Chapter 170 CHAPTER 170
Domestic Violence
Tessa stared at the ceiling until the plaster blurred into a pale, forgiving sky. The room around her felt unreal, the soft drape of the curtains, the expensive rug, the photographs framed just so on the dresser, all of it seemed like props on a stage for a life she did not recognize as her own.
Her palms were damp; her breath came in shallow bursts. The weight settling on her chest wasn’t grief alone. It was bewilderment, a furious, hollowed out sort of sorrow that left her raw and trembling.
Chloe was dead.
She kept saying the words to herself in whispers, as if saying them louder would make them heavier, more permanent. Chloe — sharp tongued, reckless Chloe, the woman who had been her rival and, at times, the only person who had understood the reckless loneliness that lived beneath Tessa’s composed surface.
They had fought like cats. They had laughed like thieves. Ten years ago, Tessa might have called her a foe; last year she would have called her a friend. Now there was only the impossible, cold fact that Chloe would never text her again, never call her late at night for a laugh that curdled into tears, never show up on her bedroom door with a bottle and one too many secrets.
Tessa pressed her palms harder into her eyes, felt the sting of tears break free. There were so many images hammering behind her eyelids, Chloe’s crooked grin, the way the other woman had always tucked hair behind one ear when she was thinking, the merciless way she’d once said, “Don’t be pathetic, Tessa.” Those memories burned bright and useless.
She did not hear the first footsteps. She only registered the sound when a shadow crossed the doorway and a voice, sharp, urgent, impatient cut through the fog in her head.
“Get up,” Marcus snapped.
He had the look of a man who saw the world as an audience and himself as the lead. Tonight there was irritation in it, not the practiced charm. He stood framed in the doorway like an accusation. His jaw worked; his eyes were cold.
Tessa saw him now the way she had learned to see him when things mattered: not as the generous benefactor he portrayed in the press, but as the man who had decided her life was a performance and anything that did not advance the narrative was a failing.
“I told you not to make a scene,” he said, coming in and pulling the curtains tighter without asking. “We have people watching. The tabloids. The right optics.”
She stared at him. The words assaulted her. Tabloids. Optics. She did not know anymore where her life began and where everyone else’s show ended.
“You don’t understand,” she said. Her voice had dried to a rasp. “She’s dead, Marcus. She was my best friend at a time. She was carrying your grand child.”
Marcus’s expression hardened, a flicker of annoyance creasing his forehead. “We will mourn privately,” he said, as if that explained the small, necessary cruelty he was about to inflict. “You have obligations, Tessa. Tonight, we go out. We perform. The world expects you to be unbothered. To be fine.”
His tone should have felt absurd, a grotesque parody; instead it felt like a hand tightening around her throat.
“I’m not performing,” she said, because it was the truth and the truth had nowhere else to go. “I’m broken.”
He took a step closer. “You’re overdramatic,” he snapped. Then he raised his hand.
Even in that moment, there was a surreal slowness to what happened next. The slap landed with a sound that was too loud for the room. Tessa’s cheek burned; hot, furious lines bloomed across her skin. The rush of humiliation that followed was a separate, cruel thing, the sudden awareness that what happened behind closed doors could be as public as the life they curated. She tasted copper on her tongue, the scent of fear sharp and immediate.
“You ungrateful…” Marcus began, but Tessa didn’t wait for the litany. She had imagined fights; she had nightmares of this exact cruelty. But being screamed at, belittled, struck, there was a particular animal terror to it that swallowed words whole. She had been trained in etiquette and in silence; she had practiced the right smiles and the right regrets. But no tutorial prepared her for the way breath was knocked from the body by a man you’d been told to trust.
“Stop,” she whispered, though the word was fragile. It did not stop him.
Marcus’s hand came again. This time his movements were faster, angrier, less controlled. He wanted to hurt something he could claim. He wanted to erase a week’s worth of inconvenient headlines with a public gesture that reminded everyone, including her, where the power lay.
Her scream tore out of her like a jagged thing. It was raw and animal and real; it lodged in the rafters and refused to be silenced. She slammed onto the bed, pressing her palms to her face as if she could push the world back out through skin.
Outside the bedroom door something shifted, hurried footsteps, a voice in shock. Ayisha’s name snapped into Tessa’s mind like a rope thrown in the dark.
Ayisha had been a fixture in the household for a scant few months, a woman with quick hands and a quicker laugh who kept to herself except for the rare, candid conversations in the kitchen when no one else was listening.
There was a softness in her that made Tessa inexplicably unguarded. Tonight Ayisha must have heard the scream because she burst into the room with the kind of speed that suggested she had abandoned reason for the raw force of instinct.
“What’s going on?” Ayisha demanded, breathless, eyes wide with fright and anger.
Marcus turned, chest heaving, eyes full of the red haze of a man who believed himself above consequence. He looked furious that his private fury had become public. “This is none of your business,” he snapped.
Ayisha’s gaze met Tessa’s, and for a moment Tessa saw something in it
that warmed the cold. “Get away from her,” Ayisha said.