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‘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 tenshades 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 yourson.’
‘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.
He opened his mouth to say something else but I cut him off with a sharp flick of my hand. ‘I can’t, okay? I just . . . can’t.’
Dornan didn’t argue. He went to my suitcase at the end of the bed and unzipped it, my skin crawling as I remembered the baby suitcase. I shook my head to try and get rid of the memory, my neck screaming in protest. I watched as Dornan lifted a grey knee-length dress and a blue scarf from the bag, bringing them over to me.
Dornan basically dressed me in the new dress, as if I were a child. He sat beside me and watched silently as I applied heavy foundation to my bruised neck before working on my face. I was red and blue from my wrists to my head, and although I tried my best, when I was done I still looked like shit. I needed a shower and about three weeks at home, where nobody could see me.
John. What was he going to say when he saw this?
‘You should have told me about your family,’ Dornan said, shame burning in his eyes.
I shook my head, resisting the overwhelming urge to roll my eyes. ‘How long are we staying in Vegas?’ I asked him.
He shrugged, standing up so that he was in front of me. ‘How long do youwantto stay?’
Oh, yeah, almost get killed, and now I get to decide how long we were staying.
Suddenly I felt like a little girl. Not a happy one. I felt powerless. Scared. Exhausted. ‘I want a shower and some food and I want to go home,’ I whispered. ‘Can we please just go home?’
Dornan stared down at me for a long moment before nodding. ‘Yeah,’ he said, and I wondered what was going through his head at that moment. The phone was seemingly forgotten, the urge to murder me on hiatus for the time being. He looked remorseful. I didn’t care.
He picked up the room service menu and handed it to me. ‘Whatever you want,’ he said.
