Page 88 of Make Me Whole

“You’re dumber than you look, aren’t you?” he sneered with a shake of his head. “That would have been possible if you hadn’t left me for five months and started divorce procedures. It would even be doable if you had returned home when I asked you to. But no! You had to be selfish and empowered, and now I’m fucked thanks to you. Stupid cunt!”

Eli followed the curse with another swing of his newspaper baton. He was too smart to hit me twice where people could see, so he delivered the second blow to my ribs and made it twice as hard.

Since displaying my pain or suffering only made Eli angrier and more prone to violence, I once more tightened my jaw to muffle my cry. However, instead of standing erect, unmoving as I knew was in my best interest during these altercations, the proximity of the blow to my womb caused me to bend over and wrap my arms around my middle to protect the innocent life growing inside me. And to a twisted psychopath like Eli, that little movewas like dangling a helpless bunny in front of a tiger.

A smile that was pure evil curled his lips, and he laughed like a person possessed.

“Don’t tell me that old guy still has some good swimmers and knocked you up in that outdoorsy fuck?” He took a step in my direction, looking more unhinged than I’d ever seen him. “Now it all makes sense. You came back to me to get Baby Daddy out of prison, he trashed me to the press to get you and Little Bastard baby away from me, and you’re not saying he’s the rat to protect the son of a bitch.”

Tears fell heavily from my eyes as I craned my neck to look at him.

Cackling like The Joker, he dropped the paper baton, clasped his hands together, and brought them to the side of his face like a Disney princess. “It must be true love.”

It was. Itis! But my life was no fairytale, and I doubted that true love would win in the end. All I could do was try as hard as I could to ensure those I loved were safe from this monster.

I dropped to my knees in front of Eli and reached for his hand. “Please, Eli. Don’t hurt Max or his son. This baby is a good thing. We’ll tell the world it’s yours. We’ll say that hormones made me a little crazy which is why I ran away, but that you, being the loving, merciful man you are, took care of me and brought me back home so our family could be whole. You’ll become the stable family hero who gets elected to the White House. Just please don’t hurt them.”

“Oh, darling . . .” Eli whispered, making the pet name I hated sound even more like poison. “Don’t you know me at all? Do you really think I’m the type of man who will raise another man’s child?”

The eerie calmness with which he spoke, the way he ran his free hand down my cheek, and the sadistic gleam in his eyes made all the hope I had that he would accept my humiliating plea for mercy disappear. In its place was a genuine fear of what this level of anger would lead him to do to me and my unborn child.

Holding my gaze, he continued the downward path to my neck, and without batting an eyelash or showing any emotion at all, he wrapped his fingers around my throat.

“Please, Eli,” I begged in a sigh as tears fell like rivers from my eyes. “The baby is four months old. Ella always wanted a sibling.”

He squeezed harder. I tried to breathe, but the air wouldn’t go past the pressure on my throat. Visions of my daughter coming into the kitchen and seeing the dead body of her mother lying on the floor terrified me.

I clawed at Eli’s skin, but I was too weak to pull his hands away. Irritated at my efforts to free myself, he squeezed my neck harder. My vision became blurry, my head heavy. I tried to speak but couldn’t. Tried to breathe, but he wouldn’t let me.

I could feel myself dying, and it was everything and nothing as I imagined it would be. I felt pain, fear for Ella’s future, sorrow for this little life that never even had a chance, and above all, I felt anger that my life’s greatest moments weren’t replying behind my heavy lids. Exiting this world among the memories of Max, Aiden, Ella, and myself being a family together was the only part of dying I was looking forward to.

But my life wasn’t a rom-com or a fairytale, and so I did the only thing I could. As my consciousness slipped away from me, I imagined the four of us sitting around the dining table at the Reno House—our house—and I said goodbye.

Then, I went out with a literal bang.

37

MAX

“Now that the article about Mayor Walsh was published, we were able to pressure the state judge to issue the warrants for the preventive arrests of Mayor Walsh and Sheriff Timothy Green,” State Police Chief Nash Jones explained as the ringing of my phone interrupted.

Nick turned to me with the kind of annoyance in his eyes you often see in parents of misbehaved children. “Turn that fucking thing off.”

I didn’t blame him for being impatient and rude. I’d been on him nonstop since the moment he took me out of jail to find a way to get Sky, Ella, and my unborn baby away from that creep. Nick’s plan to expose the truth about Eli to the world and then serve as a witness in a formal investigation of his corruption was flawless and worth every penny I paid him.

For three long weeks, we worked days, nights, and weekends to get to this moment, and now that it had arrived, my damn phone was interrupting. A distraction caused by me was the last thing we needed—and definitely the last thing I wanted—so I nodded and reached for the device to send the call to voicemail.

Before my finger reached the red circle, a hand stopped me. I turned to my right and saw Al staring at the device with wide eyes.

Our friendship had changed after that morning in jail. I knew I had lost—maybe forever—his trust and respect, but I was as determined to win his blessing as I was to get my family out of Eli’s hellhole. It took two and a half weeks, a lot of unanswered text messages, and an early copy of the exposé article I helped write along with a heartfelt letter explaining how my friendship with Sky had developed into the type of love I had only ever felt for Marge—minus the sordid details, of course—for him to speak to me again and partially accept my apologies. A full pardon would only be granted after he had a serious conversation with his daughter, he informed me.

Despite the state of our friendship, I still knew him better than anyone in the world and knew the expression he wore too well. He knew the number.

“Who is it?” I asked, no longer caring that I was interrupting the police chief.

“Eli’s landline,” Al said in a tone of disbelief.

The room grew quiet, and my heart felt like it would jump out of my chest. Me getting a call from Eli’s house on the day the exposé was published was either great or something terrible. I hoped to God it was the former but had a feeling it was the latter.

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