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As my father collapses to the floor, I know that he’s dead. Yet I can’t stop the question from bubbling up out of my throat, as if I need more confirmation than what my own eyes just saw.
“Did you… Did you kill him?”
“Yes.” Elio steps over my father – my father’s body – and crouches in front of me once more, tipping my chin up until my gaze is snapped away from the blood pooling beneath my father’s head.
“What do you think I usually do to men who steal things from me?”
“I’m not a thing to be stolen,” I whisper.
“No,” he seethes, eyes flashing. “You’re my wife. Which makes what he did infinitely fucking worse. He took you. And then he sat on that fucking couch and he watched.”
He drags a vicious hand through his hair, revealing a crusted patch of dried blood at his temple. My hand trembles violently as I raise it to the bloodied place. Elio’s eyes close, and a look of pain that I don’t think is related to his head wound flickers over his features.
“We have to go,” he murmurs, catching my fingers in his and opening his eyes. “It’s time to go home with me, Songbird.”
Home with him. Home with the man who killed my father. Home to a life I don’t even know how to inhabit now.
Elio doesn’t wait for me to stand up or answer. He scoops me up and carries me from the room. How many times has it been like this for us? Him carrying me through some kind of maelstrom into the dark, hushed safety of his cage beyond?
How many times will it happen again?
Elio gives instructions to someone, but I don’t see who it is. I’ve turned my face into his lapel and my body doesn’t know if it wants to vomit or sob, so I just hold myself shaking and silent against his chest.
“I’m going to get Caruso to take us back,” Elio says above my hiding face. “You three stay here and clean up this fucking mess. There’s a boat and lots of water out there. Go feed the fucking sharks.”
“What about that girl,” says the other person, and by the voice I think it’s Curse. “Bridget. She ran off somewhere.”
“I don’t give a fuck about what happens to her,” Elio snaps. “She can go find some new sugar daddy to leech off of or go starve in the fucking jungle for all I care. Just clean this place the fuck up, pay the staff enough to keep them fucking quiet, then get out.”
“Understood.”
With my face pressed into Elio’s chest the way it is, I barely notice when we pass out of the house and into the sunshine. I feel it on me, but I don’t see it. I don’t even move when Elio carefully fastens a pair of protective earphones over my ears for a helicopter ride back out over the water. After that, we’re in a car, then in a plane, then in a car again.
And then…
We’re home.
Elio carries me inside, taking me all the way up the stairs to our bedroom. He spent an obsessive amount of time cleaning the wounds on my hands and knees on the flight back here, hunched over my body, vibrating with tense focus as he pulled little slivers out one by one. My palms and knees are freshly bandaged now, and I had ice pressed to my mouth for most of the drive here.
My skin is going to heal.
It’s the rest of me I’m not so sure about.
He sets me down on the edge of the bed, passing into the other bedroom and then reappearing with a fluffy robe that he sets down. He doesn’t speak as he bends over me and begins to undo the many minute fasteners on the back of my wedding gown. What’s left of it, at least.
He peels the dress away from my back, rubbing the tips of his fingers into the red spots the dress has chafed me. So delicately, like he’s handling an injured child, he peels one sleeve down my limp arm, then the other. Hooking one strong arm around my back, he lifts me just enough to slide the skirt out from under my bottom. Once it’s off, he lets the whole thing fall to the floor.
I sit there and look at the dress crumpled on the floor, naked apart from my panties, and I begin to weep.
I don’t ever remember crying like this. Maybe once, when they told me Mom was gone. Great, sucking sobs that make me feel like I’ll never take in a real breath again.
I’m lifted up again, and this time when I’m set back down it’s in Elio’s lap. He presses the scarred side of his jaw against the top of my head, hushing me quietly, sliding his tender leather touch up and down my bare spine. And it feels so wrong, to crave comfort from him now. Now, when I watched him kill in front of me, for me, yet again.
But this time he wasn’t killing some faceless soldier.
He killed my father.
“Did you know?” I choke out between strangled bouts of crying. “Did you know about the debt that killed my mother?”
