Page 24 of Vermilion Desire

This is what Scarletta wants, and every step of the way, Braxton’s idiotic lawyer falls for this scheme.

“Do you still require the restraining order?”

“Yes, please.” Scarletta sniffles, teary-eyed and trembling lips. Her voice drops into a tapered whimper, and Braxton sneers at her through his lawyer’s hold.

“She’s lying! She’s faking it!”

The judge shakes his head and sighs at the incompetent lawyer. “Control your client, counselor.”

He grants a restraining order with simple words, and Braxton becomes angrier. The judge orders everyone back into the courtroom, and he walks out of his chamber first.

“You bitch!” Braxton hisses, but he makes no move to come near Scarletta.

She spares him an uninterested stare. “Go on, you wouldn’t want the judge to get upset at your incompetence to be on time, do you?”

Just when he tries to walk, he stops with a growl. His right hand clenches, but his left hand remains still at his side as if it’s useless. Normally people would clench both of their hands in anger; it’s a bodily response that needs to happen at the same time, or it would not sit well with the body.

“Don’t tell me you’re… so stiff that you can’t walk?” Another taunt from Scarletta gets a stressed growl from Braxton. “You don’t seem bothered by it. Is this not the first time?”

Cal decides to step in, just as the prosecutor leaves out the door. “Don’t associate yourself with a murder; let’s go. We’ll talk at home.”

He takes her back to the courtroom first, leaving me and the other two behind. I spin around, cracking one finger, and their shoulders flinch at the silent aggression rolling off my body. They need to have this idea in their head that I will fucking destroy them with my bare hands if they put one scratch on my precious Scarletta.

“Don’t do anything, Berkshire.”

The warning in the air gets thicker over the seconds that tick away, and I turn away to leave.

Chapter Seven

Scarletta

This is bad.

I had so much fun messing with Braxton that I didn’t stop to think of how this would affect Mr. Wolf and Uncle Cal. They were understandably fuming that I had gone out of my way to mess with Braxton, and Cal was able to understand my reasoning for it.

Mr. Wolf wouldn’t. He was the angriest of the two because I had gone against what he wished, and that was unforgivable. I didn’t think that he would mind me helping him get that man, but I was wrong.

After Cal had left for his captain training when the awkwardly tense dinner was over, the house is dead quiet with Mr. Wolf and me.

I have never seen him so cold, uncanny, and frighteningly detached. We went to bed without another word to each other, but sleep is the last thing I want to do.

Sitting on the floor, nipping on my finger in anxiety as my brain refuses to cooperate with me to come up with a plan for him to forgive me. I know it was reckless to not fill him in, but I didn’t want to get him in trouble for something I decided to do.

The silence in his bedroom laughs at me, mocking my inability to sleep, and I am being haunted by the memories of Mr. Wolf’s disappointment.

A bird flapping by the window casts an elongated shadow, mimicking a hand, and it closed the distance to my face too quickly. Startled, I scramble back to the wall with eyes wide as if I can catch any danger thrown at me through the curtains.

I don’t dare to touch his bed, not after how livid I have made him. The right to be in that bed is gone, and it won’t come back for as long as he believes his anger is justified.

Cal wanted to be a mediator, but the room was just too tense that it scared me to even move. Mr. Wolf would explode at any given minute, but he chooses to be the silence that I dread. I want him to yell at me, shake my shoulders, and tell me how stupid I was, but his cold shoulders prove to be more petrifying than any man raising his voice.

Panic fills my thumping heart, paranoia eats away my mind, and the itch under my skin comes back.

It had happened only once when I was in that competitive program for gifted children. The tension was high, and the elimination process goes beyond what normal people call acceptable because perfection is what everyone wants, even the people behind the program.

I had started to itch one day, nothing too serious, and I thought it was something I could be allergic to or a bug bit me, but every day would cause me to scratch more until I bled.

Through a series of psychological probing, the doctors had concluded that stress was the itch that I can’t get rid of. Too much stress will get me itching again, but I have had it under control for many years now.

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