“Fuck,” I mutter.
“That good, huh?” she says, her voice coming from what seems like the end of a tunnel.
I swipe the back of my hand across my forehead. “You killed me, babe. I’ll never be the same.”
11
AURORA
I lie tucked in bed with no plans to get out of it. I’d guess it to be around ten in the morning. It’s been two weeks since I married Mikael, and I’m not sure what to make of our relationship.
Detective Murphy’s words still stick in my mind. That Mikael married me because of some rival or hatred the two of them have for each other. I’m not sure what or why they don’t care for each other. I hope Mikael dislikes Edward because he’s a terrible man. If I know anything, it’s that.
Edward likely needs to be taken down in whatever it is he’s doing. I’m sure his business is shady. I can’t fault Mikael for that. I just wish he’d been more honest with me. I still might have agreed to marry him if he’d told me the truth from the beginning, only the terms would've been a bit different.
Oddly, out of everything that happened the day I’d gotten off the plane, it was Edward’s smack in the back of that limo that has haunted me. You’d think it would have been running through alleyways to get away from his driver or being hit by a car.
I was more pushed over by the car really, but still, that’s not what haunts me. It might have something to do with being trapped in the back of that limo with him. Maybe on some level I could sense the darkness and cruelty within him. I was seeing my future, or so I thought at the time.
Now I’m Mikael’s. My husband. I don’t have to worry about him ever striking me. No; when Mikael touches me, it’s unlike anything I’ve ever experienced, and the man is always touching me. If I’m across a room, he comes to stand close to me. He’ll look for any reason to touch me. From tucking my hair behind my ear, to wiping something off the corner of my mouth while we’re eating dinner, to absently playing with the tips of my hair. I’ve even noticed that he spins his wedding ring on his finger when he’s thinking.
I’m not sure what to make of it all. He swears that our marriage isn’t about Edward or the rivalry between them. That it’s only a small perk that he got to steal me from him, and if I’d been promised to anyone, he would have stolen me from them too.
I want to believe him so badly, but I’m so naïve when it comes to people. I give them everything I have, loving them and wanting their love in return, but they always use me in the end. My stepmother and sister are a prime example of that.
I also can’t forget Leslie from ninth grade who I thought wanted to be my friend. Turns out she’d only picked me as a partner in biology and pretended to be my friend so she could leech off my work and leave the big projects for me to do. She was always getting sick on the weekends we were supposed to be doing our work or the weekends we’d make plans to hang out. She’d made it clear when we finished ninth grade we were never friends and told me to stop calling her. I was devastated.
Then there was Miss Wilson. She’d been my fifth-grade art teacher. She was so sweet to me. I’d go home and tell my dad about how great she was. She went from sweet to the freakin’ devil when my dad turned her down for a date. I only know that because she screamed at me one day after class when she’d told me to stay behind. She went on and on about how my dad thought he was better than her and he wasn’t. I have no clue why he hadn’t agreed to the date, but my dad never thought he was better than anyone. I’d like to think he saw through Miss Wilson, but for some reason he hadn’t with my stepmother.
I roll over, pushing all those depressing thoughts out of my head, and reach for my Kindle on the nightstand. As much as I don’t want to think about them, I know I need the reminder. Mikael could hurt me far worse than Edward’s smack ever could. He could destroy what is left of my heart easily.
It gets harder and harder to not believe what he tells me. The way he kisses me with such passion. How he can never seem to get enough of me. He’ll take me before bed and then wake me in the night, needing me again. Sometimes it’s not even to have sex. The other day, he’d found me in the library. He’d come in and kissed me before he was pushing up my dress and burying his face between my thighs, saying he needed my taste. Then he’d kissed me again before he went back to his office.