Page 78 of Lady and the Butcher
I sat on the bed, heart in my throat, pulse so loud it drowned the world. I told myself to stay put, but every nerve screamed that something was breaking.
Minutes later, Atticus came back in. His jaw was tight, but he put the gun down calm, deliberate. He came straight to me, hands bracketing my face.
“Safe,” he said. Just that one word.
My body trembled. He pulled me into his chest, anchoring me. “You’re safe.”
I clung to him, every muscle quaking. “I don’t want to live in fear.”
“You won’t,” he promised, voice a low rumble against my hair. “Not with me.”
He ruined me again before dawn, this time slower, more deliberate. As if he was proving that even in the shadow of danger, his possession was steady, his control absolute. Hewhispered that I was his, kissed me until the fear bled into fire again, until I forgot the knocks and the blood and the shadows.
When I came undone, it was with his mouth at my throat.
When his breathing evened out beside me, mine didn’t. My body was loose and used, but my mind stayed clenched tight.
I stared at the ceiling until the patterns in the plaster blurred. I thought of the mothers again, the way they looked at their babies like they were brand-new miracles and also brand-new vulnerabilities. Those boys with their tiny fists—would their mothers want them to grow into men who kept guns by the bed, who broke jaws and called it reminding? And those girls, slippery and wailing in their first breaths—would their mothers hope they’d become women like me, pressed against glass by a man who terrified them in ways they couldn’t stay away from?
The answer twisted in my chest.
I slipped out from under his arm. He stirred but didn’t wake. I moved quiet, each floorboard groan loud in my ears. My clothes were still half-tangled in a pile, smelling like sweat and river air. I pulled them on with shaking hands, not bothering with neatness.
The loft felt different all of a sudden. Less sanctuary, more cage. The windows that had framed the river looked like escape routes now. The water slid by, steady and indifferent, while my pulse raced.
I realized with a jolt that I’d barely been back to my own house. My bed still held the shape of nights I hadn’t slept in it. Mail was probably stacked behind the door. Plants I’d sworn I’d water were either thriving without me or giving up. I’d let his loft swallow whole days and nights without noticing.
At the door, I hesitated. My tote leaned against the wall, exactly where I’d dropped it. My phone sat inside. I pictured Stephen’s name lighting the screen, or Mom’s, or Alana’s. Ipictured myself lying when they asked where I was, who I was with.
I couldn’t keep lying.
I pressed a palm to the door, the wood cool under my hand. Behind me, Atticus shifted in his sleep, a sound low in his chest that made me ache even as it hardened my resolve.
I loved the way he touched me. I loved the way he made my body feel alive. But the rest—the knocks, the blood on his knuckles, the men who smiled wrong when they saw me—that was too much.
I turned the knob slow. Stepped into the hallway like I was crossing into another version of myself.
The air outside was damp. Dawn crept pink over the river. My chest loosened just enough to breathe.
I didn’t run. I walked, steady, down the stairs and out to the street. Every step felt like pulling threads free from a net that had been cast without my permission.
I told myself I needed space. Just space.
But the hollow in my chest said what I really needed was to remember who I was before a dangerous man decided to call me his Lady.
25
Iunlocked the door to my house and the smell hit me first. Not bad, not dirty—just stale, like air that hadn’t been moved in a while.
The blinds were still slanted the way I’d left them. The rug held the faint dent of a bag I’d dropped and never picked up. My shoes by the door looked abandoned, waiting for feet that hadn’t come home.
I kicked them aside and stepped in. The quiet pressed on me. I hadn’t realized how much the river loft hummed, how Atticus filled a room even when he was silent. Here, there was nothing. No water sliding past. No heavier footstep. No warm hand finding the small of my back like it belonged there.
The stillness should have been comfort. Instead, it felt like walking into a stranger’s life.
My plants drooped. Brown tips. Cracked soil. A glass in the sink had turned its water cloudy. Upstairs, the bed was unmade, sheets knotted at the bottom like someone had tried to swim out of them. I tried to remember the last night I had slept here. It had to be before his loft. Before every hour was either in his arms or waiting for him to appear.
Days had blurred. I had lived inside his orbit so fully my own house had stopped existing.
