“I bring him inside and she freaks out. I mean, I was pissed, so it wasn’t pretty. His face was all busted up, I had already beat the living shit out of him. She was flipping the fuck out, calling me a psycho, telling me I was going to get us all killed.”
“Get you all killed?” I question.
“He was connected. Ran with a rival crew.”
I
nod my understanding. “Got it.”
“Now, I could hear her, but I couldn’t find it within me to care. I hauled his ass upstairs to the bathroom, shoved him in the bathtub. I went back and got her, dragged her upstairs.”
Oh shit, I hope he isn’t getting to the “then murdered her” part. I won’t jump to conclusions this time, but I’m struggling to see a way this story ends without someone being murdered.
“I cuffed her to the towel rack on the wall by the sink. I didn’t have the house set up the way I do now, so I didn’t have the bars. Towel rack had to suffice.” He pauses, glancing at me briefly, but then turning his attention back to the bedding, like he can’t look at me for this next part. “I chained her there and made her watch while I bludgeoned him to death in our bathtub. The whole time she’s screaming bloody murder, begging me to stop, but I couldn’t. I wouldn’t. Not until he was dead.”
Wow. This is pretty fucking intense.
“She knew what I did for a living, that I did dirty work for the Morelli family, but she had never seen it with her own two eyes. She’d never seen me like that. It horrified her, understandably. She was screaming and crying, telling me not to touch her, that I was a monster.”
I flinch, remembering when I called him a monster before I fled Vegas.
“I knew she wasn’t going to stay after that. She was terrified of me at first, then when she realized I wasn’t going to kill her too, it all turned to hatred. She fucking hated me. The sane thing to do at this point, I realize, would have been to let her go. Let it end, let her get away from me.”
Grimacing, I say, “I take it that’s not what happened.”
“That is not what happened,” he verifies. “I convinced myself that with the other asshole gone, we could come back from what happened. The cheating, killing that motherfucker, the pregnancy. We had always planned to have a family one day. It wasn’t the way I pictured it, obviously, but I still loved her even after all that. Or, I convinced myself I did, anyway. Looking back, I don’t know if I can call that love. Anyway, I installed shit all over the house so I could keep her here, whether she wanted to be here or not. For a while, I had to keep her locked up a lot of the time.”
Oh, God.
“I realize how this sounds,” he says, glancing at me again.
“I’m still listening,” I assure him.
He nods, dropping the wedding band on the blanket and looking at it. “Eventually, it got almost normal. Time passed. Her love didn’t come back, she didn’t even like me anymore, but the baby was growing in her belly and she was changing. I won’t lie, I was pretty excited to be a father, regardless of how it all went down. The baby would still be half her, even if it wouldn’t be half me. And then she was born. Ellie. My sunshine.”
He looks sadder now than he ever has in my presence, and I can’t help leaning over and wrapping my arms around him. Before, I needed a hug, but now I sense he needs one.
“She was perfect. As soon as I saw her little face…” Sin stops, shaking his head and clearing his throat. “She was mine. It didn’t matter if she wasn’t really mine, that was my daughter, and I loved her. More than anything. Once Ellie came, everything changed. I took care of her every minute I was home. I’m the one who put her to bed every night. We finally felt like a normal family—maybe not the happiest family, but hell, every marriage has its rough patches.”
I lift my eyebrows, not entirely sure his situation falls under “rough patch,” but sure, I guess we’ll go with that.
“Paula was less hostile because she had a baby to love on, and I think seeing how much I loved Ellie finally softened her toward me a little. I could have still been an asshole to her about what she did, but I wasn’t. I just wanted to give Ellie a happy life, I didn’t want to fight over shit that couldn’t be changed. I had this idea that maybe being a family would make her fall back in love with me. That didn’t happen, but she did grow to tolerate me. By that time, I wasn’t forcing her to stay anymore, she just… stayed.”
Now he pauses to sigh and drag his hands over his face in such a way that it’s impossible not to feel dread. A knot of it forms in my stomach, because I have a bad feeling I know where this is going, and while it’s certainly not a dealbreaker, it is going to stress me out. If Paula left him and took that baby with her, I am going to have to accept that even if Sin is mine now, there will be a part of his heart out there in the world that I will never be able to touch. What if she came back? What would happen to us then?
Moving his body, he looks back toward the tattoo on his back. “Ellie’s favorite song was You Are My Sunshine, so I got this one for her.”
I examine the tattoo, running my finger over the symbol in the center of the sun. “Why is this in the middle?”
“It’s a trinity knot.”
“Like, the Holy Trinity? I thought you weren’t religious.”
He shakes his head. “That’s not what it meant for me. It was three separate entities knotted together. It represented our family to me. Me, Paula, and Ellie. Bound to each other. It was an unbreakable bond.”
At least, to him it was an unbreakable bond.
“So, anyway, we made it through Ellie’s first year. Threw her a big birthday party in the backyard. Things were finally good again—not perfect, but good. When Ellie was opening her presents—she had a ton of presents, just so much stuff—we lost track of who some of them were from. Some had arrived in the mail that week from out of town. She got bored of opening them before she finished anyway, so I helped her. One of the unmarked boxes had three little coffins in it, nothing else.”