“Your father sold your ancestral home without a second thought to save his precious company,” Logan continues. “Without even consulting you. That’s how much he values you and what you care about.”
“And what are you going to do with it? Bulldoze the mausoleum and light my childhood home on fire to get your unholy revenge?”
“Why shouldn’t I?” Logan rages, storming towards me, stopping only inches away from me, his face right in front of my face. The scars on his face are pale, but the rest of his skin is flushed and angry. “Your family took everything from me!”
I start to shake my head but he’s not done, “And you,” he growls. “Bella donna. Beautiful poison.” He spits the last word and turns away.
His words gut me, scooping me out like an ice cream scooper.
For a long moment, there’s only silence in the room, both of us breathing hard. We are destroyed things. Broken. Irreparable.
A sudden ping startles me. Logan pulls a phone out of his pocket. He doesn’t look at me. “Your taxi is here.”
My taxi. Just like that, he’s kicking me out. Of my own house. That he bought out of revenge. This is so messed up.
I walk towards the door. What’s there left to say?
“Don’t forget the salve.”
I look back at him searching for...something, anything in his eyes, but they’re hard, blue stone.
I snatch the salve from where I’d dropped it on the couch before. And then I’m out the door. It’s only after he slams it behind me and I’m in the taxi zooming away from my childhood home that I remember Belladonna. The company. The research.
Everything I worked my whole life for—he now has control of it. A man who hates me and my family.
I look out the window. It all seemed so important, so vital, only weeks ago. Like there was nothing more important in the world. But now, as I glance out the back window, my ass smarting even though the seat is soft and plush, all I’m hoping for is a glimpse of him.
Five
Present Day
Logan
I watch from an upstairs window as she drives away. Am I fooling myself or do I see her hand pressed against the glass of the window as she looks back?
I turn away. “Fucking idiot,” I roar and look around for something else to smash but I’ve already tossed and smashed her precious Thornhill to ruins. Shards of expensive vases and mirrors and plates and glass litter the marble floors. I’ve ripped paintings off the wall and slashed through the precious canvases. I played Nine Inch Nails on full blast in the ballroom while I spray-painted the tapestries and drew obscenities on the statues.
The room I fucked and punished Daphne in was the one room that remained intact, and only because I fell asleep in the master suite last night before I could remember to drag my drunken ass back downstairs to desecrate it.
I stretch my hand out and bring it to my nose. It’s still fragrant from her scent.
Her scent that he probably knows now. Because she gave away what’s fucking mine. After she promised me, she gave it away. Like it all meant nothing.
I roar and grab the leg of the four-poster bed, ripping and yanking until I separate the tall pole off the footboard. And then I attack the wall with the makeshift baseball bat, smashing and destroying and taking out my rage until dust and drywall rains down all around me and coats my sweat-soaked skin.
I slump, exhausted, to the floor and bow my head. I didn’t sleep last night. How could I? When I’m used to her warm body, when I let myself imagine getting used to it forever— The pain sears fresh all over again but I don’t have the energy to destroy anything else. I lie down and lay my head on my arm. Cold. Uncomfortable. A shard of a vase cutting into my thigh.
And I sleep.
7 years Ago
The Quarantine Ward
“I don’t want to go in again. We flipped for it and you lost. You go.”
Pain screams through my face as their voices wake me from another nightmare. But blinking my eyes open doesn’t make it any better. Maybe this is the nightmare and I’m still not awake. Please gods, let this all just be one long nightmare and let me wake up.
But I don’t wake. Because this is real. The pain, oh fuck, the pain. How did I even sleep as long as I did through this?
It’s all real. Half my face is gone. Chewed away by flesh-eating bacteria. My life is gone. And she hasn’t come to visit once in the month I’ve been here. Does she know what happened to me? Then again, why would they tell her? They were trying to get rid of me and they did a spectacular fucking job.
Quarantine plastic surrounds my hospital bed. I can just make out the shape of the two nurses beyond, and then one finally lifts a flap and slips through.
She’s covered in a blue suit, face mask, and thick hospital gloves as she approaches cautiously. “Mr. Wulfe. How are we doing today?” Her falsely cheerful voice is grating.
I don’t answer her asinine question. How the fuck does she think we are?
“Time to change your bandage.”
That has me alert. “No,” I manage to grunt out even though I immediately regret it because it pulls on my destroyed cheek and sends a fresh hell of blinding pain throughout my body.
That’s the thing I didn’t know about pain. The wound is just in my head but nerves are a strange thing. They seem to connect all over my body. And so the pain shoots everywhere. My face is on fire but I’ll feel the pain in my belly. It curls me over into the fetal position.
“You know we have to change the bandage regularly to keep away infection,” the nurse says, still in that fake cheerful tone.
They changed it last night and it’s only ten in the morning, I want to tell her, but I can’t imagine getting out that many words. The final surgery to remove the last of the necrotic tissue and fluid was supposed to make things better but I swear the pain has only gotten worse. Maybe because they’ve dug away that much more of my face.
When I first came in, I coded twice in the ICU. It’s been a month of this hell and a body can only stand so much.
But the nurse keeps coming relentlessly forward.
I try to shake my head but fuck, oh fuck, it hurts. I can’t help the pathetic whimper that escapes or the tears that film my eyes. Dammit. Godsdammit.
The nurse reaches towards my face but I can see her fucking hands are shaking. She thinks she’s gonna change my bandage with shaking hands? Fuck that.
I reach up to block her hands. She jumps back with a shriek at the barest contact. “Call the orderlies!”
She scurries back towards the plastic flap.
“Wait,” I grate out, trembling from the pain of speaking. “Pain meds.”
But she’s already gone. The first few weeks, they gave me a morphine button but they said now I could only have pain meds at scheduled times to start weaning me off so I don’t get addicted.
I flop my head back on the pillow, exhausted.
Daphne, where are you? It’s a weak thought. I don’t want her to see me like this. She’s so young. And we never made each other any promises, not any real ones. We never even kissed. Why didn’t I kiss her?
You were trying to be honorable. You were trying to respect her father.