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“Ma’am. Clear the way,” an officer tells her.
“I’m this man’s lawyer. What are the charges?”
“Nigella,” I want her attention. There’s a more pressing matter than me being taken down to the station.
She turns to me as the officers struggle to get me moving again.
“In my SUV. There’s a locked box in the trunk. I need you to get into it and figure out what’s in there. Keys are in my jacket pocket upstairs.” I gesture to the door we came from. “That’s your priority.”
She nods and I am dragged from The Sinistral out into the freezing night, my shirt barely on, any asshole who is anyone watching, and the woman I think I love—no, the woman I know I love, the woman who just gave herself to me so wholly—up in that den of snakes alone and unprotected and thinking I betrayed her.
19
OPHELIA
“Deal with her,” Sly tells Ethan, checking his watch before heading to the exit where a man in a suit stands, hands clasped in front of him. He’s looking straight ahead and nothing.
Ethan glances at me, hesitates, then looks back to his dad. “Dad.”
Sly looks back at Ethan, eyebrows raised.
“I don’t think we need to punish Phee.”
“No?” Sly spins on his heel and stalks back into the room. He advances on Ethan, but I’m the one to take a step backward. “You don’t think she needs to be punished? You’re fine with another man fucking your fiancée?”
“No. Of course I’m not.”
“I thought not. Deal with her, or I will. Just make sure she can walk. I want her back out on the dancefloor in ten minutes,” Sly says, before giving me a glacial glance and leaving.
Ethan turns to the man in plain clothes. He must be security of some kind. “Wait outside the door. No one enters, not you, not anyone, no matter what you hear,” he says.
The man nods and steps out of the room, closing the door behind him.
I open my mouth to speak but my throat is a desert.
Ethan releases my wrist, and I stare down at that ring back on my finger. I understand what he meant now. The albatross. This ring is that. An anchor around my life. Pockets full of rocks in a raging, angry river.
My mind returns to what just happened. The fire. Our house is gone?
I look up at Ethan and for one sliver of a moment, I see what I think is regret on his face, but that slip in time is gone. He seems to steel himself, drawing in a deep breath, and his expression as he takes me in, naked, wrapped in a dusty old sheet, turns repellant. He’s disgusted with me.
No. It’s worse than that. He hates me.
“You didn’t waste much time, did you?” he asks.
“Get away from me.” I tug at the ring, but he catches my arm and rips away the dust cloth so I’m standing naked before him. What had felt beautiful just moments ago feels dirty now. Dirty and low.
I cover myself with my free arm as Ethan looks meover. He moves one hand to his belt, undoes it, eyes flat on mine.
Panic takes hold of me as I process what he’s doing. When he releases me, I take a step backward. “Ethan.”
He snorts, understanding my panic. “Don’t worry,” he says, and pulls the belt from its loops, taking a menacing step toward me. “I wouldn’t touch that bastard’s sloppy seconds.” He doubles up the belt and tugs on it, then slaps it against his thigh. It makes a hideous sound and I jump, gasping.
Ethan has never been violent with me. He’s never hurt me apart from maybe gripping me too hard on nights he’s in a bad mood. He barely touches me, really. But now, as he raises his arm, my brain slowly processes the rage on his face. The years’ worth of it.
“It’ll be me or my dad, and trust me, you want it to be me,” he says, bringing the belt down across my hip and stomach.
I’m too stunned to make a sound. My body curls in on itself. But when he strikes again, I scream and turn my back. The next blow lands across my ass, and another follows quickly. I run to get away from him, but there’s nowhere to go. Nowhere to hide as he raises his arm and lands a blow low across the fronts of my thighs.
