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If I’d had anything left in my stomach I would have surely thrown it up. Instead, I curled back into the foetal position and pulled the sheets over my face.
The other side of the bed was empty; I wondered where Dornan was. Reluctantly, I sat up again, scanning the room for him.
He was sitting on the end of the bed, staring at me intently, something in his hand.
‘Hello, Mrs Ross,’ he said, his voice sticky-sweet with fake enthusiasm, his teeth bared in a large grin that didn’t reach his dark eyes. Oh God, what had I done now?
‘Morning,’ I said, crossing my legs in a yoga pose and arranging the blankets around me like a protective shroud. It had to be a hundred degrees out, the sun blazing a path straight to my eyeballs, but the room was as cold as ice. I rubbed my hands down my arms as goosebumps sprang up on my skin.
‘You okay?’ I asked Dornan. Something was up. Better to get it over and done with. Rip the bandaid. It was always about making the pain as quick as possible. No point extending our misery.
Dornan dropped the grin, his eyes on mine. He ran his tongue over his teeth and looked at whatever he was holding. I let my eyes follow his, but his big hands were mostly obscuring the object.
‘Can I trust you?’ he asked me.
I raised my eyebrows. ‘What kind of question is that? Can you trust me? Can I trust you?’
I didn’t even see the blow that hit me. Something in his hand, hard and blunt, smashed into the side of my head, just above my left ear, and I went down faster than an old Vegas casino with a wrecking ball and some explosives. That is to say, I flew off the bed and onto the floor, the the carpet cushioning my fall.
‘Wrong answer,’ Dornan said coldly, standing above me. I rolled onto my back, taking in his expression: serious, distant.
Shit.
I opened my mouth to speak as he held up a cellphone. My cellphone.
The burner cellphone John had given to me.
‘You hit me with a fucking cellphone?’ I asked, getting up on my elbows as the side of my head throbbed painfully. ‘What if I was pregnant, you fucking idiot?’
He kicked me in the stomach for that. I made an oomph sound as he crouched beside me, his hand stroking my hair. ‘If you were pregnant,’ he mused, ‘you drank enough last night to destroy any baby’s brain cells. Besides, you just finished your period three days ago. You couldn’t be pregnant, unless we made a baby in the apartment before we left yesterday.’
My mouth hung open in shock as he rubbed circles on my stomach with the tip of his finger. ‘It could be happening right now,’ he said, tracing a path from my pelvis right up to my belly button and jabbing his finger in hard enough to make me wince. ‘What do you think?’ he asked. ‘Would it be my baby, Mariana? Or would it be someone else’s? Because if there’s even the slightest chance it isn’t mine . . . I’ll stick my hand inside you and rip your fucking womb out.’ He made his free hand into the shape of a claw and made a pulling motion in the air.
If I thought I’d known fear before, I didn’t. Not until that moment.
I swallowed, incredulous, that image in my mind completely fucking disturbing. ‘What is wrong with you?’ I exclaimed. ‘Seriously, what the fuck is wrong with you? You bring me here and marry me and then this?’
I was stunned, but he had the phone. He had the phone! He was going to kill me. I would die here, now, in a hotel room in the middle of the fucking desert, and it would be a fitting end to our union.
‘I’m going to ask you one more time,’ he said, standing and holding a hand out to me.
With great reluctance, outweighed only by self-preservation and the desire not to be kicked again, I accepted. He hauled me to my feet and took me by my arms, backing me into the kitchenette. Brazenly, I reached for a bottle of anything to hit him with, but he was faster. He grabbed my wrist and bent it so hard I thought it would snap.
‘Fuck!’ I yelled.
He responded by hitting me again with the phone, the plastic smacking into my cheekbone. I gasped for air, my head flying back, my body pinned by his hips.
‘Fuck you,’ he said. ‘You see this?’
He held the phone in front of my eyes and I squinted, trying to focus.
‘What?’ I half-asked, half-begged. ‘What?’
‘Blood,’ Dornan said. I saw the dried red blood on the phone and my entire body stilled. A tiny speck of red. It looked innocent enough. Innocuous. Dazed, I felt my cheek for broken skin. My scalp. None. I wasn’t bleeding.
I knew it wasn’t my blood.
‘Whose blood?’ I asked. ‘Yours?’
