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‘Why don’t you touch me anymore?’ Celia said, her voice small and lonely. ‘Why don’t you love me anymore?’
Dornan raised his eyebrows. ‘I never loved you,’ he spat. ‘Not sure where that idea came from.’
Dornan shrugged his leather jacket on, swiped his cigarettes from the bed and shoved them in his pocket. He thought of the deal breaker, the night he’d found her fucking some other guy. While she was pregnant with Dornan’s fucking kid. With that memory implanted firmly in his brain, any trace of guilt he felt for pushing her away evaporated. He’d punish her until she either left, or died. Fuck her.
‘I want a divorce!’ she screamed.
He laughed. ‘You sucked my dick so I’d grant you a divorce? You’re crazier than I thought, Celia.’
Mascara streaking down her cheeks, Celia looked like one of the strippers at the club.
‘Why won’t you just let me go?!’
His chest tightened. He thought of her leaving, their sons in tow. No.
‘You know why,’ he said.
‘They’re mine!’ she cried. ‘They came from me! They grew inside me, and now you want to take them from me? I tried to make you love me, and you just push me away.’
Dornan spread his hands. ‘I let you stay here. I let you spend whatever you want. I didn’t try and take our sons from you. But I will not forgive what you did, Celia. And I will never let you take my sons from me. Ever. You want to go? There’s the goddamn door.’
She pouted, crossing her hands across her chest. ‘I fucking hate my life.’
Dornan shrugged as he left. ‘Survival of the fittest, baby,’ he called over his shoulder. ‘We might not like it, but it’s better than the alternative.’
‘Good luck out there,’ Celia snapped sarcastically. ‘Don’t get shot.’
He had to clench his fists to stop from laying one into her pretty face. He concentrated on the image of Stephanie and what he would do to her when he got to Colorado.
It wouldn’t be pretty.
* * *
He drove all night and into the next day, only stopping when his gas tank ran low. He had just crossed from Utah into Colorado, and to have to stop now was excruciating.
As he was filling the tank of his newly fitted-out truck at a gas station, somewhere near Grand Junction, Dornan’s phone rang. It was his lawyer. Jesus, what now? He answered.
Celia had filed for divorce. She’d signed over full custody of their sons.
She’d give up her own children, the things she loved most in this world, just to be rid of him.
Dornan didn’t know whether to laugh or smash his fists into the hood of his truck and cry.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
DORNAN
The house was a modest affair: a single-storey stucco building that sat, squat and neat, between other houses that were exactly the same. Inside it was tidy enough. Chequered tea towels. Kitschy shit that cluttered the mantlepiece above the open fireplace, the coffee table, the windowsill above the sink in the kitchen. Useless possessions irritated him. What was the point of them? They took up space and gathered dust, and then you died and littered the world you left behind with your crap.
There were photographs hanging on the white panelled walls. A baby boy, with Dornan’s eyes, his colouring, his DNA. Everything about the kid screamed Dornan. He looked more like him than any of his other sons, for fuck’s sake. How was that for irony? He hadn’t even known the kid existed, and here he was, his carbon copy, smiling Stephy’s lopsided smile, her dimples passed down to his son.
His son. Those two words wrapped around him like a vice, pulling tight until he could barely breathe with the injustice of what this bitch had taken from him. He wasn’t a good man, had never pretended to be anything remotely in the realm of good, but he loved his children with a ferocity that knew no bounds. He was the father lion, possessive, pride of the pack, poised to strike at and rip the throat from anyone who dared to shatter his carefully constructed world.
Viper had been useful. Giving him the time the bitch was due home, the kid, too. He still didn’t know what he was going to say to them, but he was pretty sure it was going to take everything inside him not to smash her face into the kitchen table until she passed out. Sixteen years. And all the time, she’d let him believe she was dead in a shallow fucking grave somewhere.
And he had a seventh son.
He found her gun in the second drawer he opened. He knew she’d have one stashed in easy reach, and ironically it was the same one he’d given her. Fucking bitch. He flicked open the chamber, was mildly impressed at the recent cleaning and oiling of the weapon. He emptied the bullets into his pocket and replaced the gun in its spot.
