Rogue (In the life of the Rogue Book 1) (24 page)

I hadn’t realized that Lulina had been crying until I saw her attempt again to touch her swollen face. A nurse pushed a wheelchair up, and the three of them, helped her inside it. I followed along behind the medical aide as they pushed Lulina into the compound.

My father was there at the door waiting for us. “Did you see anything?”

I shook my head and I elected not to speak.

I did not trust my words.

The nurse stopped Lulina’s wheel chair in front of him. My father looked tired as his suit was unbuttoned and his tie was loose about his neck. His day of business had not ended, and there were no signs of it doing so. He bent down, and, I had never heard him speak so softly and sweetly to the woman.

He asked her who did this to her.

Lulina motioned him closer where she whispered in his ear for what seemed like an enternity. When she was done, he glanced up at me. His face was not angry, and that seemed to scare me even more.

He waited until the nurses pushed Lulina away before he spoke. “Go to the bar and get a drink, Tristan. Then I want you by her door, making sure that my money is well spent. After that, I want you in my office for a meeting.”

I took a step back, passing over the door’s threshold. “I rather leave.”

My father leaned his head closer, his mean eyes getting meaner. “What I said seemed to have been taken as a request, or an offer. And if you made that mistake, here is your chance to correct it; do as I told you, now.”

If someone said I could burn the world then I would ask for the match…

I skipped the drinks at the bar and paced outside Lulina’s door in the compound’s medical wing instead. My Papa had it built when he had taken a past time in beating the men who needed to gain a clear message on just who he was and what he was capable of, and allowing them to seek medical attention and heal before he allowed them to leave.

He would say, Bruises told stories. No bruises and there was nothing that could be shared.

I stopped pacing when I realized that I lost track of my steps. My head touched the cold wall and I slid down to my ass. My head were in my hands. Strangely, I felt like a waiting father and my wife was inside giving birth.

The door opened and a nurse leaned her head out. “She’s asking for you.”

It was another nudge in the ‘about to be a father’ scenario. Except, I didn’t walk into a room with a wife holding a new bundle of joy, I walked into a room where a woman I had hurt was bandaged considerably and glaring at me with a hate so raw that my Papa’s looks of blatant hate and disgust towards me would never match.

I tapped the doctor on the shoulder. “The damage?”

He glanced at Lulina before answering me. She had lost the look of hate and gave a painful smile when his eyes were on her.

“He’s like a son to me,” she said to the doctor, “he needs to know what was done.”

The doctor nodded and turned back to me. I looked briefly back at Lulina and the stare was back, her hazel eyes were icy cold and brutal.

“Should we take this out in the hall?” He asked in a professional manner.

“No,” Lulina cut in, “I want to be present as he hears this.”

The doctor nodded again and cleared his throat. “She received almost a half dozen stitches in her anus region. We stopped the bleeding and sewn the wound. She has many cuts and bruises – mostly in her face. She has two bruised ribs on her left side and a fractured rib on the right; many abrasions on her knees and hands and knuckles.”

The violence soured my stomach.

“Will she heal?” I asked, doing the best to keep the cracks out of my voice.

“On the outside, yes,” he answered and said nothing else.

He didn’t have to continue, I got the message. The obvious hurts and pain would heal, but what would be left on the inside would be the real recovery, and I was almost positive that what was broken would never be put back together.

“Leave us,” Lulina said and I watched as the doctor and nurses walked out of the room.

The door closed and I didn’t sit until I heard the click of the lock engaging.

Lulina had the floor and she took her time. She touched her bandaged face, her eyes not wincing as she stared at me. She licked her swollen lips and proceeded to fix and straighten the sheets around her.

“Just so we’re clear, Tristan,” she started, her voice even, calm and unemotional, “from this moment forward, we are enemies.”

I did not add anything to the statement.

“I have sacrificed more for you than you will ever know, but I will tell you when the time is right.”

I continued in my silence. The room was cold to begin with but the degrees seemed to drop as I stared into the hate in her face.

