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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 thenthis?’
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?’
He cocked his head to the side, eyes raging like a wildfire burned inside his skull. And it probably did – my psychotic husband. I stumbled over the word.Husband. Seven letters, my death sentence.
‘How stupid do you think I am?’ he said.
I held his gaze. ‘Stop. Stop! Just ask me. Just tell me what’s going on, because I don’t understand!’ My voice got louder as I spoke, rising to a feverish pitch by the end of my sentence. I didn’t know if I was yelling or begging at that point. All I knew was, he had that hand on me, the one he’d just threatened to disembowel me with, and I couldn’t stop shaking,and he had the phone.
‘Is. This. Your. Phone?’
‘Yes!’ I screamed.
His eyes lit up like wildfire. Oh God.OhGodOhGodOhGod.
His face gave away nothing. I wondered if it would be the last thing I would ever see.
I tried not to struggle as Dornan traced a finger underneath each of my eyes, in the hollow part, the socket, and it took every ounce of self-restraint not to flinch. I was half-convinced he was going to poke my eyes out, but his finger travelled down to my mouth. He pushed it between my lips and I let him, because more than anything, I really did not want him to hit me with that fucking phone again.
Had he found phone records? I deleted John’s number every time I called him. Still, a lot had changed in ten years. It was 2008, and you could find almost anything you wanted information-wise if you looked in the right places.
‘It’s not what you think,’ I said around his finger, needing to break the unbearable silence that stretched between us.
‘I don’t believe you,’ Dornan whispered. I couldn’t respond, because his finger was halfway down my throat, but I shook my head anyway.
