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I decided I didn’t care. I was cheating on him, after all. And if some stripper could buy me a few days without having to fuck the man who’d decided raping me and beating our unborn baby to death was the right way to love me? I’d pay her myself.
It was only when I’d set the phone down that I realised it was technically still my birthday. At least for another seven minutes. I texted Guillermo. Where are you? Bring birthday cake / vodka. He replied almost immediately. Sorry, got a situation. Be back in the morning.
I slumped over the counter, burying my face in my arms. I closed my eyes for a second, my fingers still around the bottom of the vodka bottle. I just needed to rest, just for a few minutes, and then I’d resume my pity party for one.
* * *
‘Ana,’ a voice murmured in my ear. I sat bolt upright, one side of my face cold and squished from where it had lain on the countertop.
‘Huh?’ I said, my voice still thick from sleep and all the vodka I’d just downed. My eyes felt gritty, like I’d just taken a face full of sand.
‘John? What are you doing here?’
I looked at him again. In the bright light of the kitchen, he was an apparition. He had a swollen lip, and had he split his forehead open? ‘What happened to you?’
He raised his eyebrows. ‘More like who.’
My heart sank. ‘What happened?’
John shrugged. ‘I don’t even know,’ he said, running his hand through his dirty blond hair. ‘Dornan and I . . . Ana, we can’t save him. He’s too far gone.’
‘I know that.’
‘So what the fuck are we waiting for? Waiting around to die?’
‘I don’t know, you tell me.’
He looked at the floor. ‘When I got home, Juliette was gone. He’d picked her up and taken her back to his place to fix him up. But really, to get at me.’
My stomach roiled at that knowledge. Dornan had taken John’s teenage daughter, at night, without asking him, as a warning?
‘Is she okay?’
John waved his hand dismissively, but there was hurt in his eyes. Anger. ‘I picked her up, took her for a drive. She’s at home now, hopefully asleep.’
I exhaled a sigh of relief.
‘Come with me,’ he said. ‘Hawaii. Miami . . . Fuck, Australia. I know people. Good people who’ll help us.’
I looked around my empty apartment. ‘Where were you when you were fighting?’
John looked at the floor again.
‘I called him,’ I said, eyeing off the vodka again. My head felt like it was going to split in half, and my mouth was unbearably dry. ‘Dornan told me he was at the clubhouse, but last time I checked, you don’t play stripping music there.’
‘He was at the strip club,’ John confirmed. ‘We were supposed to be having a meeting.’ He gestured to his face. ‘I don’t think he liked what I had to say.’
‘Was he high? He sounded high.’
John nodded. ‘He’s developing quite the taste for his daddy’s product.’
I scrunched my face up. ‘That sounds disgusting.’
John laughed. ‘You should have seen him snorting it. It was disgusting. That stuff’ll make your nose bleed like a goddamn faucet.’
‘Like your head?’ As if on cue, the split on his forehead was open again, blood streaming down his face. ‘Shit,’ he muttered, and before I could think to get up and get a towel, he’d taken his T-shirt off and had balled it up, pressing it to his bleeding forehead. I swallowed, my eyes drifting down his chest, past chiselled abs and a smooth, tattooed chest. His jeans were slung low around his narrow waist, and I found myself staring at the top button of his fly, almost like I could use the force to unbutton it from three feet away.
He gave me an odd look, and I tore my gaze away from the clothing I would have liked him to remove, motioning for him to move the T-shirt from his forehead. The cut continued to bleed heavily.
