Page 44 of The Butcher's Wife

I blink a few times, my anger blown out like a candle’s flame. “…Russell?”

He couldn’t possibly be jealous.

“Don’t even say his name,” he grits out and bursts into a dark chuckle. “If I hear his name on your lips, I swear to God, I’m driving back there, and I’m going to make you watch me finish strangling him.”

Finish…?

The bandage around Russell’s throat. That’d been Dom?

It’s difficult to think through the pleasurable haze that is the understanding of my husband’s jealousy.

I lean into him, wanting to sip from it like from the juices of a ripe fruit. “He’s nothing to me.”

“Maybe you’re too sheltered to know what a man thinks when he sees a woman like you, but it was pretty fucking clear he wants you.” Dom pauses. “I forbid you from seeing him again.”

I burst into laughter, and judging by the white skin on Dom’s knuckles on the steering wheel, he doesn’t like that. I couldn’t care less about seeing Russell again, but I’ll be damned if I let my absent husband boss me around.

“What gives you the right to tell me who I can talk to?”

He snatches my wrist and shakes me, a groan of pain escaping his lips. The idiot—he’s grabbing me with his own injured palm.

“This ring gives me the right,” he says. “You say I’m stuck in this—you are too. So, you’re going to be my wife, I expect obedience.”

Fuck no.

I twist my hand and dig my finger into the cut in his palm.

He nearly swerves off the road. “Fuck!”

He jerks his hand out of my grasp and swings the car to the side road, hitting a strip of sidewalk before he slams to a stop, inches from hitting a brick fence.

I brace myself against the side door of the car, heart racing, eyes wide.

“Dom,” I say in a weak voice. “You’re scaring me.”

He laughs. “You’re scaringme. Here I thought you were my sweet, innocent wife, and now I learn the Chiarellis have a hit out on you?”

My tongue goes dry. “You need to go to the hospital. Get stitches.”

He sucks in a breath through his teeth. “Alright,” he says. He turns off the car and tosses his phone on the dashboard. “Get out. Leave your phone.”

Is it trust or fear that has me scrambling to unbuckle myself after him? The way his massive form stalks around the hood of the car makes my breath catch, even now, but I still wait for him to open the door as an act of tiny rebellion—he can do it, since he wants me outside so badly.

The door swings, and he stands outside the car for me like my personal bodyguard.

I slip out lightly onto the street, my boots clicking onto the asphalt.

“Where’s your phone?”

“I left it in the penthouse.”

He eyes my coat. “You gonna be warm enough in that?”

My coat’s plenty warm, but I still cross my arms and glare at him. “No.”

He chuckles as he shrugs his massive coat off and slidesit onto my shoulders. The smell is intoxicating, and I have to resist shoving my face in the fur lining. Maybe this crush is just self-destruction dressed in lingerie.

Mom picked Dad even though Aunt Karen said he would cheat on her constantly until she got pregnant with Carlo. I’ve seen the ways she molded herself to be a woman Dad would never think to leave, until there was nothing of her old self left.