“Amazing news, guys,” Brad echoes, but it’s full of unease.
How fucking dare he. That nasty piece of shit.
I stare at Law, jaw unhinged, shock slamming through me like a butcher’s cleaver.
No matter how brutally he breaks my body, his mind and audacity to always find new ways to carve out my soul, never fails me.
Ripping my gaze away, I lift the fork with a sweat-slick hand, knuckles white as bone. I spear a lone vegetable and force it between my lips, desperate to avoid the carnage on my plate.
Butter melts over my taste buds first, but then the blood from the meat follows. It seeps through, copper and iron, coating my tongue like a curse.
My eyes drop to the meat again, and my mind starts to spiral. It suddenly no longer looks like food. It looks like pieces of a fetus, torn and scattered, glistening under the chandelier light.
My breathing fractures into jagged bursts, and vomit floods my mouth, hot and violent. I slap a hand over my lips, chair screeching backward as I bolt upright.
“Blaire?” Kelly’s voice fades into the roaring in my ears as I run, stumbling toward the door.
???
Reaching the downstairs toilet, I barely make it before my body betrays me completely. I collapse over the bowl and heave, stomach wrenching in savage spasms.
Sweat pours down my face, mixing with tears and the bitter strings of saliva dangling from my lips.
My lungs pull as I hyperventilate, the world tilting around me as I slide down the cold wall, my body dragging like a corpse refusing its grave until I’m crumpled on the tiled floor.
I sit there in the dim silence, trying desperately to get myself together, to quiet the earthquake shaking through me.
In this toilet, I am both the offering and the waste. He carved out my fucking future and left me to vomit up the pieces.
The door suddenly explodes open, and I recoil hard, curling inward like a kicked animal. Law storms in, jaw clenched, eyes burning with cold fury. He grabs my upper arms with iron fingers, yanking me upright so violently my ribs scream.
He shakes me once, hard enough to rattle my soul loose.
“Stop fucking embarrassing me, Blaire,” he hisses, voice low and venomous, breath steaming against my face.
He pushes me out the door and my legs buckle beneath me, wobbling like a newborn fawn. I stumble into the hallway, the walls closing in.
“I can’t…” The words break into a sob, barely heard.
His hand slams against my back, shoving me forward with bruising force toward the dining room.
“Act like the fucking wife you should be,” he growls, “and grow up.”
As we reach the door, I swipe the tears from my cheeks with the back of my hand. And when he pushes the door open, I force my shoulders back, lifting my chin like a marionette whose strings have been pulled taut by a cruel hand.
“Are you okay?” Kelly asks as I pass, her voice sympathetic.
I manage a small, brittle smile and a nod, the motion forced and lifeless.
“Sorry about that,” I murmur, tone as thin as paper as I lower myself back into the chair beside Law.
I’m glad to see my plate has been cleared away, evidence of my weakness being swept under the rug before it could stain their perfect evening.
My eyes glide across the table until they land on a bottle of wine, dark and glistening. Desperate for something to anchor me, to make me look normal, useful, and compliant, I reach for it with a hand that still betrays me with its faint tremor.
“Here,” I say, forcing lightness into my tone as I stand. “Let me refill these for you.”
I fill Law’s glass first, the dark wine swirling like liquid night. His blue eyes burn into my side-profile—cold, unblinking, and dissecting every tremor in my wrist, every splinter in my composure.