“Why? Why the fuck were you e-mailing her!”
Dumb struck. Words failed her, because now all the sensible, rational things she should have considered raced into her addled brain. Jason and Martinson also had the e-mail address. They might want to try the same technique for contacting Raven. Had they already? Imagine the confusion! Johnson had tailed Raven after the dance class. Gemma had no idea what he’d found out. They might have followed her all the way home and located her house, maybe even confronted her. Not possible, surely, because who had she been communicating with? Emily? No, it couldn’t be Emily.
Truth. Tell him the truth. Her only option for digging herself out of the mess she’d made.
Her lips trembled. “I want to help Emily. I….I…can’t stand the thought of her being with that woman. A criminal….” Any semblance of self-control seemed to crumble away. The pathetic excuse tumbled out of her dry mouth.
Jason closed his eyes and shook his head, grimacing in disgust. “What was the one thing I asked you do? This whole blackmail business…what did you have to do?” He accentuated the last sentence through gritted teeth.
“Leave you to deal with it,” she muttered, looking at her feet. She couldn’t look at him. The sight of his immaculate, extortionately priced suit, which signified his executive powers and the piercing blue eyes, which always burrowed past her weaknesses, was too much for her to bear. His tone cut like a knife through her heart as he reminded her of what she had agreed and how they lived their life.
“I am in control of your life, not the other way round! Trust! You were supposed to trust me absolutely with your safety, your protection. You obviously don’t,” he spat at her, impaling her with words she never thought he’d say.
She staggered backwards. She did trust him. How could he think she didn’t? It had never been her intention. The idea repulsed her. Did he believe she’d deliberately done her own investigation to circumvent his and Martinson’s, to go over his head and make him look foolish? No. She’d not done that, but was it how he saw things?
Her legs turned to jelly. What had she done! She’d imprinted her own fears so successfully on Emily, she’d lost sight of her faith in Jason, her Master. Too empathetic! The vision of an oppressed Emily, caged and held to emotional ransom, while carrying out Raven’s wishes, had been Gemma’s creation. She’d built Emily into a sacrificial lamb. A terrified woman who needed rescuing. It wasn’t really Emily she saw in her head. It was herself.
A deeply disappointed Jason stood unbending before her. If she ignored his primary rules for her safety and well-being, then all his efforts to have her trust him, to control her, and to have her obedience were for nothing. She’d done it again. Pulled the rug from underneath him. His frustrations permeated the air, suffocating the space between them.
She had to make him understand. He’d never been truly afraid. Never been petrified nor left with the inability to escape a nightmare situation.
Gemma clenched her fists as the nausea built, wave upon wave of despairing angst and terror.
He is my beloved husband. I must not fear him!
He told me never to fear him.
Too late. He crept out of the dark recesses of her mind, a hateful figure, and she superimposed him over Jason. The man who’d re-created hell in a locked garage and left her haunted, traumatised. He re-materialised, red-faced with rage, and dragged her into his chosen torture chamber, snarling in her ear, “I’m going to cut you to shreds, whore. Bleed you dry.”
The unseen bedroom spun about her. Black, obscure, and airless. She couldn’t breathe. The need to run somewhere unbearably strong. A blanket of nothingness descended over her.
Jason vanished.
***
“Gemma! No, you don’t. You stay with me, Gemma!”
A different voice. She recognised it. Familiar. Worried.
Gemma opened her eyes. The ceiling. The moulded plasterwork of an ornate white ceiling. She lay on the bed. How she came to be there was a mystery to her. A heavy arm draped over her belly, a hand clutched her shoulder, and a face was buried in her hair. Jason, breathed heavily, blowing moist air into her ear.
Some time must have passed, but she couldn’t recall what she had been doing. It had all gotten muddled up somewhere.
“Did I faint?” she croaked.
“No, babe.” His voice sounded unusually pained and troubled.
Now, she understood. Memories crept back. A panic attack. Her self-inflicted protective cocoon, where loss of awareness became paramount. There, in her mental sanctuary, things happened without her realising, leaving her very vulnerable, devouring her senses, and taking her to a place she couldn’t recall or describe.
“We have to find her, Emily. She reminded me of myself so much. That haunted look on her face. It made me think of my own kind of terror. It consumes me. You don’t know what it is like to be truly afraid, Jason. Terrifying, life-threatening fear.”
Jason moved his arm, and she turned onto her side, curling up into a ball, and he spooned his body around her. The tips of his fingers ran through her hair, stroking her like a beloved pet. The silence returned as both waited for their pounding heartbeats to settle into a natural resting rhythm.
Finally, he sighed. “Johnson followed this Raven character to a house. Not her house. She rang the doorbell, and a man let her in. According to the last update, she’s still there.”
The timings didn’t make sense. “But, my e-mails?”
“Smartphones, Gemma.”