Cold-Blooded Beautiful (8 page)

Her chin trembled and she pinched her lips to hold back a sob. One broke through anyway, and shaking her head, she walked away. That look and those tears tore at my heart, but I could never promise her that.  And I knew.  I knew it was only a matter of time before that woman walked the fuck out of my life, because I was fucked up beyond repair.  How was I supposed to stop it? 
How do I stop being how I am
? 

This is
who I am.

Chapter 4

I heard them talking in the kitchen as I walked downstairs looking for Kade, wrapped in one of his dark terrycloth robes.  Hushed whispers, fists slamming, Jen sniffling, of course, they must have been speaking of me.  Passing the den, I stopped in complete shock.  Unease rolled deep in my belly. 
Oh my God, he had lost control
. 
Please let it have been a bat he took to the room and not his hands
.  

Jen’s voice hissed out, taking my attention off the wreckage of the den.  Then like uncontrollable projectile word vomit, she was telling them about the torture David dragged me through. 
What the hell was she thinking?  This is going to kill Kade and push him into the monster that he fears lies dormant in his soul
.  Anger bubbled up in my throat, choking me.  I knew she meant well. Jen was just trying to help him understand, but even she didn’t know everything. 
No one ever will
.  There are things, words that just won’t pass my lips, emotions and fears I won’t let myself remember.  I can’t.  I have to be stronger than them.  I have to be, or they will consume me.

Do you understand that?

I leaned against the outside of the door, listening.  My terror warped into a few worthless insignificant bunch of spoken words.  They didn’t hold the weight of my experience.  No, the weight of it was safely tucked away in my heart, so as not to hurt the ones I loved.

Oh, my God
.  Your warped curiosity wants to know anyway, doesn’t it? Fuck it.   As long as it’s not you, right?  As long as the story is about someone else and you can get to feel bad, get to be part of the experience
a bit
, and then walk away without all the years of anger and fear that really comes with
it
.  I get it; it’s human nature.  It’s okay, I’ll be your spokesperson for domestic abuse. I’ll be the face of victimization, and you can live vicariously through me.  Go ahead, I’ve signed the release forms, and made sure no one else but me will be hurt in the making of the dramatization.

There is a reason why I’m a strong person.  There is a reason for my inability to filter the things I say when I see an underdog, or feel oppressed in any way, or when someone tells me
I
can’t do something.  I fucking
earned it
. 
I earned respect
when I put myself through medical school, and chose to use my talents to help save people who were fighting for my freedoms, and
I can’t even begin to tell you about the hell that was in Afghanistan or Kuwait
. 
I earned my strength
when a sick psychotic man took the perfect world I built for myself, shook it like a snow globe, and smashed it up against a wall.  I have earned every breath I’ve ever took, while being choked at the hands of that madman.  Can you even begin to understand what it would feel like, if the person you chose to spend the rest of your life with was trying to kill you?  Torture you?  You probably couldn’t even fathom what it would feel like, if you found out your husband had another secret life, well hidden from the one you knew.  You probably think it’s impossible.

Nothing in this life is impossible.

Peek through his cell phone.

Look through the history on his computer.

Watch his eyes wander at a restaurant.

Listen quietly in the shadows as he speaks to one of his friends.

Think about the dark thoughts in your own mind and about the monsters that hide under
your
bed.  Think about the things you’re ashamed of thinking, feeling, and doing.  Anything is possible. 

Nobody in this world is completely innocent
.

For three weeks after losing my baby, David kept a steady line of drugs flowing through my veins, and he was so ingenious about it too. Every few days, he’d change the way he’d administer them to me.  Some days, they were straight into my blood stream with syringes. Some days they were gassed into the air, saturated into a cotton cloth and held over my mouth and nose, or just ingested into my stomach with a small sip of water.  Minutes where I was conscious, I could fight him; fight taking the drugs, but everything was so cloudy and chaotic, I never knew what was real and what were the hallucinations. 

Every day, I was chained and shackled to our bed, and every day, he’d remind me of how
nobody
was coming to save me.  How
I was crazy
and a
criminal
for what I’d done with the fake company that
he created
.  After two weeks, my body was so weakened and frail from the constant line of drugs, it began purging itself and shutting down.  To live, I pretended to believe him, pretended to understand that I was his, nothing more than a piece of property, one of his assets.  Pretend it was okay that he could do what he wished to me without my consent.

It’s not enough to gloss over it, is it? You want to know more, feel more, huh?

My so-called husband was an uncontrolled, undisciplined
sadist
.  Forget everything you’ve learned about dominant men, and the kink of BDSM, because a sadist is something I’m not sure you truly understand.  Dominants, men or women, get off by controlling the sexual experience they give to their submissive partners.  They will inflict pain or pleasure. It could be physical or emotional to
intensify
the experience for the submissive person.  Even if the pain is unpleasant, they’re doing it, knowing that the submissive is finding some sort of pleasure in the act.

A sadist, not so much.  A sadist is someone who hurts you for his or her own pleasure,
never
yours.  They get off on the pain they inflict on you, or anyone, and they don’t give a shit about your pleasure.  Oh, I’m sure that there are some sadists out there that enjoy pleasuring their property, but not my husband, not the man I found out I was married to.  I want you to see the whole, ugly reality of a true violent undisciplined sadist, not only to get you to understand what happened to me, but also to stop you from romanticizing any option that I should have fought for my marriage, because I had made a vow.  I vowed to marry someone who
wasn’t real
. The real David was a sick man.  I sure as fuck didn’t sign up for everything he did to me.  If Aurora wanted him, she could have him.  I would wrap him up, tie him with a bow, and leave him on her doorstep.  May they find happiness together, because I would never be happy with a man who demanded me to do the things she did, never. 

