Page 27 of Unleash Hades (Ungoverned Spaces #5)

Calissandra

I didn’t know that date. I didn’t know that it happened two years ago.

In fact, I had forgotten it entirely, even as I felt the ramifications of that evening in every fiber of my being.

I had clandestinely contacted Callum MacLachlan of Caledonia Security and paid him to rescue my sister in Kemet. Chloe was saved, and Richard knew nothing.

No one knew, in fact.

Just me, Callum, and, I suppose, Hugo. He promised to keep the circle small. He understood the danger when I told him.

Every day, Richard reported what was happening with my sister as if I didn’t already know… well, it just chipped away at the all-powerful Richard Davenport I had grown to fear. It brought him down to earth. I realized how capable of a liar I was.

I felt powerful. Like I could actually win in this chess game called life.

I have had exactly three moments of defiance in my marriage.

The first was when I lied and said my sister meant nothing to me and sent her to a boarding school so that he couldn’t use her on his quest for power.

The second was when I had an affair with the man who stared at me with eyes filled with molten heat beneath a placid exterior. A man who reminded me of home, and family, and a language I forbid myself to speak because my husband had a type that I did not want to be.

The third was when I sent the world’s leading security company to rescue my sister when she was kidnapped during a humanitarian mission. A sister that everyone thought I had forgotten about.

I had become complacent. I had found a routine where my boys were safe, and I thought he couldn't take anything more from me. His revolving door of mistresses kept me safe.

He thought I was cosmopolitan and cold, which I didn’t mind. It let him find warmth in other beds.

He thought I was his partner in this life, and not the person ready to bring him down from within. I thought that with the boys so close to their age of majority that it would be safe to defy him.

When he told me to go to a board meeting, I simply said no.

For my defiance, he pinned me to the rug of the penthouse, ripped my skirt, and reminded me that he was my husband.

As he rutted above me, my mind had blanked.

I had gone far, far away, and laid there as still as a frozen deer in the road before it was run over by an oncoming truck.

I don’t know how many hours passed. When I finally reentered my body, it had gone from midday to midnight. Richard was gone. I rose on shaky, pained legs. Blood coated my inner thighs.

I washed it off, and the next day… Richard and I went on as if nothing had happened.

Because nothing had changed, and nothing ever would.

“I could not save you.” Hugo’s voice drew me back to the present. The one where my legs were surer, but the pain in my heart no less soothed. “I was in Mozambique. And the man I had watching you couldn’t intervene… wouldn’t intervene…”

He sounded bitter at that fact. Maybe he had fought with his colleague. Bit by bit, cell by cell, I felt a little of that wound heal.

“It wouldn’t have helped. It would have just made it worse,” I whispered.

“Not if you had run away with me. I could have protected you. I could have saved you.”

“But then what would happen to my boys?”

He growled, the sound coming from somewhere deep in his chest. “They aren’t your boys! They are his boys. With his mistress!”

‘They’re my boys!” I pushed at his chest, creating distance between us. On this, I would never compromise. “She wasn’t just his mistress. She was my friend!”

His eyes widened in surprise, his face growing cold.

“How could you be friends with his mistress? The woman he betrayed you with, over and over again?” He shut his eyes. “You have dedicated your life to her. You’ve turned yourself into a fucking martyr to her shrine! Why?”

“Because it wasn’t her choice. Any more than marrying him was mine.”

“Why did you marry him?”

I sucked the air in through my teeth. No one had ever asked that before. No one had cared. No one had thought there was anything unusual about an eighteen-year-old girl marrying a man ten years older than her.

Why was this man the first to ever ask?

“Laurent Media was failing. My father had made some poor decisions, and Richard came with an investment of capital.” My heart sank to my feet. “But the only way he would do it was if he was allowed to marry me.”

“So you agreed to be sold off?” Hugo looked appalled.

“It’s worse, actually.” I wrapped my arms around myself.

Maybe it would be good to say it out loud.

“He made me think he loved me. That I loved him. That he was coming in on a white horse with an investment to do my family a favor, and to win my hand. He did everything right, said the right words, and swept me off my feet.”

“You were in love with him.” Hugo’s eyes darkened. Was that jealousy?

“Yes,” I admitted, feeling the heat creep up my cheeks. “I thought I was. But I was… dissuaded of that soon. He had mistresses. One after the other until one stuck because… Well, that’s a whole other story, isn’t it?”

I crossed my arms and and looked at the lapping water beneath the dock. The boat bobbed quietly among the waves.

“I hated Adelia at first,” I finally admitted. “She was brought into our home, given her own little guest house on the grounds, and I…”

“Why was he comfortable doing that?”

“Because I loved him. I was young. I wanted to impress him. The first time I found out about his infidelity, I thought… Well, this is modern of us, isn’t it?

An affair isn’t enough to end a marriage!

Not for people like us. Not in our circles.

