My husband had beat me.
I was a battered woman.
I was a cliché.
But there was nothing I could do about it.
I did what every trapped, abused woman did at first- I stayed.
I stayed and I got beat in different ways, depending on my offense. Sometimes it was bare-handed spanking. Sometimes it was the belt again. Later, it was his bare fists slamming into my face, into my sides.
It was my twenty-fourth birthday when I decided I couldn't take it anymore. The night before, Damian thought the shorts I wore to the market were too revealing and when I got home, I was called my new names: bitch, slut, cunt, whore. Then he pulled off the shorts in question and he beat my ass until I wet myself.
And. I. Was. Done.
The actual word 'done' took on a whole new meaning as I sat in the bathtub where he always dealt with the aftermath of his anger on my skin and I twirled the knife around in my hand, trying to get to the point where I knew I could do it- sink it into my wrist and drag it up my arm, slicing open the vein and making it impossible for them to fix me, to give me back to him.
I was never going to belong to him again. Never. He was never going to get a chance to lay his hands on me again. He was never going to be able to be the reason I cried at night.
If that meant my only way out was to slice myself open and take myself out of the world, then so be it.
The only problem was... Damian came home from work early. Damian came home from work and I flew out of that tub, tucking the knife behind my back when he threw the bathroom door open without knocking. There was no such thing as privacy in my life. He had once stood there and watched me pull out a tampon and nothing had ever felt more mortifying.
“Why isn't dinner ready?” he demanded, ready for a fight already.
It was three in the afternoon, that was why dinner wasn't ready. Well, that and the fact that I didn't plan to live to see dinner when I got up in the morning.
“Answer me, bitch!” he roared, closing in on me.
I don't know where the urge came from, where it had been buried all the other times he had come at me, why it hadn't surfaced before. Wherever it had been hiding, it was showing itself then, an all-consuming burst of self-preservation. I felt the handle of the knife in my hand and I squeezed it hard, feeling a calmness settle over me as I did.
“Answer me, cunt.”
“No,” I said, taking a step forward instead of in retreat like he had come to expect from me.
The confused look on his face was seared into my memory. It was the only time I let his face pop into my head, when I was trying to remember that dumbfounded look.
“What the fuck did you just say to me, bitch?”
“I said no,” I shot back, my jaw clenched tight as I kept talking. “You should be familiar with it. You've heard me scream it out every time you've beaten me the past four years, you son of a bitch.”
His brows went up, but the rage I had been expecting didn't surface. If anything, he almost looked calm, amused. A evil smirk toyed with his lips. “I guess I have to teach you a lesson, huh?”
He reached for me then and with reflexes I didn't know I had, my arm came up and I stabbed the knife straight through his outstretched palm. I should have been horrified, sickened, frozen on the spot at the sight of the blade sticking out of both ends of his hand. But, in reality, all I felt was pleasure, down to my toes, it was positively arousing.
With a smile, I ripped it back out, Damian's scream echoing off the bathroom tile and bouncing back at me.
“You stupid...”
He didn't get the rest out because then I was stabbing. Fast, frequent, unrelenting. All I saw was red- blood everywhere. All I heard were his screams and groans and curses.
By the time my vision cleared, Damian was on the floor, clutching his hand to his side, his clothes saturated with blood. He was still breathing, but my knife was lodged in one of his ribs and I couldn't pull it back out.
Horrified, but still determined as ever to be done, I flew out of the bathroom, rubbing my bloodstained hands over the comforter of the bed as I grabbed as much as I could and threw it into a bag. That included his gun and the twenty five thousand dollars cash he kept under the floorboards under our bed because he was convinced the banks were going to fail.
With that and not a glance backward, I left him.
Also, more importantly, I left that woman behind too. The victim. I was done with her. I was never, fucking ever going to be her again.
And I never was.SixteenCashThe funny thing about my anger, it's like one of those sparklers kids play with on the fourth of July. It burns bright and brilliant for a matter of minutes then fizzles out to nothing at all. I had never been the type who could use their pissed-off-edness to fuel a revenge plot. I didn't hold grudges.
It was simply never the way I operated. I blamed my father. I blamed the fact that he never seemed to be anything but angry. From the day my mother died, even more so. It was like he blamed the world for her loss and he was all too happy to take that rage out on anyone who so much as stepped on his toes.
Even as a kid, I knew I didn't want to be that way. I knew it wasn't right, it didn't fit my personality. Reign had moments when it did suit him, when it did fit him. But as president of a gun running bike gang full of testosterone-driven men... well... he needed to be able to tap into that on occasion, to hold professional grudges. It was part of what made him good at what he did.