On an extremely cold morning, I was awakened with the icy blast from a bucket of water that was poured over my head.  “Wake up, my little pet,” David’s voiced cooed in mock tenderness.  There was nothing tender about David. His insides were as hard as rock, and black like coal.

It took me a few minutes to focus my eyes and climb out of the drug-induced slump my body had been forced to endure.  Sitting up as straight as I could in the bed, I lifted my chin to him.  A mumbled slur fumbled out of my lips and he laughed.

He laughed at my inability to speak. 

He laughed at my weakness.

Thick rough hands clenched my throat, pulling me up off the bed, over the soft white cotton sheets I once adored.  I couldn’t take in any air. In fact, I couldn’t breathe at all.  Warmth flooded my body, sparks of adrenaline-fueled fire burned across my skin, and I struggled to draw air into my lungs.  My eyes stung and burned with pressure. His were dead of any emotion or expression.  “Kneel,” he demanded, releasing my neck, watching my body crumple to the floor.

There was a small creak at the door, the tiniest of sounds, as if a mouse had just stumbled upon us and was scurrying to find food.  My eyes instantly tracked the noise, and they locked on Aurora, who crawled in on all fours with a goddamn spiked collar around her neck, violently pulled with a leash that was in one of David’s hands.  Her naked body was covered in brightly colored contusions, broken capillaries and venules, damaged by whatever trauma he’d inflicted on her.  Crimson abrasions covered her knees as she moved them over the coarse rug, and a small bloody laceration marred her pretty lips.  It was angry and red. My hands itched to clean it, and my mind raced to find something sterile to stitch up her cuts.  Oh, my God, she was acting as if she were his
sex slave
. 

I’ve only read about this sick shit in books.  Books I usually choose not to finish, because they never end well.

“The look of mortification on your face has my cock so fucking hard right now, pet.”  Slowly, as if putting on some twisted morbid show, he stripped out of his clothing, throwing each piece at me, as I sat on the floor clawing my fingers into the plush threads of the carpet.  “I’m going to make you watch me fuck her like a dog.”

Aurora’s head lowered submissively, but her bloodied lips smiled, and my stomach rolled. 
Sick.  Sick.  Sick
.

I gave him my tears then.  The last of them.  Because the minute he was inside her, I was planning to hurl myself at him, and kill him with the buckle of the belt he’d just thoughtlessly thrown at me.

He’d thought he had finally broken me, slamming his hips against Aurora like she was
nothing
.  Fucking her so savagely that I thought he’d rip her insides. 

The one heartbeat he blinked, I attacked him, clawing his eyes, punching him and raking the metal of the belt against his skin.  No technique existed in my fight, none of the combat discipline I had learned in the military; it was raw, ruthless…, and so fucking desperate. But, after a few good attacks, my arms began moving in slow motion, because they were too heavy and thick with fluids.  I knew I’d surprised him, knew I had hurt him in some way, yet the blackness claimed me quickly.  I raged in my semi-unconscious mind, raged to fight him, to fight the drugs, but my body just
quit
.  I couldn’t tell you what happened after.  And God forgive me, I don’t want to know.  I don’t want any more of those visions. 
I still can’t ever feel clean enough, no matter how hard I scrub. I still feel David’s filth…everywhere
.

I was very sick, and
that
, I was absolutely aware of. Violently vomiting, I knew what was happening. I knew he was killing me slowly.  I could feel my body shutting down organ by organ, but there was nothing I could seem to do.  Most nights, I would find my conscious swim to the surface, becoming vaguely aware of my surroundings. Most times, I would feel the headboard jostling violently against the wall, and could hear Aurora’s moans and laughter as if she was enjoying my torture.

I was almost dead when he called for an ambulance, the ink still fresh on the fictitious suicide note he penned in my name.  Those morbid, carnival clown giggles and moans from Aurora, the ones I had spent my last breaths listening too, became echoed shadows of sounds.  Cold, strange, invisible hands pulled and pushed my body.  It felt as if I was being strapped into one of those old rickety wooden rollercoasters, my body just slumping against the cool metal of the cart, not being able to do more than listen to the low murmurs of disembodied voices talking all around me.  Eventually, the little cart lurched forward and up, ascending into the warm moist atmosphere and the grinding of the metal teeth of the rollercoaster bucked and clinked beneath me.  Higher and higher I soared to a place where gravity had no say, and my body hurtled up into space, weightless. 

For a few moments, I was numb.  Gone.

Dead. 

Then I was freefalling back down to earth, wind whipping past my face, tangling the long strands of hair in trails of fire behind me like a comet across the sky.

When the world around me slowed down, and my rollercoaster car glided into its port, my heart began beating again.  My senses could pick up things again.  Beeps.  Hisses of a ventilator. 

Hushed angry voices fighting in whispers. 

Heartbreak.

I listened to the low murmurs.  “She was barely breathing when I called the ambulance.  I gave her enough
of that shit
to kill a fucking whale.  How is it that she is still living?”  David’s voice growled low in his throat.  There was a horrible screeching, as the familiar sound of a hospital cart next to my bed suddenly thrashed violently against the wall, and a clatter of items scattered across the floor.  The real nightmare was the voice that he spoke to, the one that answered him back. It was my father’s voice.

My
father
.  “Well, everybody is observing her closely now, so no more fillers. We can’t get caught here.  If she lives through this, when she gets home, we’ll give her a round of Potassium Chloride, and then we’ll be done with this.  My hands are clean of this, Stanton, clean, you hear me?  But I hold you responsible for this. She was not supposed to find out. I never wanted to lose my family over this.”  My father chose money over me.  It was one thing to learn your husband had a secret life and wanted you dead, but to find that your father
wanted
you
dead
sears your soul with scars and agony.