“I also want to make clear, Tristan,” Lulina went on, “You have nothing to worry about. They – your father or your grandfather - don’t know and I don’t plan on telling them. But, as for me, you have much to worry about. You may get away with this on the family side, but I won’t let you get away with what you have done.”

I understood her words; from this moment forward, battle lines had been dugged in the sand.

My hands touched my glock in the back of my waistband. The clip was ejected and laid on the bed next to her thigh. I showed her bullet still in the chamber then set the gun on the bed next to clip.

“Then let’s end this here,” I said, my first time talking, adding something to the conversation.

Lulina looked down at the gun, her big lips pulling away from her teeth as she tried to smile. “Shoot you, Tristan?”

“Vengeance is vengeance.”

“But what’s the fun in that?”

I leaned into Lulina, touching my nose to her ear. My teeth grazed the top of her ear as I spoke in a heated whisper. The entire time she cringed at the touch of me and I found myself losing the shame and not caring how she felt about me. “I told you I don’t like your games, Lu.”

“See, that’s the thing, I’m not playing games,” she hissed back.

Lulina waited until I was seated before she slid those hateful hazel eyes back in my direction. “Do you really think I should forgive you? Chock it up as an argument between lovers? Again, what’s the fun in that?”

“Despite this exchange of words, I didn’t mean for what happened to happen,” I tell her.

“Oh? How much better do you think that made me feel by hearing that?”

It was my turn to cringe in my seat, and the shame I had merely evaded came right back up and lodged itself in my throat.

“Oh don’t tell me you’re sorry, Tristan.”

I lowered my eyes to the ground.

“Oh, don’t do that, you don’t get to look away from the monster you created.” She said and laughed at me. As she laughed the smaller I felt. It wasn’t until she tried to sit up and the pain marched into her face did I feel like I was somewhat in control.

“I don’t hurt women,” I offered.

“You hurt me.”

“You weren’t the bubbly teenage blonde who gave me a lap dance then tried to swat my hand away when I went for third base without kissing you.”

“So this is my fault, Tristan?”

“You were the cheerleader rather than the opposing team.”

“And this makes you feel better? You rape the mother of the woman you profess to love, but you try to pass onus onto her as if she asked for it?”

“Little big words don’t go by me, Lulina. I know what
onus
means.”

“Congratulations. You are the first non-idiot to be born of this terrible family.”

“Yes,” I countered, “It rhymes with anus, doesn’t it?”

The air of tension fell on the room like a hail of rocks falling from a crumbling mountain. The hate that I let get suppressed by shame and digust for myself ended up back to the same hate I had felt the night before. Lulina stopped being the victim of my hidden violence, and again became the manipulation that I hated and tried to destroy.

“I’m going to make you wish you had killed me, Tristan.”

“Push me, Lu, and I’ll push right through those stitches.”

She wanted to act like this didn’t affect her but it did. The flash of indescrible fear plagued her face and took more than a few moments before it went away. She and I both knew that if I attacked her she wouldn’t be able to survive it. Not again. I barely remembered much of the attack on her, just the beginning, but the hours she had been in my bedroom trying to scream and me loving the way the world had been silent to my brutatily had been a blur.

I would be much more savage this time around.

Much more.

She said nothing for a long moment. If I had been angry, she was making sure the anger had passed before she forced another couple words out through her clenched teeth. “The next move, Tristan, is mine.”

“So here it is the master’s game that you said you weren’t playing.”

“You’re extremely sexy when miffed and lost and confused – such the little boy again that I couldn’t help but fuck.”

“This little boy is a man with a big man’s tool that knows how to use it.”

“Every insider jab and pun you can throw my way makes it so much easier for me to get over this, Tristan.”

“What do you want from me?”

She smiled her evil smile and I took it like hair caught in my glass. I had tried to play her game and she was winning even before I made a move. I soon realized that Lulina was much smarter and much tougher, but that was because I was playing on her own turf. I thought I was gaining control but I was more shoveling it towards her.