” I felt a hot tear of embarrassment fall down my cheek, and I didn’t bother to wipe it away.

It was good to let myself feel something.

“An affair was excusable. But our marriage vows? Well, if I was sophisticated enough, and I was clever enough, if I worked hard, then I’d keep his attention. ”

Another tear.

“I was too naive to realize that he would never have left me anyway. I was his golden ticket.” Bitterness seeped into my voice.

And even that felt like a relief. “Adelia was moved in under the guise that she’d be a maid.

It was obvious there was more. I hated her.

I was jealous. I started to fight with Richard - little things, at first. But he hit me once, and I told him if he did it again, that I’d leave him.

That set him straight… or so I thought.”

The full extent of all my regrets overwhelmed my senses until I felt like a flood would fall from my eyes.

“Realization was slow. I saw Adelia walking through the halls. Under her sleeve was a bruise. I didn’t think much of it.

I relished in her pain. Then, Richard and I had a tremendous fight.

It was about my career. I was heading for a Master’s at Columbia University, and he wanted to move to France.

I told him to go but he said it wouldn’t be appropriate for us to be separated.

I think he was afraid that I’d leave him, and he’d lose control of Laurent Media,” I laughed, feeling embarrassed of how poorly I had measured the situation.

“We fought and threw things and I told him he could live wherever he wanted to and I didn’t care.

He had his mistress. What did it matter? ”

I had caused so much pain in my life. Maybe not directly. Sometimes, I had intended to do good, but… the road to hell, and all that.

The road to hell leads to Hades.

“Adelia’s eye was bruised and swollen shut, her wrists were black and blue.

She was limping and trying not to cry as she went about her duties.

That was when I realized that she was bearing the brunt of my stubbornness.

” I wiped the tears now because I did not deserve to relish the pain of this.

I was at fault. “She was the whipping boy.” This was pain I had caused.

“I went to her, because I felt awful. I think sympathy broke her, a little, because she told me everything. She was with child, alone, and afraid. So we became friends.”

I had never put all of these things to words. I had never told anyone except Adelia. Saying something out loud brought it out into the sun and made it real. It forced you to take repressed disjointed thoughts and parse them together.

“We became allies, of a sort. I became what I am. Compliant. Richard realized that he could hurt Adelia to get to me. So he did. Over and over again, he did. And I would clean her wounds and swear to do better next time.”

I wiped more tears.

“When she had the boys, she found new strength. That she would do better. That she would make Richard leave me - a mercy at that point - and would make a better life for her sons.”

I placed my hands in front of my face, my hot cheeks flushed.

“She thought he would marry her. I was prepared to give him shares if I had to. Her boys would grow up legitimate heirs, and she’d be a real wife. Sure, she’d be hurt once in a while, but she had survived the Triangle Trade. I… I selfishly wept with joy for her plan.”

Hugo’s fists clenched and unclenched, because we both knew the end of this story. We both knew why the boys were mine, and not Adelia’s…

“We were patient. We waited. We tried to plant the idea slowly so that Richard would think it was all his idea.” I started to pace in a small circle, recounting this time in my life - a time I had blocked out.

“Three years after the boys were born, we thought we had it. He took her to Marseille, to her hometown. She thought that he would propose and go with her plan. She had been buttering him up with it for months, and I had helped. We had been planting the seeds again and again, and it was time for Spring.”

I stopped my frantic pacing, as the pain of sorrow crept from my belly, up my chest, into my throat. I choked on it, as the snot and tears came out so full that I wanted to break.

“I had been too selfish to see her twins after they were born. They were kept in a different home, off the property. I guess he didn’t want to risk it.

Her own house… she loved it.” I started to laugh at the tragic comedy of it all.

“He was playing house with her. He never came home. He was being a real father to them… that’s what Adelia said. ”

I was about to go into hysterics. I felt it. The insanity of it all. The insanity of our dreadful hope.

“She drowned. He said it was an accident on La Place de Prophet… but I know… I know… he killed her.” I knew it in my heart. His lack of remorse when he returned home, the way he had the paperwork prepared for the boys’ adoptions, and the smug way he walked around the house…

Adelia and I had not been clever. He had known what we were doing and concocted his own counterattack.

“Publicly he denies that the boys are his. He says that they were just lost children who needed a home, and that I was barren.” I rolled my eyes at that.

I wasn’t barren. I was just on birth control, but no one had to know that.

“But if I left him, he’d make the truth known, and he’d take the boys from me.

Or he’d hurt me and control their inheritance.

So I waited… I am still waiting until they’re in their majority, and… ”

I let out a long breath, feeling the sorrow ease out, even as it threatened to overwhelm me again.

“Richard always has a plan. He always has a counter move, and I don’t want my boys to pay the price. He loves nothing and no one. He cares only for himself. So I can’t run. I can’t disappear. Because my boys don’t have a mother, and it was all because of me. I am left standing, and I need to…”

“I understand.”