“Sarai?” I ask. “Where is she?”
I hold my breath held while I wait.
“She’s in the nursery. I checked on her a little bit ago. She was fine. I fed her one of the bottles from the fridge.”
Relief is quickly followed by anger, fear, and trepidation.
“And Caleb? Where is he?” I ask.
Andrew’s cheeks redden, and he clears his throat.
“He, uh, had a game.” He grabs the bottle and a glass of water from the bedside table. “You’ll need these for your ribs maybe the next few weeks.”
I stare at the pills, afraid to take anything anyone in this house offers me.
“It’s just naproxen,” he says. “An anti-inflammatory painkiller.”
“You’re a doctor,” I say dumbly, as if he doesn’t know, but pieces of information are lining up in my head to make sense of why he’s here and why he’s so calm when it’s obvious Caleb’s beat the shit out of me.
“I’m still in med school.” Andrew shakes two pills out of the bottle into his palm and offers them to me. “Remember?”
“Is this part of the Hippocratic Oath?” I pop the pills and gulp water, tearing up when the jerky movements hurt my jaw. “’Do no harm’ actually means ‘only aid and abet?’”
“I’m sorry, Iris.” He shakes his head. “I’ve told him before—”
“He’s done this before?” Horror widens my eyes and drops my mouth open. “Oh my God.”
“I’ve . . . well, helped him before, yeah.”
“You mean when he beat women, you came and patched them up?” I ask sarcastically. “Would have been good to know.”
“I thought he had it under control.” He runs his hands through hair only a shade darker than Caleb’s. “This hasn’t happened in a long time, and he loves you so much.”
“Don’t you dare say that ever again.” Tears rise in my throat like floodwaters. I wait for them to recede before speaking. “He may deceive himself that this is love, but I won’t play that game. He’s sick, and so are you if you help him.”
I stand in the middle of the bedroom and catch the first glimpse of myself in the wall mirror. The sheet knotted toga-style leaves my shoulders and arms exposed. Caleb’s brutality has painted my skin in shades of black and red, of desolation and rage. My face . . .
A moan, loud and involuntary, falls out of me and bounces off the walls.
My cheeks are uneven, one monstrously swollen and the other nearly untouched. One eye is smeared with shadows left by Caleb’s fist. A line of dried blood runs from the corner of my mouth down my neck and disappears beneath the fold of the sheet. I gently touch the swollen, bruised, puffy flesh.
I turn from the mirror to Andrew. “You have to help me.”
He takes a step back, his expression withdrawing as surely as his body does. “I can’t, Iris. I have painkillers, and—”
“Painkillers?” I sound hysterical, but I can’t help it. “He raped me at gunpoint last night, Andrew, and he beat me today.”
He squeezes his eyes shut, shaking his head. “I’m so sorry.”
“He’s blackmailing me,” I say in a rush, praying that everything I reveal will somehow convince him he has to help me. “He stole my journal and will twist the things I wrote to get custody of Sarai if I try to leave. He had Ramone, that crazy bodyguard, report me to social services. He’s cut off all my access to money. He says he’ll kill me if I try to leave, Andrew, and I believe him.” Tears flow freely while I rehash just how screwed over I am—how I’ve allowed Caleb to trap me.
“What about Lotus?” Andrew asks.
“He says he’ll hurt her, too, if I involve her. He knows where she lives in New York.” I swipe my hands over my wet cheeks. “No, just getting away from him won’t solve my custody issue. His threats would catch up to me. I need something on him that will stick, to hurt him where it counts the way he’s doing me.”
“Caleb’s good at threats,” he says bitterly. “He deals in information.”
“That’s why you help him?” I ask. “He has something on you? That’s why you can’t help me?”
Andrew’s lips compress. “I can get you more painkillers.”
“I don’t want painkillers!” I scream. “I want to not need them. I want to get out of here.” I bury my face in my hands, slumping against the wall and allowing myself one moment of weakness. “I have to get Sarai out of here.”
“I think things will get better,” Andrew says. “He probably just lost it, what with August humiliating him like that.”
“He didn’t humiliate him,” I counter. “He just played the game. Caleb let him get in his head, like he always does.”
“I know you say he doesn’t love you.” Andrew holds up a staying hand when I open my mouth to argue. “But he’s never felt like this about another woman.”
“Oh, you mean abusive? Violent? Psychopathic? Wow. I feel so flattered.”
“No, I mean you must be special to him. He’s marrying you.”
“We’re not engaged,” I auto-reply.
Andrew’s brows bunch, and he tips his head toward my left hand. “Then what’s that on your finger?”
I glance down and notice for the first time, my gris-gris ring from MiMi is gone.
In its place is the ten-carat diamond.
August
Number thirty-three.
I lift my father’s old basketball jersey out of the cardboard box, coughing a little from the dust. I’ve seen pictures of me as a toddler wearing this. It hung off my shoulders and dragged on the floor. Now, when I slip it over my head, it fits perfectly. At six foot seven inches, my dad was an inch taller than I am. His wingspan outreached mine and his feet were a size larger, but that’s where I stop making comparisons. I leave that to the pundits and media who speculate about what he could have been and what I may achieve. He was cut down so young before he really had the chance to fulfill even a fraction of his promise.
I massage the soreness in my leg and wonder if I’ll repeat history. The easy part of this recovery is over. I’ve been mostly off my feet for the eight weeks since surgery. I recently started upper-body work in a gym close by, just outside of Baltimore, and that is only the beginning. Months of grueling rehab lie ahead with no guarantee that I’ll be a hundred percent at the end. Speed and agility, the ability to turn on a dime—those are trademarks of my game and are things this injury could compromise irreparably. Only time and the hardest work of my life will tell.
Fucking Caleb and his dirty play that wasn’t ruled a dirty play. He’s slithered his way out of consequences all his life. It’s made him spoiled and cruel, but also clever enough to hide it. Me, he hates, so he did some underhanded shit that shoved me, at least temporarily, out of the way.
He’d never hurt them, though, right?
The more I’ve considered it, flat on my back and staring up at the ceiling, the less confident I am of Caleb’s boundaries. God, if I had Iris, I’d treat her like a queen.