Page 39 of Life

“Five, four, three…”

“No, Tony. I don’t know what you’re talking about. I didn’t deceive you. I would never ever do anything to hurt you.”

He frowned. “They are moving you into the lead position. Yes? Two…”

“Um, yes. I was going to tell you tonight. They asked me…”

“One.”

An explosion of pain burst across my face where Antonio’s fist plowed into my cheekbone and left eye. I fell back, the agony flaring instantly against the tender tissue.

“Back on your knees, woman!” he roared.

I scrambled to comply, my face throbbing. The skin around my eye was already swelling, feeling tighter by the second, filling with fire. I held up my hands again. “They asked me.”

“And you agreed?” he sneered.

“Yes, I thought you’d be happy.”

He punched me again, this time harder than the first, his ring cutting my cheek open. Blood sprayed out and down my cheek. I held my hand over the wound, trying to stop the flow of blood but also to prevent him from hitting that spot again.

“Feliz!You thought I’d be happy with you being touched by every man in the show? Your position is by my side in all things, mi reina!Or have you forgotten that?”

I shook my head. “No, no. I’m sorry. I’ll tell them tomorrow I can’t. I won’t leave my spot. Please…”

He lowered himself down to a crouch, his head tipping awkwardly to the side in an unnatural pose. With his eyes a coal-black nothingness, his lips in a snarl, and his skin tight over his high cheekbones and Portuguese features, he was by far the most menacing individual I’d ever known. Not for the first time, I looked into Antonio’s face and saw evil, but in that moment it was terrifying.

The man I thought I loved didn’t exist in this violent shell of a human being. The man I laughed with, danced with, made love to was no longer there. In his place wasel diablo. The devil incarnate.

Antonio breathed white-hot fire into my battered face like a dragon. Then abruptly he stood. “Stand up and close your eyes.”

“Tony…please,” I begged. More than anything I didn’t want to close my eyes. I would rather see what he was going to do to me, versus anticipate the lesson he deemed appropriate.

“Cale-se! Cállate!Shut up!” he said in Portuguese, Spanish, and English, to get his point across.

With every speck of pride and stamina I had left, I stood up. My face ached, but in light of the fear that overwhelmed every cell, it had finally gone numb. I would be in pain later, but right then, with adrenalin and my survival instincts in full force, the pain took a backseat. I could fight back, but the last time I did, I ended up in the hospital for a week.

“Whatever you wish,mi rey.” My king. I used his special endearment in the hope he’d have mercy on me. I shouldn’t have, though. He never did. I took one last look at Antonio standing across the room, wearing all black. His shirt sleeves were rolled up to the elbows and a couple buttons were left undone at the collar. His black hair was long and slicked back in the way I always found devastatingly sexy. Even then. With hate in his eyes, he was a wolf in sheep’s clothing, the demon that mothers warn their daughters about. Only I didn’t have a mother to do that. Maybe my path would have been different if I’d had.

Taking a full deep breath in and letting it out slowly, I closed my eyes and prayed.

Prayed he would go easy on me.

Prayed I would survive this night with my life.

Prayed one day I’d find a way out.

The single blow to my thighs hit like a truck running me over without so much as pressing on the brakes. The sound of bones cracking and snapping warred with the volume of my guttural, terrified, thoroughly inhuman scream. I opened my eyes, my vision swirling in a haze of pain. Antonio held a metal baseball bat in his hands. The one he just used to break both of my legs at the thigh. His mouth was a twisted mess of rage.

“Now you’ll never dance again.” The words slithered past his lips like a thousand tiny snakes.

Torturous, incomprehensible pain catapulted out from my thighs and up through my body as I lay on the floor. I was unable to move. My vision blinked in and out until, finally, I couldn’t take it anymore. The lower half of my body hurt so much it stole the breath straight from my lungs.

The next thing I knew, I was being dragged by my hair across the condo. The fissures of pain from my scalp were nothing. The agony pumping through every orifice of my body had me completely immobile. Dimly, I sensed tears tracking down my cheek, pouring down my face in rivers of anguish and blood. I attempted to speak, say something, anything, beg for help, a hospital, but it only came out as a garbled mess of nonsensical whispered words. Wouldn’t have mattered anyway. Antonio, the man I fell in love with, was no longer there. The demon inside him had taken over.

Eventually he got me to where he wanted and dropped my body onto the cold tile floor in our bathroom. The sound of water running was like a death knell. That was it. I knew instinctively that was the day I’d die.

Unable to kick and scream through the trauma, a sense of calm and peace filtered through me as if gossamer wings were lifting me up and outside of my body.

---