Page 50 of Boardroom Ties
I brace myself for what I know is coming.
Sure enough, a second later, that heavy hand thuds onto my thigh with a meaty slap. Only the thin silk of my robe prevents the skin-on-skin contact I’m dreading. I have to fight every muscle in my body not to jerk away.
“You know,” he muses, chewing with his mouth open, “we haven’t, in a while.”
I stay perfectly still, like a rabbit caught wandering too far out of the underbrush.
“A man has needs, Cassandra.” His hand creeps higher. “Come back to bed, why don’t you?”
“Ray, I?—”
“It wasn’t really a question.”
He sets his mug down with a clack that says he’s already deciding it for both of us. His palm has wormed its way onto my hip now, fingers scrabbling ever higher upward, and he’s leaning in close enough that I can smell the Kahlúa on his breath mixing with theburps and the B.O. and whatever foul things have taken root on his tongue overnight.
I think faster than I’ve ever thought in my life. “Raymond, I— I— I’m on my period.”
His hand stops moving.
“I started last night, actually. Right after we got home. That’s why I went to bed so fast.” I make my mouth pucker up small and apologetic. “I didn’t want to ruin your evening.”
He tears his hand off my thigh like I burned him. “Christ.”
“I’m sorry, darling.”
“I don’t want your fucking sorries.” He shoves the stool back from the island with a screech that puts my teeth on edge. “Goddammit. I told you to start tracking that thing on your phone. I’ve told you a hundred times. I don’t want surprises.”
“I know. You’re right, of course. I will. I’ll download the app today.”
“See that you do.”
He stands up, swaying a bit, and snatches his coffee mug off the counter. A drop of it sloshes onto the marble, but he doesn’t wipe it up, because Raymond Snyder has never wiped up a single drop of anything in his entire life. That’s whatwivesare for.
“I’m going to shower,” he announces, not like I’ve asked. “Don’t bother me.”
“I won’t.”
“And put on something that isn’t that godawful robe. You look like a skeleton in it.”
“Yes, darling.”
He shuffles out of the kitchen, muttering under his breath aboutfucking timinganduselessand a few other words I don’t bother parsing. I get the gist; they’re nothing I haven’t heard a thousand times before.
The second I hear the bedroom door shut down the hall, I let out a whistling, frightened breath.
My hand finally, finally drifts down to my belly. Just for a second. Just one little stolen second.
While it’s secret.
While it’s safe.
So, just in case there was any doubt left to sort through, it is now clear that Matvei wasn’t bluffing. Every single thing he told me last night in that closet is real, and all of it is happening.
For no real reason in particular, my mind floats back to the first time Raymond hit me. It was a month into our marriage and I’d burned a roast. He came home, smelled the char from the foyer, and swept into the kitchen and slapped me so hard I bit my own tongue and started bleeding all over the tile floor.
Then he told me to clean myself up and we went out for sushi. He held my hand across the table and told me he loved me and that he was sorry and it would never happen again.
I have not, until this exact moment, allowed myself to fully reckon with what he really is. I’d always known he was a badman—no, scratch that, anevilone—but even I wouldn’t have nightmared quitethishard.
