Knowing better than to double-guess my direct order, Clover immediately commences moving Roxanne to the lower half of the jet.
Rocco doesn’t follow his obedient lead. “Dimi—”
I shut him up with a stern sideways glare. “Tell the pilot I want wheels up in no less than five minutes. We’re already behind schedule.”
Too tired to answer the many questions his narrowed eyes are throwing my way, I sidestep him before shadowing Clover’s walk.
I’ve only just entered the compact yet luxurious sleeping quarters at the back of the jet when Roxanne lands on the bed with a thud. She springs back onto her feet in under a second, but my stern grumble telling her to sit stops her bounce off the springy mattress.
“We had an agreement. You have not yet fulfilled your side of our agreement, so you’re not free to go.”
“This was never part of our agreement.” She peers past my shoulder to the men I feel watching her. There’s no doubt they’re interested, but since they’d have to get through me to touch her, she has nothing to worry about.
The pounding of my heart matches the vein working overtime in Roxanne’s neck when I request for Clover to disembark the jet. She watches his exit, her eyes only returning to mine after I’ve fastened the latch on the only bit of safety between her and my thirsty crew.
“If you think I brought you here to fuck you, you’re wrong.” My next set of words are hard to articulate when the late hour has me confusing the flare darting through her eyes as a disappointed one. “If I wanted to fuck you, you’d already be fucked. If I wanted them to fuck you…” I nudge my head to the door I just locked, “… they’d be lining up for round two. But that isn’t what this is about. None of this is about you. It’s about Fien, my daughter. I’m trying to protect her as your daddy should have protected you. I’m trying to keep her safe.”
For the first time tonight, the wetness in Roxanne’s eyes isn’t from fear. She’s remorseful, although it has nothing on my guilt when I ask, “Did your father fuck with your head or his druggo friends?”
This isn’t a conversation we should be having now. I doubt it’s even one we should have in the near future, but for the life of me, I can’t hold back my interrogation. The knot in my gut won’t lessen until Roxanne gives me the answers I’m seeking, and even then, I’m certain it’ll take more than words to fully smooth it out.
“What?” I can see how badly she wants to deny my claim, but with her mouth refusing to relinquish another lie, she could only get one word out.
“You have the markings of an abused child, a fascination with the man who watched you get off in an alleyway.” I didn’t just feature in her latest drawings. My rain-soaked, cloaked-by-darkness form is the only thing she has sketched the past year. “The sexual maturity of someone much older and wiser.” I lock my eyes with her watering ones. “And your nipples bud every time you feel threatened or scared.” She can deny my accusations all she likes, but the straining of her nipples against the thick material of her dressing gown is undeniable. “So that leads me to believe your daddy either fiddled with you, or he sold you to his drug-fucked buddies like he did your mother.”
Roxanne’s hands ball as tightly as mine when she shakes her head, denying my accusations. “He never touched me.”
“So, his friends did?”
“That isn’t what I said.” Her words are as icy as the color of my eyes and just as lifeless.
With anger clutching my throat, every word I speak is delivered with a gravelly growl. “You didn’t deny it either, Roxanne. So what is it? Did they touch you? Or did your sweet ole Pa treat his daughter like a dirty little whore?”
“It was neither of those things!”
When she attempts to race by me, I grab the tops of her arms and drag her to within an inch of my face. “Then… What. Was. It?” My voice is as loud as hers, my anger just as palpable. I’m not angry at her. I’m fighting the urge not to track down her father and slit his pedophile throat.
This kills me to admit, even more so since Ophelia’s life was cut short right around the age Roxanne is now, but Roxanne’s eyes hold the same dark, gleaming secrets Ophelia’s did any time our father returned home after a long stint of absence. They were badly stained, but not enough to have you believing they were wholly broken. They could be fixed if the right person was willing to put in the hard yards.
I thought Isaac Holt was that person for Ophelia. I was wrong then just like I could be now, but I can’t stop pushing. I need to know who hurt Roxanne. I need to know more than my lungs need their next breath.
“Did he touch you, Roxanne? Is that why you were sent to live with your grandparents? Did your mother try to protect you after your father already fucking hurt you?”
“No,” she denies again, even with her eyes screaming the opposite. “He didn’t touch me!”
“Then what did he do? Why do you act as if he doesn’t exist?” I crowd her against the door of the private jet just as its engines roar to life. “Why do you hate him so much that just the thought of saying his name has you wanting to vomit.”
“He made me watch!” she shouts before she can stop herself. “He made me watch what they did to my mother.” Tears roll down her ashen face unchecked as she repeats, “He made me watch.”
I want to kill, I want to go on a rampage, but instead of doing either of those things, I do the last thing anyone would ever expect. I pull Roxanne into my chest, hopeful her tears will cool the rage burning me up inside.
If they don’t, I’m sure I can find another means to dispel my anger.
Torturing her father will be a good start.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Roxanne
Sighing, I rest my cheek onto the top of my knees. The meal a member of Dimitri’s staff is placing on the bedside table smells as divine as the previous three, but no number of excited rumblings from my stomach will pull me out of the slump I’m in.
I cried in the chest of a man who’d rather kill me than bed me.
If that isn’t bad enough, it seems as if that was the beginning of my punishment.
I’ve been shunted from activities. Left out in the cold like the naughty child I am.
The confession Dimitri forced out of me three nights ago on his private jet isn’t to blame for my disturbing ways. I was barely a child when my father found humor in my pink cheeks and wide eyes. He wanted to embarrass me, where in reality, he sparked a sinister curiosity for sex.
I didn’t see the men sleeping with my mother—I didn’t even see her—all I saw was two bodies becoming one, the gripping of flesh, and harmonic sounds I’d never heard before. I saw how the simplest movements could change the light in someone’s eyes in an instant.
I saw beauty when all I should have seen was darkness.
When my grandparents discovered the reason for my almost erotic drawings in grade five, my grandfather contacted the first shrink he found. He was mortified like Dimitri, confident there was something horrendously wrong with me.
Mercifully, my grandmother saw past my chipped exterior and overstimulated curiosity. She understood my vividly graphic drawings weren’t to recreate acts I should have never seen. I wanted to recapture a unique beauty I hadn’t seen since I went to live with my grandparents, not live in wickedly naughty thoughts.