He killed my father. I’m having his baby.
He killed my father. I’m having his baby.
Those two sentences are on repeat in my head, the agony of the rolling waves almost too much for me to bear.
And the agony of my nausea slams into me again with the violent rock of the waves that carry us to safer shores. I think. I hope.
But really, how safe am I? I’m suddenly questioning everything, stuck in a vortex of swirling paranoia and doubt. Is Jase on Dornan’s side? He killed my father. He didn’t even try to deny it.
I can’t believe it, I can’t accept it, and I just wish I could think straight for five fucking minutes. I wish I didn’t feel like this. I’ve left one prison, the one Dornan constructed for me, only to be trapped in one of my own making. The one in my mind that goes over and over and over again.
I’m curled as tight as I can get into a ball on a bed in the main cabin of the boat. We must be going pretty fast, or be in some crazy swell, because I swear if the boat tilted a little more, it’d capsize.
The door is closed. I made Elliot promise he wouldn’t let Jase come in here. I’m going to have to face him eventually, but I just can’t face him now. I don’t want to hear his excuses, if he even has any. He killed my father.
I’ve never been afraid of drowning before, but right now, I’m terrified. Drowning in this ship. Drowning in lies and in blood. Drowning in my own treacherous deceit. For so long, I’ve had only one goal - to destroy Dornan. I was too busy focusing on his suffering to notice or care about my own, and now, I feel so damned broken. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to feel normal again.
In fact, come to think of it, I don’t even know what normal is.
I jump as a warm hand touches my shoulder.
“Hey,” a low voice murmurs beside me.
I turn over to see Elliot lying beside me, his pose mirroring mine. I can see water lashing against the small round window that looks out to the cruel sea we travel within.
“You’re shaking,” Elliot says, frowning as he reaches out a hand to me. Without thinking, I shrink back, an automatic response after three months of Dornan’s psychotic hands being the only ones to reach for me. Elliot’s face crumples into something resembling sadness—despair—as he reaches out to me again, slower this time, and pushes my lank hair back from my face.
Am I even here? I’m not sure. This could all be a dream. An elaborate, drug-induced hallucination. The thought makes me reel. Am I out? Or am I still in the basement? Is Elliot in front of me, or is it Dornan?
Dornan.
I scramble away from Elliot, clambering off the bed and backing up to the far end of the tiny room. Behind me, waves pound violently into the thick glass porthole, the only thing separating us from the deadly currents beyond. The movement of the waves catches my attention and I turn, mesmerized, as I press a trembling palm up to the freezing cold glass.
Am I here? Am I alive?
A nudge in my stomach, nothing more than a flutter really, propels me back to sanity.
Yes. I am here. I am here, while Elliot hovers behind me, and Jase and Luis are somewhere beyond the door that keeps me safe in this room.
And I am carrying a baby inside me. A baby that should never have existed.
And I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a terrible thing.
I start to cry. Funny. I thought I was out of tears. I’ve cried enough to last me lifetimes, but the tears don’t know that. They spill onto my cheeks and my arms as I continue to watch the seawater swirl and smash less than a foot from where I stand.
“Julz.”
I turn slowly, wiping my cheeks with uncertain hands. Fresh nausea roils in my gut, but this isn’t just morning sickness. No. This is different.
This is worse.
My head is pounding, and my mouth is dry. Without thinking, I bring a hand up to the crook of my elbow, fingering the delicate flesh there that Dornan tracked repeatedly when he injected me every single day with enough heroin to turn me into a babbling idiot. The image of him swims in my vision, above me on his bed, his arms caging me in as he pushes the plunger down and floods my dark soul with artificial light. With sweet happiness that makes me light up inside. My mouth waters just thinking about it.
“Juliette!”
Hands are shaking me. I snap out of my little—I don’t even know what the fuck that was I slipped into—and find his eyes with so much more effort than I should need to use. I’m heavy, and I’m weak, and I just want everything to go away.
“What?” I reply, but my words hold no substance. They’re like feathers, soft and light, and they float away from me on the wind that howls outside.
Elliot’s jaw is tight, his dark blue eyes flashing with emotion. “What is going on in there?” he asks, pointing at my head. “I’ve been calling out to you for ages.”