Chapter 2—What Love Cost Me.

Rebecca's POV

"Come, Rebecca. Come sit on my lap."

I sat down on his lap, in-between his legs. He held me by the waist, then stared into my eyes. "Have I ever told you you're the most beautiful woman I've ever seen?"

I blushed and shyly nodded my head.

"I'm the luckiest man on earth," he continued. "Since you came into my life, I've been a happy man."

Damon always had the right words.

For three months, he was everything he seemed to be at that table.

I remember the first time we were intimate, he looked at me like he was already home.

He was the first man I had ever been with. I carried that truth like a small, fragile bird in my hands before him—unsure, a little afraid whether it was safe to trust him with my body. "You don't have to do it right if you don't want to. We can wait," he said. He was willing to be patient, and right there, I knew I wanted it to be him, so I allowed him.

He moved as if my body had already told him everything in a language only he could hear. There was no fumbling, no awkwardness. Just his palm cupping my jaw, his thumb tracing my cheekbone, and waiting until my breath steadied before he went any further.

Soft.

That’s the word that rises every time. He was impossibly soft with his hands and with the slowness of each touch.

And because he was soft, I was brave. Being with him felt less like losing something and more like finally being allowed to exhale after holding my breath for years. That’s what intimacy was with him—not just skin, but safety. Not just pleasure, but peace.

I came home from the market after a twelve-hour shift. I had been carrying sacks of rice for a trader who paid me in leftovers, and my back had turned into one solid knot from my shoulders down to my waist. I didn't say anything. I never said anything. But I must have moved differently, winced when I reached for the cupboard, because he looked up from his phone and frowned.

"Come here," he said.

"I'm fine. I just need to rest, and I'll be okay."

"Rebecca. Come here."

I was still trying to protest when he walked up to me and found the base of my spine. He pressed in slowly, working each knot loose one by one, and I stood there with my eyes closed and my breath coming unsteady, and I could not remember the last time anyone had touched me like I was something worth taking care of.

"You work too hard," he said quietly. "You don't have to do that anymore. You know that, right? You're with me now."

I didn't know how to answer. So I just stood there and let him.

The small things piled up like bricks.

A plate of food appeared in front of me without me asking. A jacket draped over my shoulders when I shivered on the walk home. He remembered that I did not like okra soup after I mentioned it once and stopped cooking it. He left the light on in the hallway when he knew I would be coming home late so I would not walk into darkness.

Then there was the night my period came.

I doubled over on the couch, pressing my palms into my lower stomach, trying not to make a sound. I had learned long ago that complaining changed nothing. But he came out of the bedroom and saw me curled there, and without asking questions, He just sat down on the floor in front of me, pulled me forward until my back rested against the couch, and placed his warm palms flat on my belly.

"Breathe," he said.

"Damon, you don't have to— it's late. You should go and sleep."

"Breathe, Rebecca."

He rubbed slow circles into my stomach with the heels of his hands. The heat of his skin seeped through my shirt. The cramping eased and was now bearable. I leaned my head back and closed my eyes.

Tears slipped down my cheeks. Not from pain but from the shock of being cared for.

He wiped them with his thumb and held me against his chest.

The first crack came without warning.

He started hiding his phone.

It was small at first — just the way he turned the screen away when I walked into the room. Then he tilted his body so I could not see who he was texting. Then he left the room entirely when it rang, closed the bedroom door behind him, and lowered his voice to something I could not hear.

"Damon," I said one evening, "who keeps calling you?"

"Work."

"You never mentioned work calling this late before."

His head snapped toward me. His eyes went cold — colder than I had ever seen them. Then the cold vanished, replaced by a smile that did not reach his eyes.

"Stressful new project. You know how it is."

I nodded and smiled back. But something small and quiet curled up in my stomach and stayed there.

Then came the drinking.

It started with a beer after work. Then two. Then something harder, something that came in a brown bottle and made his voice louder and his patience thinner.

I learned to read the signs, from the way his sentences slurred at the edges, the way his hand landed too hard on the table when he set down a glass, the way he looked at me like I was a stranger who had wandered into his house.

"Come sit with me," he would say, patting the couch cushion.

And I would sit. And he would pull me close and run his fingers through my hair and tell me I was beautiful, that he was lucky, that he did not deserve me. And for a little while, I would believe him.

Then he started staying out late.

Eleven became midnight. Midnight became one. One became "don't wait up. I'll be late again tonight."

