I take her hand and squeeze it, my chest tight with emotion. “You’ve nothing to be—”
“I’m sorry I never told you about your son.”
My world stops turning.
“Roisin, I don’t understand.” I squeeze her hand, and she moans softly. “Is there something—”
“Danny said...” She lets out a soft sigh. “Tell him I’m sorry, too.”
There’s a beat of silence, and then every monitor is bursting into life around her.
“Her blood pressure’s dropping.” Tight faced, the nurse leans over the bed and slams her hand against an orange button on the wall. “You’ll have to wait outside while we try and stabilise her.”
I stumble away from the bed as a doctor and two nurses come running into the room. “But she’s going to be okay?” She has to be okay.
“Let us do our work.”
“Please,” I whisper. “Don’t let her die.” Not now.
I don’t realise how close I am to the door until a hand is clamping around my wrist and dragging me backwards into the hallway. “Time to go.”
“Wait, Adrik! I need to see—”
“No more lies,” he snarls, shaking me violently. “I just spoke with Semenov. You never talked to him. He is coming to the house later to address the situation.”
Shit. Shit. Shit.
“Look, I heard you say her name. I guessed something was wrong, and I had to see her.” One of the nurses closes the door on us. Through the narrow window I watch them fall upon her like hungry NHS starlings, all greedy to make her live.
Please let her live.
“I’m sorry I never told you about your son.”
Her words swirl around my head, forming smoky images that make no sense to me. I gave birth to Frankie’s son. Four days later, Kirill took him away from me in punishment. It was breathtakingly cruel in its simplicity.
Was that madness or medication talking?
We’re waiting for the lift to arrive when her door opens again, and tense medical jargon is barked out across the hall to the nurses’ station.
“Goodbye, Roisin,” says Adrik nastily.
Ten seconds later, the crash trolley arrives, and I feel a great wave of sadness inside.
As for Adrik, he’s still laughing about it when we reach the car.
Kirill doesn’t arrive until late.
I’ve been sitting all alone at the breakfast bar waiting for him since six p.m., and now I’m watching the headlights of his Ferrari streak the wall opposite in shades of yellow before they shut off abruptly.
The next few moments are a slow percussion of delay and violence:
The loud slam of the front door.
The heavy boots on the wooden floorboards.
The familiar creak outside the kitchen.
My cry of surprise as he greets me with a fist to the side of my head that flings me sideways, red-hot lava exploding. Then, the almighty crash as I fall to the ground, along with the bar stool, my knees in blinding agony once again.
“Suka!” he snarls, standing over me, cowering me, covering my bare arm in slimy wetness as he spits on me. “You dare to make me look like a fool?”
You do that all by yourself, Kirill, I think blindly.
Darkness is closing in again, but the worst things he’s done to me have all transpired when I’ve been unconscious. As such, I push it away like I’m pushing away the verbal abuse that’s raining down on me, curling myself into a protective ball and bracing for a steel-tipped boot to my ribs.
The next thing I know, he’s dragging me to my feet by my hair and throwing me face-first over the breakfast bar, the hard edge of the counter colliding with my stomach and winding me.
“Wait!” I slam my hands down to save myself, but this leaves him free to flip my dress up and drag my underwear down. “No! No!”
It’s not a fair contest. It’s two against one. I’m not only fighting off my husband. I’m fighting to stay awake again. He slams my throbbing head down onto the cold surface with one hand and thrusts a brutal finger inside me with the other, stretching my dryness, coercing my body to open for what’s coming.
“I hate you,” I rasp, as he forces another finger inside me, and I tense every muscle to drive him out, but he’s too strong. The hurt is too much.
“Not as much as I hate you,” he grunts back, kicking my legs apart. “I should have taken you in that dining room all those years ago when you were still young and pure. Instead, you fucked a poor Italian boy and bought yourself a lifetime of hell.”
“No regrets,” I whisper, closing my eyes when I hear the clink of his belt. “No regrets, Frankie.”
This isn’t the first time Kirill’s raped me, but it’s the first time he’s done it when I can see light around the edges of my prison cell door.
Does that make it any easier to take, I think hazily, as he pulls his fingers out, and something else starts pushing at me down there. The fact that he degrades me when I have hope? Or was it easier before, when I could sink down into an abyss in the days that followed and find some relief in it.
I see a library suddenly.
I think of eyes meeting, of whispered words… Of a love that began amongst stories, yet the reality turned out to be so much better for us.
Meanwhile, Kirill is still grunting and pushing against me, but there’s no sharp sting or rush of air from my lungs from his first violent thrust. “Fucking blyad,” I hear him curse. “You are so ugly now, even my cock doesn’t want you.”
His hand lifts from my head and he shoves me away. With a shaking hand, I reach down to pull my underwear up. He’s breathing harshly, watching me, planning his next attack. I’m not stupid. I know he’s not done with me. What started out as my humiliation has now become his, and there will be serious repercussions for that.
There’s a loud rap at the kitchen door.
“Mudak!” Shithead. “I told you not to disturb me.”
“Cian O’Sullivan is on the phone.” Adrik sounds animated for once, and not in a good way. “He says it is important.”
“So is reprimanding my wife.”
“It is to do with the coke shipments from Vilnius.”
There’s a pause. “What about them?”
“The first plane never arrived at Heathrow.”
“Pah! That Irish svolach‘ couldn’t find a hundred kilos of white in a black room. Are you sure he checked in with Heathrow and not Gatwick?”
“O’Sullivan says it just exploded over the English Channel.”
There’s a terrifying note of calm before Kirill speaks again. “And the second plane?”
“We lost radio contact over Europe ten minutes ago. There is an issue with the London warehouses too.”
With a howl of rage, my husband pushes past me and sends me spinning into the counter again.
The next few moments are a fast percussion of exit and release:
The angry words exchanged in the hallway.
His Ferrari engine roaring into life.
The strange keening sound I’m making at the back of my throat as I sink back down to the floor.
Hurry, Frankie. He’s tearing me apart again. And this time I might not be able to find all my pieces.