Out of the Ashes (Marked as His Book 1) Read online

  “Pwetty face Mama,” the little voice called up from the floor beside her as she brushed just a hint of blush across her checks.

  “Aww, thank you baby,” she leaned down and kissed the smiling face, “but you’re still the prettiest!”

  The little girl accepted this compliment as her due and continued playing with her little puzzle, trying to fit the pegged farm animals into their correct slot.

  She was such a good little girl, always content to play with whatever she was handed as long as her Mommy was somewhere in sight.

  Felicity bit the side of her cheek, it was when she was out of sight that Catherine seemed to morph into another creature. A crying demon of a child who couldn’t be soothed no matter what.

  She hoped Timothy had booked their regular babysitter. She seemed to be making some progress with Catherine. Felicity didn’t feel quite so guilty when she left her with Seanna, knowing the woman would work her Jamaican magic on the child, the soft lilt of her accented voice soothing even the adults in the room.

  But she hadn’t asked because she hadn’t want to question him again. Nor did she know where she was going or how late she’d be out.

  That was a small price to pay to keep him from exploding. And it wasn’t something new. She was always in the dark on one thing or another because she was too scared to ask him questions.

  She stood and did a final check in the mirror. Everything looked acceptable. She mentally checked off things that might trigger him and found herself fault free…. unless he found something new to have a problem with.

  “How does mama look,” she asked the small form happily playing on the floor, “Will I pass inspection?” The baby babbled at her, not forming any comprehensible words.

  Felicity took it as approval and scooped her up, planting a kiss on her cheek, before heading back downstairs to see if she really could pass muster.

  As soon as her foot hit the last step her heart sank. A woman who wasn’t Seanna stood by the door, bag in hand, smiling up at her husband. Her wrinkled face and brightly flowered dress gave her a kindly cheerful glow. She looked like everyone’s grandma right down to the curled and styled snowy white hair.

  Felicity plastered a smile on even as her heart quivered in her chest. Catherine was going to have a bad night and it was going to be her fault. She wasn’t even woman enough to stand up to Timothy about leaving her baby with someone other than Seanna. She wanted to cry. She had to choose between knowing that her baby was going to cry herself hoarse the entire time she was gone and knowing without a shadow of a doubt that if she balked at going out he was going to beat her. Possibly bad enough to send to her to the hospital again. Then her precious baby would be left with him until she got home. All alone with him.

  “She’ll be fine Mama, you watch and see, we’re going to have a right good time.”

  Her brain had gone into panic mode and she’d missed the introductions, but now the woman was smiling brightly in her face and assuring her everything was going to be alright.

  But everything was not going to be alright, if Tim was involved, it never was.

  “My, you two are home early!” the elderly babysitter proclaimed from the couch where she rubbed her hand on a sleeping Catharine’s back.

  “Did she give you any trouble,” Felicity asked quietly.

  “I wouldn’t call it trouble. But the poor dear, cried herself to sleep not long after you two left. Wouldn’t have a thing to do with me.”

  Felicity saw that Catherine still had the snubs even as she slept, but thanked God she was asleep anyway, she knew what was coming next was going to be ugly, and she didn’t want her little girl to have to see any of it.

  She glanced at her husband out of the corner of her eye, he was smiling but she could see the ripple of rage below the surface, “I’ll just grab her and put her in her bed while you pay Mrs…” she let the sentence trail off. She couldn’t even remember the woman’s name.

  “Randle dear, and I hardly feel like you owe me at all. I was barely even here.”

  “Nonsense, of course you’ll get the entire fee for the trouble of coming out here and we are….” His words trailed off as she climbed the steps and she lost them completely as she entered the nursery.

  Such a happy room. She’d decorated it with such love even through the hopelessness she’d felt during her pregnancy.

  She laid her sweet baby in the crib that was beginning to be too small and brushed the locks of rambunctious curls away from her brow.

  How she wished things were different. She wished Tim was a different man, the man she’d thought she was marrying. She wished she was a different woman, a woman strong enough to deal with a man like Tim.

  Some nights she lay in bed after everyone was asleep and imagined herself as that woman. A woman who demanded respect and demolished anyone who failed to give it to her. A woman like that wouldn’t live in fear of going downstairs, of leaving the false comfort of a nursery.

  But she wasn’t that woman and she was afraid. She wanted to look at Mrs. Randle, fear shining bright in her eyes, and plead, “Don’t leave us here with him.”

  But she didn’t, and she wouldn’t. She wasn’t even brave enough to beg for help.

  So instead, she’d get what she deserved for not being a good enough actress to mask her worry.

  The fabric on her daughters back was soft and smooth as she rubbed her, soothing herself more than the sleeping baby. Everything about the soft smooth baby was in direct contrast with the emotions inside Felicity. She wiped the small cheek, smearing the remaining trail of wetness left by her tears.

  She took a deep breath, ready to leave the room, she couldn’t hide in this shelter forever.

  ***

  He had smiled at her, really smiled, like he had when they had been dating. And she’d wanted to smile back, but something inside her was broken and all she could manage was the usual mockery of happiness that normally danced across her face. He saw it and knew she was incapable of anything more and his happiness dimmed.

