“Then you could’ve stayed.”
“You know I couldn’t…”
He pulled his arm away from my grasp. “That was your decision, and I respect it. You were doing the right thing for you and Andrew, and I get it. But let’s not forget that you abandoned me to the hellhole where I live. You get to start over with a new life. I don’t. You were a prisoner to Maddox…and now I’ve become his captive.”
5
Hades
When I got the news Andrew was doing well, I should’ve been happy.
Ecstatic.
But I wasn’t. All I could feel was overwhelming resentment toward my ex-wife. She’d never looked so beautiful, never glowed so bright. Relocating to Rome was the best thing for her, and while she didn’t look happy, she didn’t look stressed either. She’d gotten everything she wanted…and she did it without me.
It made me bitter. Angry.
I wanted Sofia and Andrew to be safe, but I was miserable living under Maddox’s thumb. I was his little bitch, practically a slave. I was a rich man in a powerful position, but I had no rights, no freedoms. I couldn’t have the one thing I wanted more than anything else. It was like she didn’t care…at all.
When Maddox took her and all hope was lost, I sacrificed myself in exchange for her freedom. I threw myself on the grenade so she could get away.
But she abandoned me.
I would’ve judged her if she stayed. In fact, I respected her for choosing herself and our son over me. But the darker side of me couldn’t stop hating her for it. I’d sacrificed so much for this relationship, and it made no difference in the end.
How could she go to the doctor with me and be so calm? How could she be so pragmatic about this whole thing? It’d been two months, so we’d both had time to decompress. There had been a lot of tears when she first left. But I’d never gotten over that phase.
It seemed like she had.
How could she love me as much as I loved her but be fine with all of this?
I wasn’t close to being fine.
It’d been a few days since I’d stormed off and left her on her doorstep. But I hadn’t stopped thinking about that moment from the time I’d gotten home. I went right back to work with numbness all over my body and a scotch in my hand. I was stuck in a never-ending vortex of pain. My life was so meaningless, sometimes I wondered what the point was. If I were dead, Maddox would have no interest in Sofia. I wouldn’t have to live without her.
It was late in the evening as I sat on the couch with the TV on. Living alone was suffocating. I’d preferred isolation, but after I was happily married, I couldn’t imagine being alone again. Now it was just depressing…especially when I thought I heard her voice coming from the closet or the bathroom.
My phone lit up with Sofia’s name.
She was calling me. I watched it ring but didn’t answer. I’d never loved someone and hated them at the same time. But if she ever needed me, I had to be there. I would never forgive myself if something happened to her because I was too pissed off to be reasonable.
I answered the phone. Bitterness was audible. “Yeah?”
“Don’t fucking yeah me.” She launched herself at a million miles an hour, expressing all the rage she’d kept bottled up inside the last few days. She was like the sun, solar flares jumping out everywhere. “I didn’t want this. I didn’t want to lose you. I hate this so fucking much. You think I like being alone? You think I like being hours away from you? You say that you’re a prisoner, but you have no idea what being a prisoner is really like. You don’t know what it’s like to be chained up and raped, so don’t sit there and act like you and I are the same. We are not the fucking same.” She was harsh in her tone and destructive in her choice of words. She didn’t hold anything back, and her rage was mixed with the distant sound of tears.
I kept the phone to my ear and closed my eyes when she mentioned the most terrible thing we’d had to endure.
“I told you to kill him, and you refused. If you aren’t going to do anything about it, then I have to move on. Don’t you dare judge me for what I did. If I’d never married you in the first place, I never would’ve been raped. You were supposed to protect me, but being with you has caused me more harm than if I were alone. I don’t regret being with you because I loved you, but I can’t be stupid and expect a future to be any different from the past. I have a son to think about now. And what kind of mother would I be if I didn’t give him the life he deserves?”