as much as I’d feared.” He gestured to her face. Her fucking beaten face. My hands fisted at my sides. No one as perfect as her should ever look like this.
“I cleaned up her face, but they were surface injuries. I gave her an antibiotic injection and left medicine for her to take when she wakes—both for pain and to prevent infection. She’s to take them until the course has finished.” He pointed at the tablets on the bedside table. He went to walk past me. “She should wake after she’s rested. She got off relatively unscathed, considering what I imagine she went through tonight to even get in this state.”
“And her memory?” I asked. I needed to know what had fucking happened to her. I needed to know who the fuck had done this to her so I could kill the cunts.
“Should be unaffected. That’s physically, of course. That’s not taking trauma into consideration. That could be a potential problem for her.” The doctor left when I stayed silent, not asking him anything else. He shut the door behind him, and I stared down at Cheska.
My teeth ached from gritting them so hard. I thought back to the last day I went to her in Oxford. When I was fucked off my face on whisky and just needed her. Out of everyone, I fucking chose to turn to her. And not just to fuck, but to just be somewhere else that wasn’t this church or with my family, or with my old man lying in a bed that he would be in for months and months to come. And because I’d liked the feel of her in my fucking arms. In that moment, that fucked-up dark moment, she was the only one I’d wanted.
I shook my head when flashes of memory showed me crying on her like a pussy. Showed me that fucking ring on her finger, that bright diamond catching my drunken eye. She’d got engaged a couple of days before that night. One look at that motherfucking ring and I’d snapped. I’d needed her, needed to fucking own her, and here was another prick’s ring on her finger. A finger that had just been wrapped in my hair, holding my fucking face and wrapped around my dick.
I walked closer to the bed and saw her hand still wore that fucking ring.
She was getting married soon. Freddie’d told me that a while back, like I didn’t fucking know. I knew every detail. Married at St Paul’s Cathedral, then on to the Ritz afterwards. I fucking knew. I knew everything about this bird. She bloody clawed at my head daily, had done since the first time I met her.
Like fucking witchcraft.
I couldn’t go down that fucked-up road again. Cheska was pure kryptonite. She was the fucking gatekeeper of shit I needed to keep firmly locked away.
I needed to leave. I needed to send Betsy in here to keep watch over her and take care of her when she woke up. I had work to do, family business shit to deal with, and this bird had no place in my life anymore.
But then my feet fucking led me forward, and I dragged the armchair from the corner of my room to beside the bed, like I was being pulled by some invisible rope to her side.
I lit up a cig and stared at her face. Even bruised and battered, she was a fucking ten. But she didn’t belong in this world I lived in. Never fucking had. Didn’t stop me from taking her though. I’d fucking stolen her from the light and made her mine in the darkness.
I thought it would be just one time, an inevitable fuck we both knew we had to get out of our systems. But one taste of Cheska Harlow-Wright wasn’t enough. Even at eighteen, after my soul had only been fractured, not shattered apart—irreparable and written off. After fucking her in Marbella, I only craved her more. I was meant to get her pussy once and walk away. She wasn’t meant to ensnare me. I wasn’t meant to get addicted.
I came back to London with her bloody mobile number still stained on my palm. A week later I was knee-deep in her cunt again, and I stayed there for five fucking years.
Until that night.
Until the night everything changed and I had to throw her out of the way of the fucking demons that had taken hold of my ankles and were pulling me down