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He loosened his fingers a little and I tried to get up, but he wasn’t having that. Staring twin bullet holes into my head, he straddled me, one knee on either side of my chest. I tried to push him off, but he was too heavy. Too strong. His knees squeezed my ribcage until I thought my lungs would burst.
‘Keep talking,’ he ground out. ‘Why? Why should I believe you? Why would you start hurting yourself again?’
‘I found out my whole family was dead.’
Shock registered on Dornan’s face. ‘What?’
The truth, now. My eyes filled with tears and spilled over.
‘Your father had them killed,’ I whispered.
I could barely make out the expression on Dornan’s face anymore. My eyes weren’t focusing, and I wanted to pass out.
His fingers tightened. This is it. This is where I die. Tears leaked from the corners of my eyes as I ached for my son. For John. They’d never even know what had become of me. They’d never know that I didn’t want to be married to Dornan, or that I’d fought to get back to them. They’d just never know, and I’d be gone. I wondered, in those moments, my fingernails scratching against Dornan’s hands, if he’d burn me or bury me. Would I sink into the earth? Would he bury me in the desert? Would he just leave me here, in this room, for the maid to find when she came to make the beds and restock the minibar?
Please, I mouthed. Dornan was killing me, and he wasn’t even watching as I died. I could feel the life ebbing from me as I starved for oxygen, my brain screaming for a single breath of air, my chest locked and shuddering. He seemed momentarily distracted, his fingers loosening a little, and I took the opportunity to twist my head to the side and bite his hand.
He pulled his hands away, giving me an annoyed glance and a smack on the cheek, but nothing compared to what he’d been doing earlier.
I choked and gasped for air, prompting Dornan to reach for a bottle of Evian that sat on the bedside table, courtesy of the hotel. A five-dollar bottle of water, but I would have paid a million dollars for it. He unscrewed it and handed it to me, watching silently as I chugged it down. I drank it too fast and I coughed, getting water down the front of my dress in the process.
‘You done trying to kill me?’ I asked.
Dornan got off me.
I couldn’t stop coughing. My throat was on fire.
‘What do you need?’ Dornan asked, as if some water or some fucking food could fix the fact that he’d beaten me ten shades of black and blue and then almost strangled me to death.
‘Who did you think I’d be calling?’ I asked him. I put on my best wounded face, which wasn’t a stretch. ‘Because I know you wouldn’t react like that if you thought I was calling my family in Colombia.’
He stared at the wall. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I just . . . you get further away from me, every day. Every single day. You used to melt when I touched you. Now you recoil like I’m a monster.’
Apt words from the man himself. He understood what he was, even then.
‘You know why I recoil,’ I said, my voice throaty and rough. I coughed, drank some more water. ‘I don’t trust you.’
Dornan growled. ‘I’ve done everything for you! Everything, you understand?’
I nodded. ‘Yeah. Still doesn’t change what you did to me. To our baby. To Stephanie. To your son.’
‘That’s it?’ he said. ‘That’s why you’re acting like this?’
‘That’s it?’ I repeated, dumbfounded. ‘Yeah. How many more innocent lives do you snuff out because what they do is inconvenient to you?’
He didn’t respond.
‘Don’t you want to know how he killed them?’ I whispered. ‘How your father wiped out my entire family?’
He levelled his glassy eyes at me, and I took that as an invitation to continue.
‘Your father had his men go to Villanueva and burn their house to the ground. But first they tied them up, so they burned too.’
‘Who told you that?’ Dornan asked. He seemed shocked. Like his father had never told him.
‘It doesn’t matter who told me,’ I said. ‘All that matters is that it’s true. Your father nullified his bargain with me when he killed my family. Me in exchange for their lives, that was the deal. And he killed them anyway.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he said.
