AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“I like seeing you happy,” was his usual response. “And I have a lot to atone for.”
She understood that. For years, she had felt the same way. But despite what he had done to her, she was finally beginning to feel like she could trust him. He had seen her at her very worst and accepted her anyway—and more than that, he had given her a fresh new start to flourish.
“I always secretly envisioned you playing Madison,” Rafe told her. “If the role seems like it was written for you, that’s because it was.”
“Doesn’t it bother you, then?” she asked, running a finger down his chest. “Seeing another man fucking your creation? Didn’t you envision yourself as Makarov?”
“No.” He covered her hand with his. “I see myself as your not-so-benevolent god, putting you in difficult positions just to see you get your way out of them.” A brief smile flashed across his mouth. “You never disappointed in that.”
Perversely, she found out that she really did enjoy being with him. She liked his dry sense of humor, and even his forcefulness under the right circumstances. But mostly, she liked that he genuinely seemed to care about who she was, and what she had to say. He enjoyed spending time with her, in and out of bed, and she never walked away from him feeling bad about herself. Which made her enjoy spending time with him, too. Because she liked feeling adored.
He had proposed to her at the T?t Trung Thu festival. They had gone to the one in LA after a solid week of filming and he had come back with two lanterns: a plain one and a red carp.
Inside the carp had been a ring.
“To family and good fortune,” he had said, when she started crying.
There were YouTube videos of it. Most of them unflattering. She still watched them anyway.
The scandal of marrying the man she had helped raise wasn’t as big as she expected. Moving out of California helped. So did their age. It wasn’t as if he were some fresh-faced eighteen-year-old she’d plucked from the cradle. Occasionally, talk of it would resurface and for a few weeks, she’d hand her social media accounts off to an assistant to handle, just so she could breathe. But for the most part, everything was fine. People did so much worse. That was what she told herself.
Take the diethylene glycol lawsuit. Her former husband’s estate was thoroughly gutted, sold piecemeal to pay off the victims of her husband’s greed. Art ripped off the walls, handed over to collectors. The house itself sold in a rush, at steep discount. The local newspapers in Riachuelo followed the news of her husband’s posthumous destruction like sharks chasing blood and froth.
From the sale, people like Elizabeth and Denise Banner and Lacey Huang received their thirty pieces of silver from Marco’s pound of flesh, with money wrenched from the lumber and drywall.
Good for them, Donni thought, without any bitterness. Sometimes she missed Riachuelo, but she never longed for it. Not the way she did for her career or, now, her husband. Everything she’d wanted in that town had always been through the misty focus of what could have been.
She heard a famous basketball player had bought the house and was having the place gutted. Apparently, he was a big fan of wine and wanted to start his own winery. He thought the built-in vineyard was a major plus. Donni wondered who was going to tell him.
No, she didn’t miss the house, either. She had very few good memories there. The new owners could be the ones to sleep in their beds, wondering if the noises outside were the clatter of palm leaves, or the tap of fingers. Legally, the realtor had had to disclose that someone had died in the house, but as far as the rest of the world was concerned, it had been a natural death—not murder.
Only she and Rafe knew the truth.
That three men were dead because of her.
That she had gotten away with it.
“Are you ever afraid I might turn on you?” she asked him eventually, terrified of the answer but desperately needing to know. “That I might keep you silent?”
“What would you do to me?” he asked, watching her with his dark green eyes. “It’s been two years.”
“I don’t know.”
She looked past her reflection from where she was putting on her lipstick, to where he lay reclined on the bed. He had his laptop with him. He was working on the screenplay for the third Madison Hawthorne book, which he had decided to callLittle Deaths, with her permission. Johnathan Steel must have been rolling in his grave.
Donni smiled at the thought. “Maybe I’d cut out your heart.”
“You already have my heart. I gave it to you years ago.”
She tossed the tube down. “You’re so sappy,” she said, but there was a faint smile on her face. She looked down, worrying at the ring on her finger. “I just don’t want things to get bad between us. They’ve soured with everyone else.”
“You’ve handed me the keys to all your darkest secrets and dared me to be your jailer, my darling raven. Because deep down, you trust me enough to keep you safe.”
Was that true? She wondered. Was it simple as that?
Her thumb smoothed over her wedding ring, delicate and old-fashioned. Enamel that looked like stained glass entwined with a small baroque pearl. His was engraved brass, inset with pieces of colored stone that looked like Moroccan tile. They had picked them out together.
“You’re not a very good jailer,” she said at last, resting her chin on his shoulder as she slid on the bed to join him.
