AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I smoothed down my tank top, painfully aware that we were out in the open, an afternoon ice-cream date with his daughter and the stray I’d taken in. Dornan’s son Jason, the one he’d been unaware of for sixteen years, emerged from the fairground ride with Juliette, stepping back onto the pier, two teenagers in love, even if they didn’t know it yet. It was a rare day for any of us to be out, but the weather was so beautiful, John had collected us all in his beat-up car and brought us out into the sunshine for some fudge sundaes and a chance to dip our toes in the cold water.
It wasn’t a typical outing, to say the least. On a day like today, I’d normally be working for my boss, Emilio, cooking his books and making sure his hefty cartel profits were funnelled into all the right places. Or, if I got a day off – rare for a Saturday – I’d inevitably be on my back, or my knees, or my stomach, with Dornan. But today was Emilio’s birthday, and he insisted on a great big family celebration – one that none of us were invited to. I was surprised Dornan hadn’t insisted on taking Jason to the family event, but I think he worried about how unstable Jason might be in a large gathering of the people who’d inadvertently caused his mother to die.
Yes, I was sleeping with two men. I was in love with one of them, and I was terrified of the other. When I first arrived in California ten years ago I’d loved Dornan, but now I loathed him. I was ready to leave him, or kill him, or both. Anything to get away.
But the world kept spinning, and the cartel kept trading, and I kept my feet on the ground, too scared to make a run for freedom lest a bullet find its way between my shoulder blades.
‘Can we go feel the water?’ Juliette asked her father.
‘Sure,’ John shrugged, his face lighting up for his daughter like she was the sun. And she was, to him. That made me fall for him even more than I already had, to see the love he had for his daughter. Without thinking, I reached out and placed my hand on Jason’s shoulder. He was only sixteen, but already well taller than me, and the picture of his father – all olive skin and deep brown eyes, a product of their Italian heritage.
Jase flinched when I touched him; I pulled my hand away and smiled instead. I didn’t want to apologise and bring attention to how jumpy he was, so I left it. Juliette grabbed his hand – the contrast between them night and day, what with her bamboo green eyes and straw blonde hair – and pulled him towards the beach. He didn’t flinch when she touched him, and that’s how I knew it was already love in bloom.
I realised I’d been daydreaming and turned my attention back to John. He was just as stunning as the day I’d met him, but age had weathered him in a way that only made him more attractive to me. He was barely forty, but the lines around his eyes told a story of far more trauma than a man his age should have seen.
I loved his hands. Rough palms from the mechanical work he did, but smooth on top. Rough fingers that spread me open and worshipped me, not missing an inch of my flesh; smooth on top, for those times when he’d brush a knuckle along my cheek or put my hand on his as I travelled on the back of his motorcycle.
Dornan’s hands didn’t have an ounce of smoothness; they were rough and big and good for holding over my mouth while he fucked me until I screamed. I won’t pretend that I didn’t like it. I lived for his brutal touch. I was addicted to it.
But the addiction had become too dangerous. It was a nasty habit that was going to kill me one day, a day that would come very soon if I didn’t figure my life out and get out of Los Angeles.
I was entirely certain that if I didn’t make a bold move soon – run, or hand myself over to the police, or just plain kill my dark lover while he slept beside me – I’d be the one who’d end up dead, dumped on the side of the road in a ditch somewhere, or maybe cut into little pieces and fed to the sharks. Because Dornan Ross had changed. He’d grown cruel. He used to use violence in the most delicious of ways – a hand over my face to stifle the noise that accompanied the mind-blowing orgasm he was giving me with his other hand; a subtle choke that made me see stars as my heart sped up in anticipation; a finger forced into my mouth so I could suck on it, tease him, pretend it was his cock I had my lips wrapped around. A violence that would have me smashed up against the nearest wall, fingers that bruised me with their passion as he wrenched my thighs apart and entered me so hard that I ached for days afterward.
That violent love was the thing that made us. When we met I was only nineteen years old and his father’s property, thanks to a deal I’d brokered to repay a debt my own father had racked up, and to keep my family from being slaughtered. One set of parents. One sister. One brother. I had given my servitude for their lives.
Emilio had killed them eventually, anyway. Loose ends and all that.
That violent love reached its peak when I saw the blood on my lover’s hands and the body of the woman he’d killed for daring to flee from him. Her face had been so badly beaten she was unrecognisable.
I still saw her when I closed my eyes at night. Stephanie. He’d killed her for concealing a pregnancy and leaving him seventeen years earlier, and he had punished her by beating her until she was almost dead, and then giving her a hotshot of heroin to finish off the job.
That this was the man I’d fallen fiercely in love with as a young woman was impossible to me. This was a man who’d risked everything for me, a lowly Colombian slave on her way to auction. He’d defied his father, and in doing so, had taken my heart and my loyalty. He’d done it out of some goodness that existed inside of him, something that couldn’t bear to see me come to harm.
‘He’s struggling,’ I said, nodding my head towards Jason. ‘He has nightmares. He barely talks. He barely eats, and teenage boys are supposed to eat everything in sight. I’m worried about him.’
John side-eyed me. ‘And your son? Luis? How’s he doing?’
I immediately baulked at his line of questioning. He was inferring that I cared more about a boy who wasn’t my son than the boy who was waiting for me in Colombia, my beautiful son, Luis. He was thirteen. I hadn’t laid eyes on him since the day he was taken from me by my father – the day he was born.
‘He’s safe,’ I said, my throat itching. ‘He’s with family. And that’s where we should be going. All four of us.’
John pulled a face. ‘You really want to take Dornan’s son after you saw what he did to the woman who kept him secret his entire life?’
I didn’t want to think about that. About how Dornan had become the monster he’d been trying to save me from all those years ago.
About how a lover could become your captor.
I didn’t want to think about how a lover, in a rage over your incessant questions and your disbelief that they could murder somebody in cold blood, could beat you until the baby inside you, the one that was still a secret, died.
Didn’t want to remember how a lover, in a post-murder-fuelled high, could pin you down and rape you, while still covered in the blood of the woman he murdered hours beforehand.
Didn’t want to reconcile all the ways a lover could become the person you hated the most in the world.
Especially because, if you were like me, black-hearted and completely corrupted, you already had another lover.
John Portland. Of course he had to be Dornan’s best friend, just to dial shit right up to eleven on the crazy scale.
It was complicated.