  She wondered if he knew it was him who had made her incapable or if he somehow blamed her for that too.

  She’d wanted to please him. If for no other reason than to make her life easier. She’d dressed right, had left her child without complaint, but she hadn’t smiled right and she knew the night wouldn’t get any better. They hadn’t even brought the appetizer before he was whisking her back out of the restaurant, tense hand holding her arm just a little too tight.

  He hadn’t said anything on the way home, cold eyes gripping the road. She hadn’t either. Where once she would have filled the car with chatter, trying to make things right, now there was only silence. She knew nothing she said was going to change anything.

  He was standing in the doorframe to the great room when she came down. Back to her, jacket off and thrown over the chair in foyer, he cut quite the figure.

  With the soft light coming out of the living room he could almost be a set up for a GQ photo shoot. But it wasn’t, because underneath that tailored vest and top of the line fabric, cruel cold violence was just waiting to burst free.

  He heard her footsteps and turned his head. “I guess I’ll go make my own dinner then.”

  “I can make it, what would you like?”

  He dropped his hand from the doorframe, “Don’t bother. You couldn’t muster enough energy to enjoy a night out, how can I expect you to find it in yourself to make your husband a meal?”

  “Really, I don’t mind,” Felicity said, following him down the hall. Her voice was dead, but then it always was, maybe she could try harder to pretend to be alive for him.

  “Just shut up and go to bed, or take a bath, or whatever it is you’d rather be doing than being with me.” She wished she could have just walked away and let him fix his own dinner and sit around being angry. But that’s how normal couples fought, she knew as soon as she went to do anything other than try to placate him he’d let his rage build until he came and got her and then i
t’d be even worse. No, better let him go ahead and get on with it. Get it over with.

  He entered the kitchen, unbuttoning his collar as he went, and that’s when she remembered. Her binder was in the cabinet, she hadn’t had time to move it. A new fear shivered up her spine.

  If he found it things were going to go from bad but normal to a whole new level of awful in moments.

  She had to do something.

  She rushed to him and put her hand on his shoulder. “Please Tim, let me. You’ve worked hard all day. I’m sorry I was distant at the restaurant, but my mind was on the baby. You know she doesn’t do well with anyone but Seanna.”

  He shrugged her hand off him, the muscles in his sharp jaw line working.

  “And anyway,” she put her hand back on his shoulder, this time running her hand down the taunt muscles in his arm until she was touching his hand, “Catherine is fast asleep now, I want to spend time with you.” She grabbed the fabric of his shirtfront and turned him around towards her so she could press up against him and look into his deep soulful eyes, the eyes that had seemed so full of love before they’d gotten married, the eyes that had deceived her.

  Please let him buy it, please let him buy it, she pleaded to a god she’d given up hope on. She hadn’t initiated sex since long before Catherine had been born, not since a time when she’d still held out hope for them.

  She saw the lust that always boiled under the anger take hold and wished she could make her body respond to it. But somewhere along the way that had died too. He let out a long deep breath, his eyes locked on hers, as he made up his mind. He’d have her first and then see how he felt after. She could almost see the thoughts forming in his might and she sent a silent thanks up to whoever was helping her out.

  His hand snaked up her back and he grabbed her hair in his fist, yanking her head back to expose her neck to his greedy mouth.

  She closed her eyes against the tears she knew would come.

  ***

  “What is this?” his quiet voice chilling in its softness.

  “What,” she asked, coming completely awake in an instant and taking stock of her surroundings. They’d made love, if that’s what you call the brutal joining that always seemed to happen between them, in the kitchen, in the foyer, and in the great room before she’d finally fallen asleep on the couch, exhausted by the physical act and by the emotional drain.

  “This, Felicity,” he threw the binder into her lap and everything on earth stood still.

  She couldn’t breathe.

  “Oh nothing to say?” the binder lay open across her naked legs, she stared down at her neat squared handwriting, that spelled out in painful detail everything she had been planning to do.

  Everything she wouldn’t be able to do now. He picked the binder up off her lap.

  “New names, new bank accounts, a new address… and in Idaho, I never would have guessed that one Felicity, good job.” He pulled page after page of out of the binder and she watched as everything she’d hoped for fell to the ground in ashes.

  “And here I was happy for the first time in months. Happy Felicity, all because you put your hand on mine, because you looked at me like you used to, before you became this dead thing that slinks around the house day in and day out, doing nothing but shoveling food into our child’s mouth. Because I thought that maybe I was finally getting you back. And then what happens? I go to make us something to eat and I find a binder where the pans should be. Imagine that. And what is it full of? Plans to leave me and kidnap my child at the same time.”

  “I… ” she tried to speak but her mouth was dry, the ashes of her and her child’s future choking her.

  “You what?” his hard face was right in front of her, rage practically pouring off of him.

  She swallowed, “I’m sorry.”

  He stood back and smiled a sideways grin, “Oh yes, I know. And if you aren’t now, you will be soon.”

