Cold-Blooded Beautiful (6 page)

Oh, my God, he’s crazy
.  “Yes, David.  I’m…I’m afraid,” I stammered, blinking back tears as he touched the cold barrel of the gun to my throat. My pulse beat against the metal, moving his hand in small quick tremors.  One small pull of the trigger, a mere six pounds of pressure, and my jugular would be blown to shit, and no one would find me, he’d be brilliant about it, I was sure. 
Feed his ego, but don’t let him see you cry
. I refused to give him the satisfaction of watching my tears fall.

Ominous whiskey colored eyes gleamed and danced with the sight of my fear.  The sick fuck was reveling in it. 

My husband, the man I once vowed to spend the rest of my life with, was a monster.  I was shocked.  And, don’t ask those stupid condescending questions people always think when they hear about a husband abusing his wife –
Why didn’t you just leave?  Why were you so weak?  Didn’t you see it coming?
There are no universal domestic violence guidelines. There aren’t any fucking abuse checklists that us girls sit around and learn about in a high school class, or an orientation of relationships 101. I had a strong sense of self. I had decent self-esteem. I’d fought in fucking wars and I’d seen and done things not many women ever did.  And, I sure as shit didn’t see this coming.

It
did
happen all at once with David and me. I was in love with him, but I had a separate life than him.  I had a career, an ambitious demanding career, and so did he. 
He never hit me, never got jealous, and never showed me anything but complete adoration
. 
Until he didn’t
… Little things changed at first, and you don’t see them at once, only in hindsight.  Only then, when I stood with a gun to my throat and his finger on the trigger. Hindsight is a bitch isn’t it? It loves to come back and fuck you from out of nowhere.

I’ve seen him belittle and demean the sweetest nurses and orderlies at the hospital.  I’ve watched him once,
and only once,
get jealous and snap my cell phone in half, when a fellow soldier called me while on leave in the city wanting to get together for coffee.  It was little things that became clear and pronounced that very minute.  Just a handful of tiny things and the rest was a perfect husband,
or at least the facade of one
.

“Take off your clothes,” he demanded, sliding the gun up my cheek to stop on my temple.  A hundred panic filled scenarios filled my mind, the loudest one being him forcing himself on me, and I,
Lorena-Bobbitt
the motherfucker. 
Yes, in a heartbeat, I would bite that dick right off.
 The shock and sheer pain he’d be in would give me plenty of time to get to the door. I prayed like hell he’d put the gun down, Because other than the
Bobbitt
situation, I couldn’t fight him. The gun was too close, and the life of my baby, too precious.

“Take off your fucking clothes!” he roared louder.

Now, there’s a huge fucking difference between taking off your fucking clothes, and trying to outsmart him, and outright dying at the hands of a madman, so I just did what he said.  Because seriously, if I refused him, was that the way I want the world to find me in the end?  No, sorry, that’s not the way I want my story to end.  Let’s go for what’s behind curtain number two.  I get it, I truly do, the thoughts that are running around in your head right now: Run!  Fight!  Kick him in the dick!  Let me express again what the scenario was.  There’s a gun wedged hard against my temple.  I feel the cool metal of it.  I can blatantly see the safety is
NOT
on, and the magazine is clipped in and probably fully loaded.  Like I’ve said before, it takes only SIX pounds of pressure against that little trigger, and then my brain will collide with the wall.  I could shove him away hard, he could move that trigger softly,
BOOM
, my baby is going to die, and my brains would need to be scraped off the walls. I can’t even think about the possibility of losing my unborn child.  I happen to like my brains, as they’ve been with me for thirty-two years, and I have trained them and exercised them to almost genius fucking status, and I want to KEEP them inside my skull. 

Still don’t agree with me?  Then, let’s probe the crazy that is my husband.  I had watched a video of him with another woman, and his reply to the whole thing was to laugh, tell me how he’d screwed someone else, and complimented me on my damn
toasted shrimp
.  He told me he
would
kill me.  Told me he owned me. Oh, and let’s not forget the bigger picture here.  Try to envision it with me, okay?  HE’S GOT A GUN, FULLY LOADED, TO MY HEAD.  Most twisted part: he’s fucking smiling.

The butt of the gun moved in a quick violent motion, and my world went black.  God only knows how long I was out for.

An indescribable scorching pain along my pelvis and across my lower back was what woke me.  When I looked down at my body, my eyes blurred instantly, and I was gasping at air to stifle the shrieks of pain that were bubbling in my throat.

What I saw almost killed me
.

Beads of cold sweat exploded across my cheeks and forehead.

I couldn’t believe what I saw was real.

He branded me with his name.  My skin, it
burned,
and I’m panicked and sick. Blisters have formed in the shape of the name David, and I feel the intense throbs of pain pulsing and screaming at me.  The burn had extended through my epidermis and into the dermis, its second layer, and I moaned out in agony, because I knew I would have these scars for the rest of my life, however long that might be.  My stomach was rolling…and then I felt them…

The
cramps
… My body felt beaten, but my stomach felt wrong.  It felt so wrong. 

Looking around, I found myself lying on my bed, still naked, cold and shivering, with a thick layer of sweat pouring out of my pores.  The muscles of my lower back and stomach were convulsing, and there was an intense cramping and clenching of my uterus. 

Oh, God.  No, please, please don’t take my baby
. 

In the blur of my eyes, I saw David as he sat at my desk with the papers from my bag strewn all over the floor…
he knows I know
… The way he looked at me was sickening.  If I doubted before what I had found about SamMatt Pharmaceuticals, there was no doubt now.  Those papers were
his
, and what was on those papers would put
me
in jail for the rest of my life, yet I was totally innocent.  The huge offshore bank accounts with my name on them were all
his
.  He framed me, set me up, all that time, so he could steal millions of dollars from my father’s hospital.  Aurora was telling me the truth. He never did love me.

