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Chapter 1
Deirdre
“I’m not marrying you.”
I say it over and over again in the car on the way back from the cemetery. I say it so much that it becomes a sort of whispered chant, or a prayer, the words eventually rendered meaningless in their repetition.
They must be meaningless to Elio too. Because he doesn’t say a single thing in response.
Other than his earlier threat, the threat to marry him or else he’ll tell Darragh where my dad is, he hasn’t spoken again. He’s silent in his fury, his gloved hands hard on the steering wheel, his jaw set. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen his dark eyes so focused. Simultaneously trained on the road ahead and sweeping dangerously from side to side, as if expecting more men with guns to jump out of some shadowy place on the sidelines, like a fucking video game.
Only it’s not a video game. It’s my life.
Except it doesn’t feel like real life. I feel like I’m floating outside of it. Like this is all happening to someone else. I’m shaking, my teeth chattering so badly that my words become a mangled mess, but I barely feel it.
We pull into the long drive and through the gate at Elio’s mansion. More men than I’ve ever seen here before are pacing and standing guard outside, with wary eyes and weapons that I know are there even if I can’t see them yet. I look at them, all those men and their guns, and suddenly I can’t fucking take it anymore. It’s too much. Too much blood pooling at the edges of my life. Eventually, it all starts seeping inside to the centre. Staining. Ruining.
As soon as the car stops and the door is unlocked, my seatbelt is off and I’m running. Running who the hell knows where. I certainly don’t. Some part of me is blithely aware that this is a pointless exercise, that I’m a rat in a cage sprinting straight towards the outer edge of the enclosure and that I’ll never in a million years be able to scale that brutal wall.
Another part, the mindless, shaking, rat-brain part, keeps on fucking running.
My lungs burn and my hair whips out behind as I head blindly for the trees. Shouts go up around me, and a man from the house is already chasing me. He’s almost within reach. His bare, tattooed hand rises at the periphery of my vision, about to clamp down on my arm. Even though I know rationally that this man won’t hurt me, not with Elio here, I can’t truly believe it. The fear has become a frenzy and I have to get out, get away, get somewhere, anywhere. Anywhere but here.
The man slips slightly in the slush, then catches himself. His fingers stab towards me again, disembodied on the periphery, like a severed ghost hand.
But then I hear a voice, not the voice of the man right behind me but his voice. The voice that shapes so much of my life these days. A voice that has commanded and cajoled, soothed and seared. It’s the first time I’ve heard his voice since he told me I’d marry him in the car and that suddenly feels painfully long ago.
It’s a voice I react to even through the adrenaline-fuelled numbness of my flight, a voice that I want to reach for and run from all at once.
“Don’t fucking touch her!” Elio snarls. “Nobody touches her but me.”
Nobody touches me but him.
Because I’m his.
His debtor. His Songbird.
His wife.
No.
That was never supposed to be the way this ended. There was always supposed to be a way out for me. Far-off, maybe, and small as a speck of dust on the horizon, but there all the same. Pay the money. Get my life back.
The running makes my blood pound hard. The place between my legs hurts. And I want to cry and laugh at the same time, because who am I to rant about escaping him when I’m the one who wanted him with me tonight? When I’m the one who let him choke me, let him fuck me?
When I’m the one who took his hand in the snow at Mom’s grave because I wasn’t sure how the hell I would stand up without him?
I can barely stand up now. My knees buckle. I don’t cry out, simply suck in a rattled gasp as I go down. But he has me, he has me, and I should have fucking known he would.
Because he would never let me fall.
And he would never let me go.
Nobody touches her but me.
The strength goes out of me all at once. I don’t scream, I don’t fight him. I don’t even go back to my muttered prayer of “I won’t marry you.” I just sag against the roiling wall of his chest, hard and hot as living stone. After my manic, half-assed escape attempt I half-expect him to toss me over his shoulder caveman-style, but he doesn’t. He lifts me against his chest, cradling me like I weigh no more than a small child, before turning and taking me back towards the house with powerful, furiously measured strides.
Elio takes me through the front door and absurdly, giddy with the jittery trauma of the night, I think, Isn’t this how a groom carries his bride across the threshold?
