living area, and sink onto one of the stools that surrounds it. “How was your day, goddess?” I ask her, the same thing I always ask her when I get home from work. And she replies the exact way she always does as well.
“It was good.” And there’s her little one-shoulder shrug, never meeting my eyes as she plates our dinner, then slides it across the island to me. She tugs the stool at the end of the counter around to sit on, keeping the five feet of white marble between us.
I groan in pleasure at the smell. “God, I love your spaghetti. Thank you for this.”
Words of affirmation. Right now, it’s the only Love Language she’s receptive to. I can see her physical response to the praise, a relaxing of her shoulders, the corners of her eyes no longer pinched.
I take a bite, moaning at the perfection. “How you get the absolute perfect amount of salt every time is beyond me, woman. So, so good. Mm.”
There we go. Her eyes finally lift, and I can hear her barely audible sigh of relief.
And it makes me want to murder that motherfucker for making her this way. Making her terrified that she’ll be punished if the food she didn’t have to cook in the first place isn’t exactly right.
But I can’t. It’s against our code. Life for a life. He might’ve ruined a decade of her life, but he didn’t end it. So therefore, I’m not allowed to choke the very spark from his body.
“What did you do today?” I ask, glancing around the first floor and seeing its usual immaculate state. Not even one of Scout’s dog toys are outside its beige basket with the black pawprint.
She wipes her mouth delicately with a napkin before replacing it on her lap. “I put together several makeup orders. There’s a sale going on, so there’s quite a few more than usual, if you wouldn’t mind taking them to the post office for me tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow is Saturday,” I remind her, watching her closely.
A tiny furrow of her brows. “Oh. Oh yeah. So… I can do it. No biggy.” She shakes her head.
“I’ll take you. You don’t have to go alone,” I tell her, and she nods, a look of relief in her eyes. The post office is right by my office, so I normally take her orders for her after she packages them all up. But since I don’t work on Saturdays, I use it as an opportunity to make her leave the house. Otherwise, she’d stay right here, a self-imposed prison. Hence why it wasn’t that hard to keep her from moving out and leaving me once Brandon was behind bars.
“Did you do a live video today?” I ask, my head tilting to the side as I take in her look. “I like these colors on you. They really bring out the blue in your beautiful eyes.”
Her cheeks pinken and she looks down into her plate of spaghetti before she nods.
“Astrid.” My tone makes her eyes meet mine once again, and she knows I want a verbal response. It makes me uneasy to be commanding with her, since Brandon forced her into a life of subordination, but sometimes the Dom in me rears up in subtle ways.
“Yeah, I thought I’d try out the new pallet that just came in. It has these new shades of browns and greens that haven’t been in the previous pallets. Just wanted to play around with it a little,” she explains. “But you don’t want to hear about my silly makeup stuff, do you? I mean, you’re out there doing really important work. My job is—”
“Something you love, goddess.” I finish for her instead of allowing her any more self-deprecation. “It makes you happy, and you’re tremendously talented at it. As I’ve told you time and time again, never put down something that brings you pleasure.” There’s a tense moment of quietness. When I see her relax enough to take a bite of her food, I wait until she swallows to ask her another question. “How long did it take you to achieve this look? It seems more intricate than the last one you did. I see what—” I narrow my eyes and lean closer to count the colors. “—five… six different shadows?” From all my time of getting her to hold an actual conversation, I’ve learned more about makeup than I ever thought a forty-something-year-old straight man should. But I’d learn anything if it were Astrid