CHAPTER 148: TRAGEDY AFTER EUPHORIA

–Damon–

I had reserved the entire cinema for us — every plush seat, every beam of light, the hum of the projector, all of it hush and private. A 3D showing, because small theatrics suited me; because she looked impossibly fragile in those sunglasses, and because I liked watching the way light tried to steal itself across her face. I slipped the sunglasses on her, took her hand, and waited for the darkness to swallow us.

"This hasn’t been shown in the whole country," I said, keeping my voice low, the kind of voice I use when I want the world to feel a hair’s breadth away.

"Are you terrified?" she asked.

"I’m not." I let out a chuckle. I tried to make it casual. The truth: horror films made my skin crawl. Reality was where I kept my calm. Reality was where I did my worst work. But tonight — tonight I wanted to be ordinary. Tonight I wanted popcorn, childish jump scares, and her hand in mine.

"Let’s just cancel this," she muttered suddenly, voice tiny and unexpected.

"No. We can’t. It’s our first movie together," I replied, and heard the ridiculousness of it even as I said it. Our first movie together, after everything, felt like some small victory I could pin to my chest.

"Fine," she said coldly, pulling her hand away in a practiced motion. I would not let her. My fingers closed over hers. She stayed still. I forced my attention forward as the opening credits crawled and shadows on the screen began to move.

The film lived up to its purpose: cheap scares, loud stings. In five minutes, it assaulted us with more jump-scares than a dozen midnight tales. I leaned forward in the chair, half-enjoying, half-distracted, until I realized my wife — my beautiful, impossible wife — had drifted off. Fast asleep, eyelashes casting little soft shadows under those sunglasses.

"Oh, damn. This bores you," I said aloud, dropping the act. It wasn’t scary at all. Not really. Real fear didn’t come from a screen. Real fear came from a throat you could choke.

I watched the movie and kept my hand on her as if that could anchor something in the middle of my chest. That’s when I noticed a figure approaching — quiet, measured, a shadow slipping into the aisle behind us. He sat, then reached forward, extending an envelope. With my left hand — my right was still entangled with hers — I accepted it. He laid the envelope in my palm and retreated, vanishing as if he had never been there.

My fingers brushed paper. I glanced at Livana; the sunglasses hid her face, but the rhythm of her breathing told me she was still asleep. I slid my thumb under the flap and took the single sheet inside. I did not open it. Not yet. Instead, I let the film do its work while I watched it for different reasons: for the movement of the screenlight across her lips, the line of her jaw softened in sleep, the faint caret of worry that always lived somewhere near my ribcage.

Soon enough, the lights came up for us. I reached for her sunglasses and pulled them away gently. Her eyes opened slowly, like someone surfacing from warm water.

She got startled — sharp, instinctive — the kind of sound that is half-surprise, half-lost memory. It’s probably the sound since she couldn’t see it all. I grinned and moved closer, tasting the edges of the moment. I kissed her, at first softly; then deeper. Those lips had been a map I had memorized long ago, a map I still loved to get lost in. I bit her lower lip gently, then parted it with my teeth. Thirteen years ago, I’d dreamed of this — that first mouth-to-mouth in that pool, the water a cold ribbon around us, Tyrona’s stupid face floating in the periphery of my memory. A ruined memory, but redemption had a funny way of dressing itself in ordinary places.

"I’m—" I whispered, then smiled crookedly. "I’m horny right now."

"You can’t be horny in a horror movie," she protested, placing a playful push against my chest.

"Then I’ll tell them to play that erotic film instead," I suggested with a grin. She rolled her eyes, scoffed, and the sound made my heart twist because it was hers — low and unique.

"Let’s just go home."

"Alright," I agreed. "Maybe after my man down there is calm?"

She scoffed at me as I grinned.

After a few inspections of the photographs, I slid the envelope into my inside pocket. I had the photographs from one of my men, Dela Vega, with a cluster of senators in a secluded restaurant, trying to disguise their faces but failing at secrecy. Men who thought power could be purchased with cheap disguises. I found the code scrawled on the edge of one photo and typed it into my phone; a live conversation from one of Tyrona’s men bloomed onto the screen. Livana was still, distant, and lovely. I tucked the evidence away. There would be time for retaliation later, for the real fun. Right now, I have my wife.

We walked out into the lobby and into the flood of light. I noticed someone snapping photos of us from a distance — likely to be used for social media. The thought was poisonous. Livana liked to be invisible; fame, wanted or otherwise, found her peculiar like a moth finds light. My bodyguards moved on the photographer like wolves; the ring of my protection narrowed so fast it left the air in the corridor smelling like cheap perfume and gasoline.

We made our way to the parking lot and collided — literally — with Tyrona, who looked ridiculous pushing a trolley as if she were auditioning for some frivolous market drama. She waved like she’d just stumbled into a family reunion.

"Hey, Damon." Cheerful. Annoying. Predictable.

I glanced down at Livana, waiting for the flare of jealousy I loved to stoke. I wanted to see that tiny sting in her, that soft, possessive glow she kept for me. She only smiled, innocent and unreadable.

"Is it Tyrona?" Livana asked, already turning.

"It is," I said, and guided her gently to face her. The world narrowed to the three of us — me, her, Tyrona — and I savored that focus.

"Well, Tyrona. Long time no hear from you," I said, politeness and poison braided together.

