All their murmured words and tender caresses had been nothing but a stupid vicious pretense to be able to claim my virginity between them like some kind of trophy. My hands clenched at my sides.
Darius’s face had tightened alongside my fists. “Are you kidding me? After all the shit you and your brother have pulled, you’re going to make it sound likeyou’rethe real victim?”
“All the shitwe’vepulled?” I snapped before I could catch the words. “We weren’t the ones who staged a shootout to justify a goddamn war.”
Confusion flickered across Darius’s expression, and I clamped my mouth shut. Shit. I shouldn’t have said that much, shouldn’t have revealed that I didn’t believe the story about the deal gone wrong.
“What the hell did you just say?” he demanded. “Who staged what? What war?”
As if his father wouldn’t have bragged to him about the recent victory.
“Never mind,” I said coldly, groping for my composure. I wasn’t going to find it in this room. I turned toward the door. “I just wanted to see if you were even listening to me.”
Darius caught me by the upper arm and yanked me across the room before my fingers could close around the doorknob. I staggered on the rug and spun around.
“No way,” he said, jabbing his forefinger at me, his eyes blazing now and his voice gone rough. “We’re not falling for your bullshit again. You’re up to something here, just like you always are. You think we don’t know you hooked that old fucker into marriage just so you could murder him and bring the business back home? All cold calculation down to the goddamned bone. Iseeyou.”
An icy tremor ran through me at his mention of Clyde. Something in me cracked right through. Maybe it’d been on the verge of fracturing for days now, since the first moment the Rosano brothers had descended on me like a pack of hyenas looking to see what they could scavenge from their past wreckage.
My insides seared with white-hot rage, but my voice came out deathly frigid. I advanced on Darius, unable to stop it from shaking with my next words.
“I’d have givenanythingnot to marry ‘that old fucker,’ you jackass. Do you want me to show you the presents he gave me, the scars that still haven’t healed? Just a small assortment of the worst of the smacks and burns and jabs I took over those five years. And that’s not even getting into the bruises you could never see: hearing the shit he hurled at me every day, having to bow to his sick whims so that my dad wouldn’t show up and killmefor screwing uphisdeal. I’d throw away every bit of my inheritance if it meant spending one less day under that asshole’s roof.”
Darius’s jaw had gone slack. He’d really thought that I’d happily gone along with the marriage? For fuck’s sake.
I was too far gone now to hold back the rest of the words searing up my throat while he stood there in startled silence. “But you know what, it could have been worse. It’d have hurt more if I’d expected better, but I knew what I was being sold into from the start. In five years, he never gutted me the way the three of you did. I was always perfectly aware that I was nothing to him. With you…”
As my tirade petered out, exhaustion rolled over me. Darius swallowed audibly, his forehead furrowing. “Anthea…”
I waved my hand in dismissal. “Whatever. It was years ago. We were all kids or not much more than that. But you know what happened to the last man who used me as a punching bag. If you or either of your brothers hurts me again, just imagine what I’ll do toyou.”
When I strode past him this time, he didn’t lunge fast enough to stop me. I hurtled down the stairs and rushed to my bedroom, but even as I set my purse down on the bed, I knew I couldn’t stand to stay here. Empty-handed, I swiveled and marched right out again, back to the stairwell, farther down, to the first floor and then descending into the cooler dimness of the basement.
I didn’t really know where I was going, only that I wanted to be away, somewhere none of them could quickly find me.
I hadn’t meant to say so much to Darius. I hadn’t meant to lay it all out. I couldn’t even say the confession had felt good. It was like I’d spat up acid and now my insides were burning from my stomach all the way to my throat.
The basement was a maze of tiled, low-ceilinged hallways, a huge home gym, a wine cellar, and about a million general storage rooms. Probably at least one of which was reserved for torture, knowing how gangs like this operated.
Shouts and sporadic laughter echoed through the halls alongside strange whuffs and thumps. I rounded a corner and then drew back, seeing a few of the younger lackeys including the guy who’d fenced my valuables for me—Brant—brandishing Nerf guns of all things.
I guessed that was one way to get in some practice when they couldn’t shoot off real guns around here without a neighbor potentially calling the cops.
As I watched from the shadows, the guys faced off. One foam ball blasted Brant in the shoulder; his two shots went wild. His companions cackled and cuffed him on the shoulder, mingling reassurances with insults the way men liked to do.
“Just not my thing,” he said with a shake of his head.
I pulled back through the nearest doorway as they headed toward me. The other guys strode on ahead, and Brant brought up the rear. He paused just before he reached my doorway, waiting until his colleagues had turned a corner up ahead, and raised his toy gun. I was standing at just the right angle to see the ball bounce right off the little light switch on the wall twenty feet away, flicking its position.
He chuckled quietly to himself as if he wasn’t actually surprised by his accuracy and strode on through the now total dark.
Silence fell over the basement. I was alone—totally, blissfully alone. I drew in a few breaths, rubbing my arms as I wandered through the room, and sank down with my back to a stack of cardboard boxes.
I’d just sit here for a little while until I felt ready to face the rest of humanity again. Until the part of me that’d cracked had sealed itself up again. Darius never needed to seethatside of me again.
I raised my knees and leaned forward to rest my forehead against them. My eyelids slid shut. Before I realized it would happen, I was slipping away from the agony of that confrontation the surest way my body knew how, drifting off into sleep.