We agreed to get an estimate back to them by morning and were halfway down the stairs when we encountered another woman. This one had dark hair with some colored streaks at the bottom, beautiful blue eyes, and she was wearing an apron over jeans and a T-shirt. Carrying a bucket of soapy water and a broom. And the scent…I heard my friends inhale sharply. Our mate. A maid.
“What are you doing here? Get back to work!” Funizzi snapped.
“I’m sorry. I was just finishing up the front hallway for the party,” she said, hurrying past us. It was all I could do not to snatch her up then and there.
“Wait for me at the top of the stairs!”
She scurried up, head ducked low, and I wanted to kill someone.
“Your maid is quite attractive,” Lyon said, and York and I both stared. The man who never said anything if he could avoid it. And who certainly wouldn’t make remarks like that about our mate.
“My wife? She’s all right for an omega,” he muttered then continued down the stairs and showed us out.
When we got to the truck, we all climbed in. I took the driver’s seat this time, needing something to do while I processed the whole thing. Once we were down the drive and onto the street, though, I pulled over to the side. “Well?”
Chapter Five
Isabella
“You know better than to come around looking like a servant when we have outsiders in the house,” he growled, looming over me. After walking the men to the door, he’d marched back to find me waiting as instructed. “You’re an embarrassment. I almost let those workers believe that you were a servant. You don’t deserve to be my wife.”
I wrung my hands, knowing what was coming, and dreading it.
“No answers, omega?” He closed his hand around my wrist, nails digging in, but I knew better than to complain. “You’re never going to learn.” He dragged me to the bedroom we’d once shared every night, the one he rarely visited except toteach me how to behave. Trembling, I let him tow me along without protesting. He was my husband, and as an omega, I was his property, to do with as he saw fit. Anything that went wrong was my fault. I’d broken a rule even if I didn’t know what it was. And sometimes I did. I shouldn’t have embarrassed Mark by letting those men see me so disarrayed. My job was twofold. The omega who worked and cleaned and scrubbed and the one who was brought out on special occasions like a decoration.
Outsiders should never see the undecorative omega, not even if they were maybe contractors.
“You’ll never learn,” he repeated, still shifting his grip to my upper arm. Where sleeves would hide the bruise. Of course, after being dragged by my wrist, there would be marks there. Long sleeves. “Why do you make me hurt you?”
He drew his arm back, and his fist slammed into my abdomen, sending me into a coughing fit. The only reason I was still upright was his grip on me. The second pounded myshoulders, chest, hips, any part of me that I could possibly cover with fabric. Or makeup. Not my face. Thank the Goddess he’d learned early on that when he pummeled my face, there was not enough makeup on earth to hide it. Partly due to the vivid bruising but more because of the swelling. He punched me over and over. Then when he got tired of that, he grabbed a fistful of hair and pulled. Experience taught him just how hard to yank without ending up leaving a bald spot that was hard to explain.
Not that omegas couldn’t be treated badly, but he believed that it reflected badly on him if I was so awful I required physical discipline.
When he was done punching and yanking, he let me fall to the floor and stood over me, lecturing me. “You cause me so much pain, making me do this. I work day and night, trying to teach you your place. How to be a good omega. You know what to do, or you should by now.” Considering lines was one of his favorite punishments when he was out of town and couldn’t beat me, and by lines, I meant writing the rules he had for me, a person would think I’d know what the rules were.
But there was a trick to it. The rules changed from day to day and week to week. Sometimes hour to hour. Making it exhausting and frustrating. And when he did this, blamed me for hurting his hand punching me or his wrists holding me in place while he punched me?
I felt guilty.
Mark finally left me a sobbing heap, giving me a kick in the ribs on his way out. It was all my fault. It must be because he told me so. I cried until I ran out of time for sadness. The party would be starting and I had to be perfect when it did.
I forced myself up on hands and knees and then, when the dizziness passed, to my feet. Limping into the bathroom, I struggled not to vomit. My stomach roiled, my breasts ached. All of me had pain from a dull ache to sharp shrieks of muscularagony. Undressing, I did not look in the mirror. I’d learned never to do that naked, unless it had been a while since I’d been beaten. A state I had been in this morning.
After allowing the warm water to ease as much as it could, I dried off, wrapped up in a big robe, and then allowed myself to sit at the vanity table and do my hair and makeup.
Then I had a harder job. The dress I’d selected had been chosen based on the fact that I was only faintly bruised. Mark had come in and approved it. And now…no way in hell could I wear that emerald-green dress that hung off my shoulders so delicately. I loved it, out of date or not. But after my punishment, impossible.
And now, I had to wear something else, something unapproved, likely leading to another beating later. Unless he forgot.
Sometimes he forgot.
Please let him forget.
As I stared into my closet, I remembered the men from earlier.
Who were they? Workers of some kind, clearly. Jeans and clipboards were a giveaway. But as they descended the stairs, all three gave me a look over their shoulders. I wanted to tell them not to go. To wait. To take me with them.
Finally dressed in a high-necked, long-sleeved, floor-length gown, I returned to the vanity and opened the drawer. My hair kept falling in my face, and I needed something to hold it back.
