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Drake
Thanks to that photo at the charity auction, and no doubt Wright helped supply them the details, the press had discovered the name of Mrs. Blackwell. They hadn’t gotten any details about her. Yet. It’d stay that way if I protected her from this city’s vultures.
Something my father could never do.
It seemed to me that Noriko didn’t appreciate my protection. She was like an insolent child trying to make things worse, demanding that she attend a public art class, wanting to make friends with people who wouldn’t think twice about selling her out to a reporter, giving Franco the slip in London and wandering the goddamn public gallery alone. My hands curled into fists when I thought of it. Thank God nothing had happened to her. This time.
She didn’t know what people were truly like. She hadn’t been burned enough. She continued to be obstinate, glaring at me as if I was trying to repress her. I was keeping her safe. Everything I did was for her own good. Couldn’t she see that?
No. Apparently she couldn’t.
She had to fucking test me.
That evening, Sam stuck her head into my office, even though I threatened to cut off the balls of anyone who dared disturb me. I’d been in tense board meetings all morning and barely had time to check my damn emails, let alone have lunch.
“Somebody better be dead or dying for you to risk coming in here,” I snapped.
She said nothing. The thin press of her lips told me something was very wrong.
She slid the newspaper in front of me and backed away.
My vision bled in from the corners. Here it was, my worst fucking nightmare.
I slammed open the doors to the dining room. My eyes zeroed in on Noriko sitting at the end of table. She leapt to her feet, almost knocking back her chair.
“What’s wrong?” her voice sounded fuzzy over the throbbing of blood through my skull.
What’s wrong? What’s fucking wrong? Her face grew pale as I approached her, newspaper crushed inside my fist. “I’d like for you to tell me why the fuck I’m looking at this.” I slammed the paper down on the table. I didn’t take my eyes off her. I didn’t need to see the photo of her betrayal again. It was burned into my retinas: Noriko standing in an intimate huddle with Jared fucking Wright at the London National Gallery, his lips near her face.
The headline, in large black font, screamed across the page the question that was on everybody’s wagging tongue right now, the question my office had already begun to field from a thousand sticky-beaked reporters:
Mrs. Blackwell’s Lover?
It has only been four months since the secret wedding of one of America’s most eligible bachelors, billionaire Drake Blackwell, to a mysterious beauty known only as Noriko. Our sources say that Mrs. Blackwell is already seeking comfort and companionship outside her suffocating marriage. Here she is, caught in a tender embrace with none other than Blackwell’s most fierce competitor, Jared Wright, billionaire and CEO of Wright and Sons. This reporter has to ask, is history repeating itself?
The whites appeared around Noriko’s irises, her mouth making an O as she lifted her face to me again. “Drake, it’s not what you—”
“Are you fucking him?”
She gasped so hard it sounded like she was choking. “How could you ask—?”
“Are you fucking him?”
“No. I didn’t even know he’d be there.”
Despite the chattering in my brain—whore, whore, slut, just like your mother—I believed her. Or maybe I just needed to believe her.
Noriko was too innocent, too naïve to have contrived a plan like this on purpose. How could she have even made contact with Jared to make plans to meet him; she had no phone.
She continued to ramble, “I tried to get away from him, I swear, Drake. He wouldn’t—”
“I told you it wasn’t safe,” I roared. This all could have been avoided if she had listened to me. “I told you to stay with Franco. But you deliberately went against my orders.” Frustration unleashed from me as I stomped towards her.
She backed away. “I didn’t know there’d be reporters—”
“It doesn’t have to be a fucking reporter. Anyone with a fucking camera phone can sell pictures of you. Anyone can twist anything you say into a story. I fucking told you they’re all vultures. Now they know. Now they have a juicy story to run with. Now they’ve got somewhere to dig. Oh yes, and dig, dig, dig they will, those little worms. They’ll dig and they’ll use whatever they find to try to tear me down.”
My private life was already fodder for the fucking papers, juicy morsels of my flesh to dress their bare-boned, pallid lives. Now her precious life had become carcass for those hyenas and I failed to protect her from it.
I could barely think as rage surrounded me. I didn’t even realize I’d grabbed her dinner plate and hurled it, smashing against the far wall. Noriko cowered away from the noise and the explosion of china, a scream coming out of her.
“Master Blackwell?” One of the staff, a younger, dark-skinned girl named Celeste, pushed through the dining room door. “Is everything alright?”
“You.” I turned my focus on Celeste, anger making my periphery fuzzy and dark. “Leave us. Tell everyone else to leave us.”
She just stood there like a fucking mute, looking at me, then at the remnants of the plate, then at Noriko, a story building behind her eyes.
“Get. OUT!”
She yelped as if I’d hit her and disappeared out the door.
“As for you…” I swung my body to face Noriko again. The mere sight of her made the black and white newspaper image superimpose across her face, Jared leaning into her space, his eyes hungry, his hand possessively on her arm. The whole image flickered like a broken cinema screen.
Noriko shrank back against the wall as I approached, her fear turning up the flame under my boiling rage.
She was my wife. She was supposed to be the one fucking person who’d trust me. The one fucking person who would respect my decisions because she knew I was doing it for her. Not because she feared me.
Was this what it’d take to make her obey me? Did I have to make her fear me like my staff feared me? Like my employees feared me? Did she need to fear me to obey me?
I rushed towards her, power surging through my body as I crowded her into the wall. I grabbed her, wanting to shake some sense into her.
“Don’t!” she cried, her voice pleading, so full of raw fear, shredding at my insides, dislodging a memory of my mother’s voice.
“Don’t, Pierson! Please.”
I stared at my monstrous hand, somehow now gripping her slender wrist, veins surging with blood under my skin. It didn’t look like my hand.
It looked…like his hand. Like my father’s hand.
Only then did I feel how fragile her bones were. Only then did I realize how hard I was gripping her. I could have crushed her forearm like a little mouse in my claws. The blood drained from my body.
“Noriko,” slipped from my mouth. My fingers stretched open, stiff as an unoiled hinge. She curled away from me, cradling her arm with her hand.
Shit. Shit, shit, shit.
“Look at me.”
She wouldn’t.
My eyes kept drawing to the glimpse of my red finger marks between her pale fingers, a glowing accusation around her wrist.
This wasn’t my fault. It wasn’t. I had to make her understand. I was trying to protect her. I failed. That’s why I was angry.
I wrapped my arms around her, grabbing at her even as she slipped through my fingers like a wraith. “Noriko, please, I would never hurt you. I love you.” She had to believe me. Of course she believed me. “I’m not like my…” I caught sight of my reflection in one of the dining room mirrors. His face, Pierson Blackwell, flashed in front of mine, making me wince. I buried my face in her hair, smelling fresh like the sea and sweet like hibiscus. I tugged her wrist from her chest and pressed gentle kisses over the fading mark. See, all better. All better. “I’m not like that. You believe me, don’t you?”
“Of course I believe you,” she said, but her voice was quiet.
My hands traveled over her tiny body. So fragile. So breakable. If I could make love to her, she’d be close to me again. I needed to be close to her again.
My fingers slipped up under her skirt and I felt her flinch. It cut me right into my heart that she would react that way to my fingers.
“I need you.” I tilted her face to look at me and pleaded with her silently. Let me love you. Let me show your body all the sorry I couldn’t seem to make myself say.
She pressed her lips to mine in submission. Behind it I felt her flickering like a candle about to expire.