Page 66 of Unleash Hades
Ididn’t know thatdate. I didn’t know that it happened two years ago.
In fact, I had forgotten it entirely, even as I felt the ramifications of that evening in every fiber of my being.
I had clandestinely contacted Callum MacLachlan of Caledonia Security and paid him to rescue my sister in Kemet. Chloe was saved, and Richard knew nothing.
No one knew, in fact.
Just me, Callum, and, I suppose, Hugo. He promised to keep the circle small. He understood the danger when I told him.
Every day, Richard reported what was happening with my sister as if I didn’t already know… well, it just chipped away at the all-powerful Richard Davenport I had grown to fear. It brought him down to earth. I realized how capable of a liar I was.
I felt powerful. Like I could actually win in this chess game called life.
I have had exactly three moments of defiance in my marriage.
The first was when I lied and said my sister meant nothing to me and sent her to a boarding school so that he couldn’t use her on his quest for power.
The second was when I had an affair with the man who stared at me with eyes filled with molten heat beneath a placid exterior. A man who reminded me of home, and family, and a language I forbid myself to speak because my husband had atypethat I did not want to be.
The third was when I sent the world’s leading security company to rescue my sister when she was kidnapped during a humanitarian mission. A sister that everyone thought I had forgotten about.
I had become complacent. I had found a routine where my boys were safe, and I thought he couldn't take anything more from me. His revolving door of mistresses kept me safe.
He thought I was cosmopolitan and cold, which I didn’t mind. It let him find warmth in other beds.
He thought I was his partner in this life, and not the person ready to bring him down from within. I thought that with the boys so close to their age of majority that it would be safe to defy him.
When he told me to go to a board meeting, I simply said no. For my defiance, he pinned me to the rug of the penthouse, ripped my skirt, and reminded me that he was my husband. As he rutted above me, my mind had blanked. I had gone far, far away, and laid there as still as a frozen deer in the road before it was run over by an oncoming truck.
I don’t know how many hours passed. When I finally reentered my body, it had gone from midday to midnight. Richard was gone. I rose on shaky, pained legs. Blood coated my inner thighs.
I washed it off, and the next day… Richard and I went on as if nothing had happened.
Because nothing had changed, and nothing ever would.
“I could not save you.” Hugo’s voice drew me back to the present. The one where my legs were surer, but the pain in my heart no less soothed. “I was in Mozambique. And the man I had watching you couldn’t intervene…wouldn’tintervene…”
He sounded bitter at that fact. Maybe he had fought with his colleague. Bit by bit, cell by cell, I felt a little of that wound heal.
“It wouldn’t have helped. It would have just made it worse,” I whispered.
“Not if you had run away with me. I could have protected you. I could have saved you.”
“But then what would happen to my boys?”
He growled, the sound coming from somewhere deep in his chest. “They aren’t your boys! They arehisboys. With his mistress!”
‘They’remyboys!” I pushed at his chest, creating distance between us. On this, I would never compromise. “She wasn’t just his mistress. She was my friend!”
His eyes widened in surprise, his face growing cold.
“How could you be friends with his mistress? The woman he betrayed you with, over and over again?” He shut his eyes. “You have dedicated your life to her. You’ve turned yourself into a fucking martyr to her shrine! Why?”
“Because it wasn’t her choice. Any more than marrying him was mine.”
“Why did you marry him?”
I sucked the air in through my teeth. No one had ever asked that before. No one had cared. No one had thought there was anything unusual about an eighteen-year-old girl marrying a man ten years older than her.
