, which only makes me even more confused. When Brian tried to push himself on me, that fumbling, drunken night in his apartment, I hadn’t wanted any part of it. I’d liked him well enough on our dates, but at that moment he became completely repulsive to me, and I couldn’t even stomach his beer-scented breath wafting over my skin. My whole body was filled with dread and nausea.
Why don’t I feel repulsed by Elio? Elio is ten times worse than an idiot like Brian. He’s literally killed people. He’s trapped me and punished me and coerced me. But I can’t even make myself as afraid of him as I was when Brian was against me, panting, his crotch tented stiffly at the front.
I wonder if my own thoughts somehow conjure him, because when we exit the building after my last lecture of the day, I hear that familiar voice calling my name.
“Deirdre? Deirdre! Hey, Red!”
Elio hears it, too, and his arm descends fast and hard around my shoulders, like the possessive downward sweep of a guillotine. He doesn’t stop walking, and neither do I, swept along by his long strides and the other people moving the same direction. God, I hate it, but it actually feels good. It feels good to be with Elio right now. To have his arm so tight around me. Brian’s showed up a bunch of times begging for me back, and I’d always been alone.
Not this time.
I don’t bother looking back. Elio’s got me too tightly pinned against his side. The crowd thins out as we head away from the school building until it’s just Elio and me on the sidewalk and a guy running a small poutine cart in the near vicinity.
At least, I thought it was just us. But then I hear the call of “Red!” again, along with the sound of boots hitting the slushy sidewalk in a jog. “Would you just stop and fucking talk to me?”
I’m fully prepared to ignore Brian like I’ve being doing up until now. I keep on walking, momentum pulling me forward, so that it takes me a second to realize Elio is no longer holding me, no longer walking beside me. I stop and spin just in time to see the black fingers of Elio’s right hand close around Brian’s throat as he backs him up against the brick wall of a building.
“How about I talk, you listen?” Elio murmurs so softly that goosebumps rise on my skin under my clothes and coat. Once again, Elio’s carrying my backpack, and it looks fucking insane, this hulking six-foot-four giant with a woman’s book bag on his shoulder and his fist around another man’s throat. I have to quell a horrible surge of something that feels icky and dark and wonderful at the sight of Elio towering over Brian the way he does. Brian’s not a small guy. He’s about six feet tall and I know he works out, but compared to Elio he looks like a gangly kid. And seeing Elio so totally subdue him does something to me. Something bad and wrong that I need to hide from, need to heal from.
If Brian wants to say anything now, he can’t. His eyes are wide, and his face is an alarming shade of crimson.
“You will not contact Deirdre. You will not touch her. If you ever see her again, you turn around and walk the other fucking away.”
Brian makes a gurgling sound that makes me think Elio has tightened his grip. His boots slip in the slush and he claws at Elio’s arm, but it has absolutely no effect. Elio’s only holding him with one fucking hand, his other one secured around the strap of the small backpack slung over his injured shoulder. Like he’s worried about my books falling into the salt-melted snow. And once again I feel that dark, wrong, lovely feeling. The feeling of being cared for, being protected when my own father couldn’t even have been bothered to do it before.
No. This is not a good thing. He’s not a good man.
And that not good man is about to murder someone right in front of me.
“Elio,” I whisper in alarm. “Please stop. Don’t kill him.”
I can’t witness a murder. I can’t watch Brian suffocate like this. I can’t.
A car pulls up beside us, and how fucked-up am I, how far-gone have I become, that my first instinct is fear that whoever’s in the car will get Elio in trouble? My reaction isn’t to turn to them for help, to save Brian and maybe even get myself out of Elio’s grip entirely. It’s alarm on Elio’s behalf.
The car is Elio’s, though, and Enzo pops out of it, hustling around the hood of the vehicle, his hand inside his jacket in a way that makes my stomach drop and the word gun repeat inside my head on an endless loop.
