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‘Because you don’t have to testify against your spouse in court,’ I said vacantly, rubbing my wrist as faint bruises began to appear. I mean, I’d been a little slow to catch on, but I wasn’t an idiot.
‘Bingo,’ Dornan said. He wrapped his hand in paper towels to stem the bleeding. Then, as I continued to stand there like a waste of space, he put his hands on my hips and guided me over to the unbroken mirror that hung over the neighbouring basin. He started to fuss with my hair, moving strands to where they belonged and smoothing down the knots he’d created when he fisted clumps of my hair and pulled. There were flowers woven into my hair, my messy topknot.
‘Did you put these in my hair?’ I asked slowly, horrified at the way he’d dressed me and arranged me as if I were his doll.
‘I did,’ Dornan replied, tucking a small pink rose back into my hair. ‘You can thank me later.’
Somehow the act of decorating my hair was more disturbing than almost anything he’d ever done. It was his way of communicating that he could do whatever he wanted with me – and if I didn’t like it, he’d force it anyway, just to get things the way he wanted.
I watched him silently in the mirror’s reflection, weighing my options.
They were feather-light. They didn’t exist.
‘You good?’ he asked. It was like the fight had bled out of him. Maybe it had. I nodded.
‘Then let’s go get fucking married,’ he said, pulling the bloody napkin from his knuckles. ‘Don’t worry. If you still hate me this much in a year, we’ll just get fucking divorced.’
His casual words belied the intent in his eyes. I knew that look. We would be married, but we would not ever be getting divorced. The only way I would ever be undoing what was about to happen would be if one of us died and the other was widowed.
John was going to want to murder Dornan when he found out about this.
‘Does your father know about this?’ I asked again, my heart hollow as the answer knocked around it like a frenzied moth in the dark. Because I already knew the answer.
‘Of course,’ Dornan replied, ushering me out of the bathroom. I glanced back at the shattered glass one last time, a sense of doom crushing down on me.
‘Esteban and I were going to get married,’ I said softly, letting him lead me to the altar, his reluctant bride. ‘But your father had him killed before we could do it.’
‘Lucky me,’ Dornan said, as Elvis started singing ‘Suspicious Minds’ at top volume over the speaker system. Oh, the irony. ‘Now I get the honour of calling you wife while he’s napping in the dirt.’
I made a choking sound in the back of my throat as his words slammed into me.
‘You motherfucker,’ I shot, anger blossoming in my chest like noxious fumes.
He took something from his pocket and held it out to me, seemingly unaffected by my reaction. ‘Have some gum. You need it.’
If looks were knives, he’d have been sliced clean in half. ‘How thoughtful,’ I said, snatching the packet from him.
I unwrapped a stick of gum and stuck it between my teeth. Mint flooded my mouth, sharp and tangy, and from that moment on I’d always associate white dresses and Elvis with sticky-sweet mint and broken bones.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
DORNAN
The ceremony was short. It wasn’t, however, remotely sweet. When it was time for them to kiss, Dornan could have sworn Mariana flinched.
He’d have to punish her for that.
And he had just the punishment to fit her crime. The crime of not loving him anymore. The crime of checking out. She was physically here with him, but her mind was just gone.
But her body would be his. He would mark her so that any man who touched her knew she belonged to him. He would dig into her flesh until her eyes burned from the pain.
He’d seen the threads of them unravelling, but by the time he understood how serious it was, she was already somewhere else.
And he couldn’t figure out where.
The phone, the incriminating evidence against her, was like a ticking time bomb in Dornan’s existence. He’d almost asked her about it so many times, but he had never actually spoken the words aloud, because he didn’t want to know the answer. She was all he had, the only person who loved him that wasn’t required to by virtue of sharing his DNA, and he couldn’t bear the thought that she might have betrayed him.
That fucking phone, though. It was prepaid, a flimsy piece of shit that led nowhere. No details, no call history that he could find when he scrolled through the phone’s basic functions – nothing. Murphy was the one who could get things like call logs easily and discreetly, and that motherfucker was either ghosting all of them, or dead. Dornan had packed the phone for this trip specifically, taking the opportunity to steal it from its hiding spot while Mariana was packing. Because he was tired of waiting around for answers, and it was time to get them himself.