Tyrona scoffed. "Oh, please. Livana. I know you can see. Stop the act."

Livana laughed — not the small laugh she used for friends, but a villainous, delicate thing that always made my blood beat faster. Damn her. She was devastating.

"If I can see, I would surely enjoy your pitiful face," Livana said, voice slipping into that wicked sweetness she kept as an occasional weapon. She stepped closer to Tyrona like she’d chosen a very pretty blade and was about to use it.

Tyrona took two steps in. "I’m not that pitiful, Livana. You are. Living in a marriage you don’t want."

"Who said I don’t want it?" Livana’s smile sliced. "I have the man you always wanted." She closed the distance and let the words hang. "He worships me every day and night. You know what I mean. He never fails to give me an orgasm. Let’s just say I enjoy his way of pampering me."

I took deep, private pleasure in watching Tyrona’s armor crack and in the way the word "orgasm" made the air between us smell like heat. My grin felt like something obscene and holy all at once. Livana’s words were a soft sting on my pride; she knew how to wound them with comfort.

"Well, good luck, Tyrona." I pulled Livana closer by the waist and kissed the crown of her head the way a man kisses something he intends never to lose. The motion was public, possessive; the kind that announces ownership without asking permission.

I led her to our car and helped her in. When I glanced back at Tyrona, I shrugged the smallest shrug I could manage.

"Sorry, Tyrona. You failed to make my wife jealous. Be better next time. I always want to see my wife’s jealous face." The barbed joke hung in the humid night. Tyrona cursed and stomped away like a woman who expected a kingdom and found only the weather.

"What’s taking you so long?" Livana asked from inside the car.

"I just chatted with an old ghost," I lied, settling into the driver’s seat and turning the key. She hummed, dismissive, and I reached for her hand, pressing it with my lips. We eased into the road and out of the theater complex. The drive back to the Blackwell residence was long enough to let the city breathe around us and short enough that I could plan everything that might go wrong in the span of one lane change.

"Liva," I called after twenty minutes of silence that had an odd softness to it.

"Yes?"

"Do you mean it? Do you enjoy your time with me?"

"Yes." She sighed — such a small, honest sound — and it sent me spinning, unmoored. I calmed myself with a thought I returned to like prayer: she belonged to me. I loved her so furiously it felt like a physical thing.

"How about we make love somewhere isolated?" I asked with a grin. "It’ll be fun."

"Shut up and just drive back home," she said, a command I was more than willing to obey.

I kept us under sixty kph. Safety had become a ritual. I stole glances at her while keeping the road. The world outside slid like a dark ribbon, everything a smear of neon and streetlight. Then — in a beat that felt not unlike falling — something flashed at my peripheral vision. A vehicle collided into our side with a violence that rearranged the world.

I hit the brakes hard. The steering wheel took the shock. For a moment, everything was an orchestra of shrieking metal, then glass. My heart tried to break out of my chest. I turned the wheel, the car gyrating, and looked over at her.

"Liva!" I shouted. The car in front of us — the one that had struck us — revved and its headlights stabbed straight into my eyes. My head felt full of cotton, and my mouth tasted like pennies.

"Baby, talk to me." My voice was small in my ears, unrecognizable as my own. She lifted her hand to her head, hair falling like a veil. Her fingers fumbled, then curled.

"Fuck," she muttered. "Kill whoever that bastard is."

"No," I said quickly, the urge to rip the offending driver from his vehicle flaring hot and animal. "We must escape."

"KILL THAT BASTARD!" she screamed, voice raw now, raw with something I had always found intoxicating — a threat, a challenge. Her eyes were wide, the pupils blown. Blood — fresh and bright — had begun to bead at the corner of her mouth where her lip had split. The sight was a blade in my chest. I wanted nothing more than to oblige, to find the bastard and let him understand what it meant to touch what belonged to me.

But there were reasons — reasons written in the lines of my mind, reasons I had not told her and would not — why violence in the moment could cost us everything. My men thundered on motorcycles outside, a cavalcade that could have split the night into two.

Survival, tonight, was pragmatism.

I drove.

"The nearest hospital," I told myself, to my men, to the kids who might be listening. "Get us to the medical people."

Motorbikes with red-and-blue lights began to wail — four of them, then more, surrounding us with a siren chorus that made the car vibrate. My skin prickled. The array of flashing lights looked like teeth. "Liva!" I shouted again, but she did not answer. Her chest rose and fell in the shallow, quick rhythm of someone caught between consciousness and the dark.

My heart — I cannot prevent the confession — began to tear. I felt as if my ribs were being tenderized by the beat of it. The car’s heater hummed, the radio fuzzed out a pop song into a world that had no place for it. I kept scanning her face while keeping two hands on the wheel. Her eyelids fluttered once, then again. Blood smeared the corner of her lips, and then, as I looked, her eyes rolled upward, and she slipped away.

I said her name like an incantation. I have never been a man with much use for prayers, but I said it anyway. I shouldn’t have to admit how small I felt in that cab of metal, how utterly helpless I was when the person I loved most in the world could not answer me. All the strategies, the men, the contingency plans — they mattered less than the tremor in her hand.

"Stay with me," I commanded — not a plea, an order. I would always be the man who barked commands; it was easier than letting fear in. She did not respond. Her fingers brushed mine — faint, like a whisper of lace. I closed my hand around it like I might hold her to life.