don’t have balls, shithead.” Then I turn around and head inside.
I stop outside of our room, and I don’t hear anything. Even the music is drowned out up here, on the hallway with all the boys’ bedrooms. I snuck in through the back stairwell, successfully avoided seeing anyone.
Now, with the silence beyond the door, relief spreads through me. I can go inside and fucking sleep. I’m sure he knows I’ll be in here and leave me the fuck alone. Or maybe he’ll be so fucked up, he won’t be able to find his way up the stairs at all.
Either way, I reach for the door, find it unlocked. Good thing, because I don’t have the damn key. My copy is somewhere at our house, which I’ve avoided like the plague since I saw Ophelia in there.
Fucking Ophelia.
My stomach twists into knots.
I push thoughts of her aside and step into the dark room, taking a deep breath as I close the door at my back.
But immediately, I know something is wrong.
The lights are off in the room, but down the hall, the blinds are open, from the balcony, and the dim light casts a glow on two people.
One is laid out on the table. The one Lucifer and I had breakfast at in the mornings that week we came here after we got married. He smoked out there, too, careful to blow the smoke away from me, unlike that first time we met at the intersection. He drank too, mimosas in the morning, but no fucking blow.
Not yet.
Not then.
Maybe he was stronger then. Maybe the nightmares hadn’t started. Maybe our fights hadn’t been so fucking vicious.
I don’t see any coke now, either, but I see plastic cups. A bottle of vodka about to teeter off the edge of the table, dangerously close with every thrust my husband makes into Ophelia.
She’s stretched out over the table, her arms over her head which is tilted back, her mouth open in ecstasy. Her big tits are bouncing as my husband pounds into her, slapping one of her tits as I watch him, one hand on her upper thigh, pulling her closer to him.
I see his core muscles flex, his pants around his ankles, and Ophelia’s bikini top tied around her throat where he must have been choking her, because after he slaps her tit, he grabs the string and pulls, hard.
She gags, the moans that were coming from her mouth—faint, because the sliding glass door is closed—dying off.
His head is tilted back, the long, pale column of his throat exposed. I see the Unsaints tattoo on his thigh. The scars down the middle of it.
So many.
So many that aren’t mine.
I think I must be in shock, because for a long, long moment, I just hold up my hand and stare at it even though I can’t see it in the dark. But I know it’s there.
Coagula.
I curl my fingers into a fist, think of when he carved that knife across me. When he put my blood in his mouth.
Left Jeremiah to burn in that building at our back.
The hole in my heart gets bigger. I drop my hand to my low belly and watch them, wondering if she’s on birth control, because my husband probably doesn’t know what the fuck a condom is, despite what he said.
Like seeing a car wreck, I can’t look away, numbness flowing through me, and I take a step further into the room. I see the bed is made, and I don’t know why I feel some small amount of relief at the fact that he didn’t fuck her in there.
The same place he held me down. Promised to never leave me.
I step closer to the balcony door, and I can see my own shadow reflected from the light outside. I look small, like a kid.
Ophelia, with her curvy hips, big tits, and the meat on her thighs that Lucifer grabs now, still holding that bikini top tight around her throat—her face is red and she’s tugging at it, trying to pull it off—looks like a woman.
I take another step, bile rising up the back of my throat.
But I’m pregnant with his fucking child.
Another step.
With a trembling hand, I reach for the door and I think for a split second of locking it. Locking them out of on this balcony to look out at the woods beyond Liber all night until someone checks on them, and I assume that’d be a fucking while.
But I can’t do it.
I don’t want