AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Where did you go, Willow?’ he asks with a frown.
I don’t reply. I only slip off his lap to sit beside him as I stare out the window at the passing trees as we drive down through the gates that lead to the Gallo estate.
I never considered that I had exchanged one prison for another, but I am starting to realize my mistake.
Chapter Five
Fewer Truths
Rafe
Willow ignores me for the rest of the drive home, sunk into her head, a place where I forced her to retreat while I worked my anger into her flesh.
I fucking hate when she lies to me. Or omits a truth, especially when that truth directly influences my own flesh and blood. As much as I regret manhandling my wife, I regret the decision to send Regina away with Dom more.
“When will you start to obey me, Willow?” I ask, pushing my hair back from my face. It isn’t enough, and I scrub my cheek with the palm of my hand roughly, considering slapping my own cheek to keep myself awake.
Cyprus was exhausting, and the travel compounded that. Now, with whatever trouble my sister has concocted…
I needn’t have worried about my alertness. Willow’s hand cracks across my face, bringing me back to the world I also lost myself from. I find myself staring into the twin blazing suns in her bright eyes, slightly puffy and raging beyond demonic status.
“You could have had a fucking conversation like a normal person, Rafe! What are you going to do with your sister? Spank the truth out of her and then find out she’s—” Willow catches the slip in time.
My gaze narrows, pinpointing the searing center of my obsession. “When I find out my little sister is what, dear wife?’ I ask in a deadly, low tone.
If Dom was here, he’d stop me. But like my sister I sent him away, foolishly thinking I could force the truth out of my wife.
Willow stares at me across the back seat, her arms folded defiantly over the plunging neckline of her cream top that transforms into the black skirt I just threw up to tan her perfect ass. She doesn’t utter a single sound.
“Perfect,” I mock her. “I could get more out of an enemy with a little threat than I can from my own kin. My wife,” I whisper, my voice low. Deadly. “I had a stupid dream. That one day I might marry and that woman would be my confidant. The person I told everything to. Who I would trust to soften my wrath when it’s too harsh, or harden me when I feel weak.” I’d never say those words to anyone else, not even Dom. The weakness displayed would break us, shatter the family I cling to into shards so broken I’d never put us back together. “The woman who would be mine in every way, and give me the solace and comfort I need. A place to put my rage when no one else can handle me.”
I stare at Willow, and she stares right back. An impasse. How did we get to this place?
For the first time, a single tear trails along her cheek. “I’m not the woman you want, Rafe,” she whispers, shocking us both with her words.
I can read that tarnished truth in her eyes, the way they widen and shutter, blocking the hurt she feels from me.
“I can’t heal you if you don’t let me,” I say gently, reaching for her. “Willow, I’m—”
“Sorry. Yes, the great excuse of every abuser in history. But I’m not that woman, Rafe. Not for you now, maybe not ever. Because you can’t fucking trust me. Why should I return that courtesy?”
She pushes the door open before the car stops, striding up the steps where Regina waits for her beside the doorway, both in plain sight as I’ve instructed them against too many times to count since that day when I thought I lost Willow, and so nearly did.
“Take us around the back,” I say tersely to the driver once the door is shut. “And don’t bring the fucking women around the front again, unless you’d like to observe your head separate from your body before your brain fails you.”
I slam my fist against the window at my side, watching a fracture form in the perfect tint, the lines spreading like a tree to encompass a fading fission of my family as the car turns and my wife and sister disappear before Dom closes the door. The break forms in a perfect crack that, against all odds, explodes over me as I sit there, swearing and picking out shards of what should be bulletproof glass from my pants.
Isn’t that just fucking perfect?
****
By the time I walk into my bedroom still wearing the rumpled suit I wore to fly in from Cyprus, and holding the dinner tray Luca sent up for Willow claiming she hadn’t eaten all day, I’ve been betrayed, slapped again—by my sister, this time, before she ran off like Willow—and my best friend deserted me in the pursuit of his own preferred pussy who left him sleeping alone.
I knew, because he slammed the door in my face and stamped around like a wildebeest behind its shuttered comfort.
Thalia darted in the opposite direction when I called out to her, needing my healer to look at my wife.
I wish I stayed in fucking Cyprus.