“I want to take everything away from you, Tristan,” she said, “I want you to see as you lose everything. I want you to have nothing when you finally die because now we’re through. If I can’t have you then you won’t have jack shit.”

“Then you’re wasting your time. I don’t have anything you can take.”

“I’m going to love showing you how wrong you are.”

***

The medical wing wasn’t too far from my father’s office, but the trek felt like it had taken an enternity and a half.

My father sat in his chair and smoked quietly on his cigar. Papa was there, too, shaking his glass so he could hear the
chink
of the ice cubes protesting from the sudden movement.

My Papa proceeded to do something that I could only count on one hand that I’ve seen him do in my life growing up: he took his glasses off and polished them on his silk shirt. I watched as his dark eyes glared with suppressed rage and angish. I understood why he wore the shades. Behind those dark walls he built around his face lay a very dangerous murderer who had seen the ugliness of the world and decided to become uglier.

“Did you enjoy your father’s fancee?” He asked after fixing the glasses back on his face.

I opened my mouth but no words came out.

“Did you even stop to think before you jumped into bed with her?”

Finally, I found my words. “I was under the impression that Dominique asked for me.”

“She did,” Papa agreed, “but you didn’t know that. I see you haven’t learned from your mistake two years ago. Still a weak man and you have no place in my eyes that deserves respect.”

There was no use arguing at this point. My grandfather had always looked at me as weak and unimportant – unworthy of my family name. And, this instant, in this excat moment, he had been proven right.

He hadn’t needed to push.

I had made all the mistakes by myself.

Papa continued, changing the subject, “It’s unfortunate what happened to my granddaughter-in-law.”

I scratched my head, wondering if I should show an emotion, and if that was the case, what emotion would that be. I had been ashamed at what I had done, and sorry for it too, but after me and Lulina’s heart to heart talk, those emotions were gone.

“Take a seat, Tristan. You look funny standing,” Papa motioned for the chair in front of my father’s desk.

Instead, I considered the chair that was pointed out to me then looked back him, making it clear that I had no impulse to follow his command.

Papa raised his eyebrows, “is that a no?” He shook his head as corner of his mouth lifted into a smirk. “You were, at one time, so gong ho to please me, to satisfy me. Has that changed?”

“I never satisfied you, Papa. Why should I now?”

He laughed. “Your father asked if you saw anything tonight, did you?”

“I didn’t.”

“Did Lulina say anything to you while you were in the wing?”

“Nothing we can use.”

He asked, “Well, what did she say?”

“Nothing that you would care about.”

“Like what, Tristan?”

“About how she is so hurt, and how she hates how her life is turning out.”

Papa finished his drink in one long gulp, shook his glass and then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “You were right, I wouldn’t care about that.”

My father casually smoked his cigar – he looked not particularly interested in either me or his father in the room discussing the abuse on a woman that had married his son. But, what more could I expect from a man who never seemed to sleep.

My father stubbed out his cigar. He pondered the box of Cubans and carefully chose another cigar. “What we do care about, Tristan, is if rival family had a hand in this. See, I don’t give a rat’s ass what happens to her, but if this is a launch attack on the family then it becomes family business.”

Papa: “We’ll push for a name. Maybe ask around, see if anyone brags about giving her some unwanted cock. Our concern is that another family did the deed. They don’t touch Rogue.” Papa shook his glass again. Internally I winced as the cubes smacked and smashed together. “My guess goes to Lougotti. I wouldn’t be surprised he gave a little payback to his ex-wife. Johnnny was a fool and she got what she deserved.”

The mention of Johnny’s name seemed to cut my father fast and hard like twisted barbwired that was rusted. He ended his smoke, and the taste of it looked like the cigar had been aged in fish sweat in a broken freezer. He glared at his father, his eyes just as dark and murderous as I had seen in Papa’s eyes.

My father adjusted himself in the seat, a sign that the conversation had been delayed enough. “We’re here to talk about your status in this family,” he said to me.

Finally, my thick tongue decided to move in my mouth. “So what happens now?”

“I want you to move back into the compound. We’re going to need you close.” He said this without looking at me.