I could feel it then, the life of my child seeping out of me. I felt her leaving me and I couldn’t protect her.  I couldn’t keep her safe. I felt my heart just dry up and shrivel, harden, and die. 

The monster turned his face in my direction, gun still pointing at my head, “What the fuck did you do? You went through my private belongings.  This is the end of you.  Do you understand that you just killed yourself, baby?  I can’t let you live after this.”

“David.  Take me to the hospital.  The baby.  The baby,” I cried.

“Baby’s gone.  I took care of
that
while you were asleep. That should have been a blowjob, anyway.”

What?

No.

No.

“No.  No, David, no-no-no-no-no-no,” I sobbed.  “Oh, God.  What did you do?  What did you do to me?  What did you do?”

His face was in mine instantly with the gun held to my chin, “What else did you see?  What else did you take?”

Red blood spread across the sheets underneath me, my uterus convulsed in pain.  “Everything,” I hissed.  “And I made five copies of each.  You’ll never find them, but if something happens to me, everyone will.” I smiled.  “Oh, and check your secret accounts, dear.  All that money you stole from
my hospital
?  It’s gone, you fucking piece of shit.”

Chapter 3

Rage.

Samantha was visibly shaking as she whispered her story.

I should have killed him.

The sick part was that I knew there was so much more to this story, and she was completely spent just telling me
this
much.  I knew this was overload. I knew what she was feeling. I knew she could see the images thick and visceral - real and solid right in front of her, because as she spoke, her emerald eyes followed the ghosts of the things that haunted the room.

“Okay, Sam.  Enough for tonight, love, I can’t let you suffer through this again.  I…we’ll talk again, more, but you need a break.”  I held her in my arms and kissed her on the temple, the one that I knew still felt the lingering apparition of David’s gun.  “I promise you, I will never let him hurt you again.”  Lifting her gently, I carried her into the bathroom and placed her softly on the chaise lounge.

I ran a bath for her as she sat and stared blankly at the ceiling.  The look in her eyes was so broken and full of agony, it made me want to rip someone apart.  Taking out all her soaps and scrubby shit, I placed them in order along the edge of the steaming tub.  I knew what she needed after letting that filth out,
I knew Sam
; she needed to clean herself, rub herself raw with apples and fucking cinnamon.  “I’m sorry I pushed you to talk today, but the thought of you being sick killed me.  I know talking about him makes you feel dirty, baby.  Go ahead, wash him off your skin.”

Her vacant eyes still stared up at the ceiling.

Holy fuck, Sam lost a baby
.  I had to stop her from telling me more. Fuck, I just want to watch him die.  Really slow. 
All I saw was red
.

Closing the door, I left her in the bathroom and stormed into my den.  I tried every fucking anger management piece of shit step the doctors had shoved down my throat for the last four months, but NOTHING helped.  Explosive rage tore through me and I completely snapped. 

I could only vaguely remember any of it. 

It started like a little knot of venom in the pit of my stomach and began eating its way through my body, taking control.  A surge of heat traveled over my skin, making me sweat instantly, and my heart was slamming painfully against my chest, pounding too loud for my ears to take. “BLOODY FUCKING HELL!” I roared, screaming a string of harsh words in my rage until my throat burned and my words ran dry.  Slamming my fists over and over again through the drywall, breaking holes and tearing the flesh of my knuckles until I saw my own blood.  That’s what I was going to do to the motherfucker’s skull when I caught him.  The fucking doctors were going to have to remove my fists surgically from his internal bloody organs, just to bury the cocksucker.  My knuckles burned, stung, and split over and over again as I repeatedly slammed them into
everything
.  Cartilage snapped and cracked, bones splintered and popped. Yet I felt only numb blinding rage.  Somewhere in the back of my mind, I could hear pounding on the door, muffled voices yelling my name, but I was too far-gone.  I wished David was standing in front of me. I wished that I could hurt him every day for the rest of his life.  I wanted to see him bleed and I didn’t care about consequences. I just needed to see the cuts, rake my fingers across his broken flesh, and indulge in the crimson spray of his suffering.  I wanted to burn her name across his forehead and watch it bubble and hiss with the blistering flames.  I wanted justice.  Revenge.

When my eyes became focused, and my breathing slowed, there was broken glass and furniture littered all over the room.  The curtains were torn off the windows and my extremely large couch had been thrown right through it. Giant shards of glass were sticking out of the leather, and a cold wind drifted in from the other side.  My desk chair was dangling by a wire in my flat screen television that had a brilliant desk-chair-sized-hole in the middle of it.  The chair twirled and swayed in the breeze. 
I don’t think I’ll be stopping my therapy anytime soon
.

Opening the door, I stumbled out into the hallway, and fell into the kitchen.  My hands were a bloody mess and my throat was scorched dry.  It was three o’clock in the morning and Jen was in the kitchen, holding one of my steak knives, shaking and crying.  The blade of the knife glimmered and trembled harshly with the vibrations of her fear.  “If you
touched
her, hurt her in any way, I will
gut
you,” she warned.

“With a fucking steak knife?” I laughed, dryly.

Violently trembling hands held the knife out threateningly.  “Where is Samantha?”

Before I could answer, Dylan rushed through the door with a crowbar and a baseball bat. “I got the crowbar, come on!”  When he saw me standing there, he froze, and held the bat out towards me, another person, threatening me, this time with a blunt object. 
They’re acting like this from what they heard, imagine what they’ll do when they see the fucking den.  I don’t care; it’s my damn house
.