  Timothy used the binder and all his strength to slap Felicity across the face. She felt herself lift off the floor and knew in the instant before she hit the floor that this time wasn’t going to be like the others. This time she might not get back up.

  Two Years Later

  A tiny bell rang overhead as Fern walked into the shop on a little side street. It was on a little out of the way side street in a bad area of town. But she liked being in places that were out of the way and the side street wasn’t far from her apartment, which was how she’d noticed it.

  It somehow stuck out from its surroundings. Sure, a tattoo shop should fit right in with the rough and ready crowd that hung around the area, but something was different about this little shop. She could tell it, just from the sign outside. And the windows.

  She couldn’t think of the word she wanted to describe it, but it looked like someone cared about it. The windows were clean and freshly painted with the shop name and the store hours, even the front of the store was clean, like the sidewalk had been freshly swept, while trash collected in all the corners around the other shops on the street.

  Even as nice as the store looked from the outside, she was still nervous. She’d never even thought about getting a tattoo before. It was something so out of character that when the thought had first crossed her mind she’d immediately dismissed it. She’d never get to see the inside of the intriguing shop she walked by every day because she wasn’t the kind of girl who got tattoos. And that was exactly the reason she changed her mind.

  It had taken weeks of screwing up enough courage to even walk in, who knows how long it’d be before she could actually go through with having ink permanently embedded in her skin.

  She shivered at the thought of it. But that was ok, today she was just here to look around and get some prices. She was on a really strict budget, so maybe she could use that as an excuse with herself to put it off even longer.

  But all the thoughts and fears went by the wayside as soon as she entered because what she found inside was anything but what she had expected. In fact she wasn’t sure what she’d expected, but this definitely wasn’t it.

  The place was artistically lit, lamps highlighting dramatic hand drawn tattoo art on the walls, a red leather couch and love seat tucked tastefully into a corner area where two burly men sat looking at her with curious eyes.

  She automatically looked down, she was shy and this wasn’t somewhere she felt comfortable, but she forced herself to look up again and she met the eyes of one of the men and nodded. She just had to keep training herself and one day it wouldn’t be so hard to be this new person she’d made for herself.

  “Hiya sugar,” a little woman came from behind a small swinging door, her face bright and crinkled with a smile. She was wearing a little spaghetti strap dress that seemed a little odd on someone her age, until you took into account that her body was covered by the most gorgeous tattoos Fern had ever seen. Surely someone covered in such elegant and delicate art wouldn’t want to cover it no matter their age. “How can I help you today?” she asked, not seeming to mind Fern’s obvious staring.

  “Hey, um, I came to talk to someone about maybe getting a tattoo and you came highly recommended.” Well, she had googled the name of the shop and all of the reviews seemed to be highly complementary. There had even been a few pictures past customers had posted that seemed like above average work from Fern’s inexperienced layman’s point of view.

  The little woman laughed, “Oh no honey, I don’t do the tattoos, I just do the books. You’re looking for Dax or Joker, but they’re both with clients right now. Have a seat and you can wait on one of them to finish. Shouldn’t be too much longer now.”

  Fern looked over at the two leather clad men already taking up most of the room on the furniture and decided that she’d rather stand and look at some of the artwork.

  The woman gave her a knowing grin and went to a little counter that must hold their appointment books and fished out a few binders.

  “Here shugs, you can look at some work they’ve already done. Thi
s here is Joker’s book, this one’s Dax’s, and here’s Sandy’s; but she’s not here today.” She produced two more binders and laid them on the counter for Fern to flip through.

  It was all very good, not your average heart and scroll with the word ‘Mom’ on it. These paintings were something other. Fern wasn’t an artist, nor had she ever been into the art scene but she knew the work she was looking at was way above average. In fact she bet the artist could make a fortune selling prints if he wanted.

  “Wow,” she said to herself as she flipped the page over to a wildlife scene that seemed to be done with watercolors, even though the opposite page clearly showed it emblazoned over a woman’s arm and shoulder, the bright smile on her face indicating how pleased she was with the work.

  The older woman leaned over to see what had elicited the exclamation from Fern and nodded, “Yeah, that was a really good one. Hey if you liked that one check this out.”

  She flipped open one of the other binders and laid it in front of her. It was a sailboat on an ocean backlit by a sinking sun, except it was almost as if the tattoo artist had used a wide brush to paint, leaving a distinctive stroke in his wake, like a classic impressionist would.

  Fern was deeply impressed. “That is amazing, I didn’t know you could get tattoos like that.”

  The older lady beamed, “You can’t get something like that everywhere.”

  Fern smiled at the pride the woman took in the good work done by her place of employment. She obviously loved it here, and thought a lot of the tattoo artists.

  “Have you been working here a long time?” Fern asked.

  “Since it opened,” the woman replied. Again, Fern was struck by the pride in the woman’s voice when she talked about it. Fern wasn’t sure she’d felt that kind of pride about anything, except her daughter, but certainly nothing she’d ever worked on.

  “That’s really nice, what’s your name by the way? Mine is Fern.”