The Mafia Wife's Revenge novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Milk

Damian tries to force a cup of poisoned milk on her to help his mistress; Helena knocks it out of his hand and speaks aloud.

When the pen began Camilla's name, I flung it across the room.

It hit the study wall and rolled under the desk.

I pressed the braille slate against my knee and wrote my answer in front of him.

"I won't sign."

Damian frowned and wrote back in my palm.

"What's wrong, baby?"

I wrote, "I don't want it."

Six years ago I came to New York with one suitcase and a sketchbook.

I had worked nights in a fabric warehouse and slept on a friend's floor.

Every dress with my name on it, I had earned with my own hands.

Now my husband wanted me to hand all of it to the woman who had killed my mother.

His patience wore thin, and I watched it happen.

I watched it with the one eye he thought was dead.

"I only want you safe," he wrote, slowly, so I would feel each dot. "You can't see. You can't hear. Someone could take advantage of you."

He was lying again, and he wrote it as tenderly as ever.

For three years his fingers had been my entire world.

On the day he told me I had won the trial, I had decided I would love him until I died.

He had stolen that day from me and given me a lie to keep.

His phone rang.

He glanced at the screen, and his face went hard.

He answered on speaker, because to him I was a wall.

It was Camilla, and she was sobbing.

"Damian, please. Please come get me. He's going to kill me this time."

Behind her a man bellowed, and something shattered against a wall.

"Two years!" the man shouted. "I gave you two years to get a woman pregnant for your brother, and you came back with nothing!"

"Your brother can't help how he was born, and you're too useless to help him!"

Camilla screamed.

Damian's jaw locked.

"Damian," she cried. "Helena can't see or hear. Just give me one night, just one."

My husband closed his eyes.

"Okay," he said.

That single word went through me.

I turned for the door.

Damian caught my wrist and dragged me back against his chest.

"Don't be afraid," he wrote on my palm with his free hand, fast and rough. "You've always wanted a baby. Tonight I'll give you one."

He pulled me toward the bedroom.

I braced my heel against the doorframe and he lifted me and kept walking.

Ten minutes later the front door opened.

Camilla came in with her face wet and her makeup perfect.

She did not look like a woman who had just been beaten.

"My father's coming with my brother," she said, soft and quick, to Damian. "They'll be here in twenty minutes."

"Thank you for this, Damian. Really."

She dug in her purse and held up a small pill bottle.

"Ovulation pills. Put them in her drink. By midnight she'll be ready."

"Ready for what?" I wanted to scream.

I knew exactly what.

Helena Ashworth, three years in the dark, was going to be handed to a stranger so a man could get a grandchild.

Damian shook the pills into a glass and poured warm milk over them.

He put the glass against my lips.

Then he pressed a note into my palm, in the same kind hand he had used for three years.

"Milk, honey. Drink it while it's warm. It's good for you."

He was lying again.

He had forgotten the one thing about me that he used to know by heart.

I cannot drink milk.

When I was six, one sip closed my throat, and my mother ran with me in her arms to the ER.

I shook my head hard.

Damian paid no attention.

He pinched my chin and tilted the glass.

Camilla stood at his shoulder, watching me with bright, hungry eyes.

The cold rim hit my teeth, and the white liquid slid toward my tongue.

"Stop it!"

The voice that tore out of my throat was a rasp, rough and cracked from three years of silence.

I swung my arm and knocked the glass out of his hand.

It broke against the floor, and milk ran across the tiles and over Camilla's white shoes.

"Did you two think you could keep this up for the rest of my life?"

Nobody moved.

Damian's hand was still in the air, shaped around a glass that was not there.

He shoved Camilla behind him without thinking.

They both stared at me with their mouths open.

"Helena?" Damian said.

His voice cracked.

"You can speak? You can see? You can hear me?"

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