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“Ah, Donni,” he said. “Didn’t I say you’d take care of me?”
The words from their first meeting, when he had tucked the flower behind her ear, gave her pause. She folded her arms, fingers brushing the gap in her torn sleeve, and saw him shoot a look her way. Like he knew every bad thing she’d ever done.
And he did, she supposed. Except for one thing.
A really big thing.
“You know I’m a murderer.” She picked at her nails, still crusted with blood. “Doesn’t that bother you? Doesn’t that make you afraid that I really will take care of you?”
“I pushed a man off a cliff for you, Adonica,” he said. “I think it’s clear where my loyalties lie.”
“Even though I’m not the idol you made me out to be?”
His mouth twitched into an unwilling smile. “I’ve never been very interested in girls who walk the straight and narrow. I’m sure a shrink would tell me that it’s because my fucked-up mother gave me a taste for emotionally unavailable women. But I didn’t fall for my mother. I fell for you.” Turning to keep her in sight, he said, “I imagine there’s very little you could say or do to shock me.”
“I’m not so sure about that,” Donni said, her eyes flicking to the hideous Lichtenstein painting. “I think I still have a few secrets that might turn you away.”
“Like?”
“Like me killing your father.”
His expectant smile flickered like a lamp on the verge of being extinguished. “What?”
“Marco,” said Donni. “He didn’t die of a heart-attack. That woman gave me two syringes, remember? I used the other one on him. I killed him, the same way I did Johnathan.”
There was no trace of a smile on his face now. “Why?”
“I don’t know. Maybe because he wasn’t the idolImade him out to be.” Her tone bittered. “He changed after I married him. Every year, it got worse. But when Johnathan talked to Marco, the changes got faster. More twisted. It was as if he had filled Marco with his poison. Poison that got into his head and clouded his mind, warping the way he saw the world—and me.”
She laughed unhappily.
“Oh, he wasfinewith the idea of my trauma when I let him believe my father had done it. That was what he assumed. He thought he was saving me from my past—and in a way, he was. But it wasn’t exactly the storybook ending he’d been counting on. And when he found out I had been attacked by a man he respected, and that I was a young woman and not a child, he got to thinking that maybe I had done something to deserve it. After all, Johnathan had shown himpicturesand apparently, according to my husband, I didn’t look unwilling enough in those pictures for him to consider it fuckingrape.”
Rafe had gone very still. “What?” he said, in a very different tone of voice. “But in the recording I saw—the one on the flashdrive—he said he never mentioned Johnathan’s name to you.”
“Not by name,” she said. “But then, he didn’t have to. There are hundreds of ways to bring someone up without talking about them at all, and Marco found every single one of them. Do you want to know why we were sleeping in separate rooms? Because he started accusing me of sleeping around. ‘The most expensive whore he ever paid for,’ he called me. When he got drunk at Brouchard’s and starting saying it to all his friends, I stopped letting him touch me. I told him that if he thought I was such a whore, I wouldn’t be giving it up to him for free.”
Tears pricked her eyes.
“It was never the same after that, for either of us. I think he really started to hate me that day. And then I found out—he was going to leave me. Even without the passports. You know he’s always forgetting to switch mail accounts. He’d arranged to leave the country, to start over in a new place, leaving me behind with this whole mess. The biggest fuck you he could think of, and he did it through our joint fucking email address. And then he had the nerve to accuse me of not doing enough to support his fuck up, when he’d done everything he could to sabotage me.”
Her breathing grew ragged.
“So I did it. I stabbed him with the needle. And for what it’s worth, I regretted it. Because I really did care about him once.” She cried softly. “Or at least, I thought I did.”
“Donni,” said Rafe. “Jesus. You—really did it, didn’t you?”
“I felt so trapped,” she said, in a small voice. Knowing that this was the end of it and feeling the desperate need to explain. “I just wanted someone to love me. But every man in my life ended up hurting me. My father was taken from me, my mentor took advantage of me, and my husband turned his back on me. And then you—y-you hurt me, too.”
She turned away before she could see the hatred on his face.
“There’s something wrong with me. I feel like I’m all broken and jagged inside. I thought I could fix it and get some of those pieces back, but every time I tried, I just made it worse. A man I’ve never even met spent almost a month torturing me because he hated me so much. That’s the kind of person I am, Rafael. That’s the woman you want. The kind who turns men into monsters.”
He stepped towards her and she stiffened, bracing herself for—what, exactly, she wasn’t sure. But it wasn’t the feel of his arm looping around his waist, pulling her in for an embrace.
“They were already monsters,” he said quietly. “Fuck my father. If he was getting ready to abandon you, then whatever love was ever there had already withered up and died. I don’t care if you’re broken or whole. You could walk through blood or broken glass, and I’d run after you just the same. I’ve already done both.”
“No,” she said, and if it weren’t for his broken arm, she would have pulled violently away. But hesitation trapped her when he spun her carefully around, forcing her to look at him. There was no hatred in his eyes, and what she saw in its stead scared her more than vengeance or violence. “No,” she said again. “It’s easy for you to say that now, but one day something will go wrong, and you’ll go too far or I will, and then—” she gulped “—and then—”
