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I sleptfor three whole days.
Three days of dreams and nightmares, mixed with all my hopes and fears, where dead men came to life and knights fought for sweet little princesses named Honey.
I'd passed out for only a few seconds and awoken in Knight's arms, shaking.
Honey was still alive but Antonio wasn't.
I couldn't watch as they'd taken care of his body, my feelings about him too mixed and confusing, but I made certain to watch as we cut Manuel's head from his body and buried him in different sections of the desert like he was some kind of vampire.
A wave of satisfaction and relief had welled up within me, a feeling more powerful than I ever could have imagined.
He was dead.
Dead dead.
The heavy burden I had been carrying had finally been lifted, and I felt a lightness that had eluded me for a long time.
After that, I'd barely showered and eaten, trying to come to terms with everything that had happened the past few weeks. It felt like a lifetime ago since Knight had claimed me in front of a crowd of mafia men.
And now, I was in a dark room in some fancy hotel room in Cabo San Lucas, after Knight insisted we leave Vegas for a while. As soon as we'd arrived, an oppressive sense of fatigue had descended upon me, more powerful than anything I had ever experienced before and, once more, I was dead to the world.
Then, sometime in the fuzzy space between dawn and daybreak on the fourth day, I'd awoken to Knight holding me close on the hotel bed. His arm was under my neck, his face buried into the crook of it, with his other arm wrapped around my waist.
The shutters were drawn closed, no lights were on.
I'd woken, lost and drowning in a sea of my nightmares, with him comforting me in the stillness.
"Tell me everything," he'd said, once I'd calmed.
"I don't know where to start."
"Start at the beginning."
And so, I began. The whole story came tumbling out as we'd laid in the dark. My words flowing, lost to the memories as I was thrown back in time to the endless days and nights when Manuel had complete control over my body.
It had started out small: he suggested I trade out tacos for fruit and veggies.
I'd thought it sweet. That he cared about my health.
Then it became where I sat at the table, which shoes I wore, how I styled my hair.
Slowly it turned into more and more, and it was after he started dictating every single aspect of my life that I realized it wasn't concern for meat all, but rather,control.
But, by then, I was in too deep.
I couldn't leave the house without permission, and when I did, I had to have his guards with me for my "protection." And, when I tried to leave him, their protection quickly changed to dragging me back to his house and locking me up.
But it didn't stop there.
His control over me grew and grew until I couldn't get up from bed in the morning without his explicit permission.
He dictated every single aspect of my life: which rooms I could go into in the house, how much time I spent outside in the fresh air, if the shutters were open or closed.
I couldn't even look out the window to the sea beyond without asking him first.
And, once I started to rebel, to eat an apple when he'd listed oranges only, when I showed up to the party in the red dress, instead of the black one, small things like that--that's when he began to experiment with different poisons as a way to control me.
And he didn't stop until he found the perfect one--poison from the deathstalker scorpion.