“The only thing that will separate you from me,” he said quietly, “is death.”
My stomach dropped.
“I... n-need...” I pressed two fingers lightly to my throat, willing it to hold together. “I need... to be married to Harris... b-before I can claim... my-my-my inheritance.”
That got his attention.
“You forgot that when you pointed at me on the altar?” His gaze snapped back to mine—fierce, blazing, an electric blue lit from within by fury. “You chose this.”
“I wasn’t... thinking.”
Pain speared through my throat without warning. I winced, breath hitching, fingers digging into the side of my neck as if I could physically hold myself together.
He stepped closer.
Too close.
“You seem perfectly capable of speaking now,” he said softly, dangerously. “My beautiful deaf-and-mute wife.”
The word beautiful landed wrong—wrong in its sincerity, wrong in its weight. It wasn’t mocking. It wasn’t teasing.
It was a fact he hated.
“Yet when I ask why you butchered my pregnant wife,” he continued, voice dropping even lower, “why you cut open an innocent woman and murdered the child inside her—”
He leaned in until I could feel the heat of him, until his breath brushed my forehead, my cheek.
“You go mute again.”
My heart hammered so violently I thought it might fracture my ribs.
“Why?” he demanded softly. “And don’t you dare cough blood.”
I stared up at him—terrified, exhausted, breaking.
The truth clawed at my chest, screaming to be released. But my ruined throat betrayed me, locking tight, sealing my words behind pain and scar tissue.
I could only shake my head.
Slow.
Helpless.
A silent plea written in every tear-bright inch of my eyes.
Please see me.
Please don’t do this.
Please—before the monster inside you decides I’ve had enough time to live.
He was asking why as though some part of him—buried deep beneath the rage, beneath the certainty he wore like armor—still refused to believe I was capable of such horror.
As though the evidence he carried, whatever proof had carved this conviction into his bones, clashed violently with the woman standing in front of him now: bruised, shaking, blood still drying at the corner of her mouth.
I felt that fracture inside him. I could see it.
And it terrified me more than his threats.
