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It’s like a moldy, distinct smell that can’t be masked with his aftershave. That is what I remember about being with him, feeling like death and the scent of it hanging in the air.
I’m shaking and trembling. It’s so bad I can’t focus.
It only stops when he moves away and smiles at me. He walks through the door whistling and I stay where I am, watching. Watching and wondering what the hell is happening.
What the hell just happened?
Finding my strength to move, I slide off the bed. My feet connect with the wooden floor and the coldness from the room seeps into my soles.
Present for me downstairs…
What could that be? I don’t have anything like that here. Anything that could be deemed as a present. No, there’s nothing like that for me in Italy at all let alone in this house.
I take a few steps to the door and listen out first before venturing down the corridor that leads to the grand staircase.
I’m still listening out and I realize something. It’s quiet…
Why is it so quiet? The house isn’t normally so quiet. People are usually milling around at this hour.
Night fell long ago. There are supposed to be guards stationed around and the maids and servants doing their last rounds for the day to finish up.
Antonio is always downstairs with someone or talking it up on the phone while his business associates fuck me.
I can’t believe it’s me thinking that. I can’t believe this is what happened to me. Me the girl who saved herself for one man.
I arrive downstairs and the place is so quiet you could hear a pin drop.
Heading to Antonio’s office, I notice his door is wide open.
When I get to it I stop short and freeze right up and my hands fly up to my mouth in horror at the sight before me.
Antonio is …
His head…God… His head is on the floor next to his feet and his headless body is sitting in his chair behind his desk. There are two bullet wounds in his chest and blood everywhere.
I feel lightheaded and faint, but I don’t fall. I can’t. The part of my brain that was clinging on to hope awakens and I see what Tobias meant bypresent.
Freedom.
That’s what the gruesome horrific sight before me is. It’s freedom.
Freedom ten years later. Today marks the tenth year I’ve been his prisoner.
So… it’s freedom.
Freedom from a man who abused me in so many ways. It means freedom from a debt I’ve repaid many times over.
It’s hope in the darkness.
It’s so quiet and no one else is around. I don’t know what the hell happened here, because my late husband was supposed to be untouchable and feared in two hemispheres. Nobody is supposed to be able to get to him, yet Tobias did.
He did. And left me alive?
I’m not stupid…that means something. I don’t know what it means yet, or what he wants but I suppose I’ll find out soon enough.
Right now I have freedom and by God I am going to take it.
Chapter Five
