“He knew the exact spot to bruise me so it could be covered no matter what I wore in the pageant.” Turning her head, she lifted her hair. Right under her hairline were five purple bruises: four on the right, one larger on the left.
Rage gripped me. “That fucker touched you?” I snarled, then rubbed my hand gently over her neck, wishing I could take it from her.
“I wouldn’t have gone with him willingly, Kai. He knew as much.”
“He deserves far worse than what he got.”
Her gaze snagged on my busted knuckles. “Yes he does.”
“Go on, please,” I told her, knowing it would do little to calm me.
A sad smirk tugged at her lips. “He asked me to marry him on my nineteenth birthday. I was so dead inside, so miserable, I agreed with the hopes the pain would stop once we were married. Which was naive of me. That night, we got in a huge fight because, surprise, surprise, I still wouldn’t sleep with him. Del called me asking if I wanted to go to the bayou, even though only nights before I’d told her I didn’t have time for someone like her anymore.” A tear rolled down her cheek, her chin quivering. I caught that tear with a kiss. She sniffled before going on. “I snuck out that night and smoked and drank. When I put my hair up, she saw the fresh bruises. They were so bad that time. That night, she convinced me to run.”
I fucking loved Delia.
“We planned for two weeks, during which I endured his anger, his abuse, while we slowly moved my essentials into her car. I’d been pilfering small amounts of money from my parents’ accounts from the time I turned fourteen. I’d taught myself how to hack, just for the hell of it, just to know they couldn’t control everything. I’d also secretly sent my transcripts and application to Vanderbilt using Del’s address, and I was accepted.
“During my escape, we came up with rules I had to live by: I was never to fall in love, I was never to get pregnant, and I was never to sleep with the same guy twice, amongst many others.”
She’d broken all three with me. That knowledge lit a fire inside me, making me want to do a whole lot more than kiss her. But we were in a hospital, and she was six months pregnant.
“My new goal in life was to be so tainted that if he ever found me, he wouldn’t want me anymore. Which seemed like a great plan to a stuffy nineteen-year-old virgin.”
That made me sick to my stomach but also caused me to give her a sad smile. She’d taken her life by the reins and fucking lived it without any regrets, without any say from her parents.
With this new knowledge, I understood her so much. Her aversion to marriage, especially when forced on her, her rules, her attempts at controlling her own life.
“But you broke all your rules,” I reminded her.
“Yes.” She nodded, still grinning at me, golden eyes sparkling. “I realized after meeting you how I’d traded one prison for another. The life I lived those three years was no life at all.”
She was fucking amazing.
And she was mine… mostly.
I held her hands, kissing each finger. Which was when she gasped, yanking her left hand from me. Breath coming in short gasps, she stared at the ring.
“I told them we’re married so they’d let me stay with you,” I explained sheepishly.
“And you just happened to have a spare ring on you?” She kept gawking at the ring.
Heart pounding in my ears, my palms became slick with sweat. “My dad gave it to me when they came to visit. It was my great-grandma’s.”
She rubbed her thumb over the round rose quartz stone set in the delicate woven yellow gold band before meeting my gaze, but I couldn’t read what was there in her expression. “I have to give it back when we leave?”
My breath caught in my throat, heart jumping up it, before I swallowed four times. “I, um… well… you don’t have to.”
She stared at me from under her lashes, killing me. “If you want me to, I’ll keep it on.”
“Are you saying you’d marry me, Chloe?”
“I think I would, Kai. I got a good look at the life I don’t want to live, and that’s one without you.”
I stood, leaning over to kiss her hard. She wanted to marry me. Something I never considered in our relationship after the mention of it had made her throw up. All the rest of the world could go to hell. I was going to make this woman my wife.
Once we were both breathing pretty hard, I sat back watching her play with the ring. “I’m curious,” I said after a long minute. She raised her eyebrows. “What exactly was your pageant talent?”
The corners of her lips tugged up, much-needed color flooding her cheeks. “Since I’d been practicing with computers for a while, and by then I hated everything pageant, I was going to hack the judges’ emails on stage and read them off to the crowd.”
I belted out a laugh. This woman owned me. “Fuck, I love you, Chloe.”
She beamed. “And I love you, Kai.”
We talked a bit more, her telling me about what happened, how he had shown up at her new job—one she probably lost for not showing up the last two days—how her parents insisted she marry him.
My blood boiled. Fucking sick people trying to force her into a marriage when she was pregnant with my babies.
Then she told me what she’d planned when she thought I wasn’t coming. How she was going to destroy them from within. My heart about exploded with adoration for her. She left out the part about the doctor, which only confirmed my suspicions. She didn’t mention anything about what they thought of the twins, for which I was grateful. I didn’t want to go back there and murder all of them.
We both got a little sleep, but the nurses came in often to check on Chloe and the babies. I passed out pretty hard in the chair around dawn. I thought I was dreaming of someone knocking on a door until Chloe snarled, “What are you doing here?”
My eyes snapped open to see her parents, looking fancy as ever, standing in the doorway. They wore lifeless masks as they took in the whole room, giving me a pretty apprehensive look. They had no idea what I was capable of on top of what they’d witnessed, no clue the ways I knew how to make a man bleed.
“We came to make sure you’re okay,” her stuffy mom answered.
Without any humor, I snorted, standing from my chair.
Her dad’s eyes grew wide. “We do care about our daughter,” he told me, his tone even. But that was all he would say, because he’d seen what I did to that shithead.
“That’s hard to see,” I told him in as even a tone as I could muster, “when you sold your daughter off to some dick who abused her.”
“We didn’t know,” her mom snapped at me, losing her grip on the careless mask.
Chloe’s face drained of color. “You knew exactly who he and his father were.”
Her mom’s lips thinned.
“Why are you here?” I pressed.
She raised her eyebrows at me. “You should be grateful the Roches decided not to press charges.”
I chuckled darkly.
“This is no joke,” her dad snapped.
Baring my teeth, I tilted my head. “Isn’t it?” I asked, calm, cool. Inside, I was raging. Chloe reached for my hand and I took hers, letting her tether me there. Her mom’s nostrils flared, her dad looking like he wanted to flee. Smart guy. “Of course no one will be pressing charges. You wouldn’t want the bad press. Especially when it gets out that you tried to get a doctor to abort my twenty-six-week-old twins. Or the fact that their dick son kidnapped my fiancée.”