Breaking Her (Love is War #2)(60)

He started punching me in the stomach.

I still wouldn't look at him, and I swore I wouldn't cry for him either, but tears had been seeping steadily down my face since he'd first begun.

Still, I wouldn't sob for him, and I wouldn't beg him either.

He started screaming in my face. "Look at me. Look at me." Over and over.

No matter what he did, no matter how angry it made him, I would not look at him. I kept my eyes on that clock.

I didn't fear punishment. What was worse than what he was already doing?

He could beat me. He could kill me. Somewhere around hour number two, in fact, I wanted him to.

At hour three, I begged him to.

"Don't be silly," he panted into my ear, back on top of me again. "I'm nowhere near finished with you. Trust me, you'll learn to like this."

I stopped begging and tried to think of something, anything else, but I quickly stopped. I didn't want to taint any of my good memories with this, and the nightmare I was trapped in now was bad enough without adding to it.

When he was done with me, for some reason I cannot fathom, and I go back to it often, he untied me.

I tried to get my bruised, overused body to sit up, had started to, but he quickly joined me in bed, yanking me to him, wrapping his limbs around me so tightly that I couldn't move.

"Shh, go to sleep, dear girl," he told me, and promptly passed out.

As soon as his body went limp, I slipped from the bed.

I tried to move quietly from the room, but I was trembling so powerfully that I was sure the sound of it would wake him up with every limping step I took.

I saw his gun, but it was close by the bed, close to him, and I couldn't make myself move toward him. I struggled for a minute, trying to, but I could not do it. I could only make myself move away from him.

Once I was out of the room, my body just started to work of its own accord. It moved fast, fluidly, ignoring all of my soreness, ignoring the fact that my spirit felt broken, and I still wanted to die.

I went mindlessly to my grandma's room.

Feeling completely blank, I took the gun from her nightstand, checked the clip, and glided quietly back to my room.

He'd shifted in his sleep, turned so his back was to the bedroom door.

I didn't linger. I didn't stare at his sleeping form. I did not contemplate.

I don't remember making a decision. I just remember clearing the door, raising the gun, aiming it, and emptying the entire clip into his back.





CHAPTER





TWENTY-SEVEN


"Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other."

~Rainer Maria Rilke





I don't know if I fainted, dozed, or blacked out, but what brought me back was a consistent, warm drip, drip, drip of fluid onto my chest.

I was huddled outside of my old bedroom. I'd shut myself out.

I didn't look down at my body. I was numb in a way, but still coherent enough to know that I wasn't ready to see the damage. Wasn't ready to face it.

My jaw was slack, and so my first assumption was that I'd been drooling on myself, but as the drip, drip, drip continued, I realized there was too much of it, whatever it was, for that.

Had I thrown up on myself? I wondered. It seemed as likely as anything. My mouth tasted foul enough for it, acid burning in my throat.

I kept my eyes trained straight ahead, at the stained yellow wall in front of me as I took a shaking hand and wiped my chin. I held it up all the way to eye level, not lowering my gaze even an inch to see what it was.

Red. So much red, but as I saw it I was not completely surprised. I felt at my lips, and to this day I wonder, I honestly have no recollection, which one of us had ravaged them, bit them bloody, that monster in his depravity, or me, in my anguish?

What do I do now? I thought. Call the police? Bitterness filled me at the thought.

Someone was pounding on the front door. I went from numb to trembling again.

But then I heard a frantic Dante calling, "Scarlett! Are you in there? Scarlett!"

I broke. Into a million pieces. In relief. In renewed horror.

I started sobbing and made my unsteady way to the door, fumbling with the lock in my rush to let him in.

Some part of me had shut off, slipped inward, gone dead, perhaps, for the duration of the nightmare.

It took seeing Dante's face to bring me back, to realize, and start to deal with the horror of what had happened to me.

A dozen expressions flitted across his face as he took me in. First shock, then horror, then anguish as he started to connect the dots.

I looked down at myself. I was naked, which I'd as good as forgotten, but that wasn't the worst of it.

Bruises were already mottling my torso, my wrists and ankles raw, open wounds from struggling against the ropes.

And there was blood, a lot of it, all over my thighs.

I crumpled with a sob.

With a low sob of his own, he caught me.

He didn't ask me anything at first, just held me, stroked me, carried me inside, sat down on the couch and tried, around his own helpless sobs, to calm me down.

And when I'd quieted, and was just lying against him, hoping that I never had to leave his arms ever again for my whole miserable life, he asked me only one thing.

"Where is he?" His quiet voice bled like murder into the air.