I lay in bed with the lights off and listened for his key in the door. Sometimes, he came home smelling of alcohol. Sometimes perfume — different scents, different women, each one a small knife between my ribs. Sometimes, he did not come home at all.

"Where were you?" I asked one morning when he stumbled through the door at sunrise.

"Out."

"With who?"

He stopped walking, turned and looked at me with bloodshot eyes and a smile that did not belong to the man who had rubbed my stomach on the couch.

"With who?" he repeated, mocking my voice. "Listen to you. Sounding like a wife."

"I just want to know—"

"You don't get to know." He stepped closer. "You live in my house. You eat my food. You sleep in my bed. And you want to ask me questions?"

I said nothing.

"That's what I thought." He walked past me into the bedroom and slammed the door.

I stood in the hallway and pressed my hand to my chest and felt the thing I had been pretending was not happening start to take shape.

He was changing. Or maybe he had always been this person, and I had just been too hungry for kindness to see it.

The first time he hit me, we were arguing about money.

He asked for everything I had saved from my market shifts, "just to hold onto, so you don't lose it" — and I hesitated. Just for a second. Just one second. Something I had never seen before flickered across his face, and then his hand moved so fast I did not track it.

One moment, I was standing in the kitchen doorway. The next, I was against the wall with the left side of my face on fire and my ears ringing, that I could not immediately work out what had happened.

He was on his knees beside me before I even found the floor properly.

"Baby. Baby, look at me. Look at me, I'm so sorry." Tears ran down his face — actual tears. "I lost my head. I swear to God I lost my head. You pushed me and I just... I'm sorry. That will never happen again. I promise you."

I touched my cheek. My fingers came away wet with blood from where my tooth had cut the inside of my mouth.

"Okay," I said. My voice came out completely steady, which surprised me.

"Say you forgive me. Please."

"I forgive you," I said.

I believed it would never happen again. Not because the apology was convincing. But because I had nowhere to go if it did.

The second time, there was no apology.

The third time, he explained why it was my fault.

After that, I stopped counting.

But I started watching. I learned his moods like weather — a certain flatness in his voice, a stillness in his body before the anger came. I learned to agree before he finished sentences, to disappear from rooms he was moving toward, and to make myself smaller and quieter and less there.

And with every forced smile, every swallowed response, every night I lay awake beside him and felt nothing but the cold distance where love used to be — something in me hardened. Disappointment so complete it felt like grief.

'This is who he is,' I started telling myself. 'This is who he has always been. You just did not want to see it.'

Then came the night he told me about the men.

"There's someone I need you to meet," he said, not looking up from his phone. "A friend. Just dinner. Keep him company."

"What kind of company?"

"Don't ask stupid questions."

"Damon, I don't want—"

"You don't want…" He cut me off, set his phone down, then looked at me with so much anger and coldness. "Let me ask you something. This flat, the food in that kitchen, the clothes on your back... who pays for all of that?"

"You do."

"Me." He nodded slowly. "I pulled you off the street. I gave you a life. I have never once asked you for anything." He tilted his head. "And now I ask you for one small thing and you sit there and tell me you don't want to."

"Damon—"

"Go," he said. His voice dropped to something very quiet. "And smile when you get there."

I went. I did what he said.

When I came back, he counted the money without looking at me, put it in his pocket, and made dinner. He acted like the evening had been completely ordinary. I sat at the table and ate and told myself, 'just this once. Just this once, and it will stop.'

It did not stop.

The second time, I cried in the bathroom afterward, pressing a towel to my mouth so he would not hear.

The third time, I did not cry at all. I just lay on the bed and stared at the ceiling, and felt something inside me fold up and close itself away.

Women came and went through the flat. He stopped hiding it. When I cried, he called me ungrateful. When I asked questions, he laughed. I stayed because the street was the only alternative, and I had already lived on the street, and I was not strong enough to go back.

But I started planning.

'One day,' I told myself. 'When I have enough, I will leave this place.'

He came home one night smelling of perfume that was not mine. He sat across from me at the kitchen table, folded his hands, and smiled.

"I have news for you," he said.

I waited. A part of me hoping that somehow, after everything, it would be something good.

"You're getting married."

I stared at him.

"I've arranged it. A powerful man. Old money. The contract is for five years. When it's done, you walk away set for life."

"You arranged a marriage," I asked. "For me?"

"Consider it a business deal. You go, you play the role, you come back rich. Simple."

"No." I shook my head. "No, Damon. I'm not doing that."

He looked at me for a long moment. Then he gave a slow, thin smile.

"You will," he said. "Go to sleep, Rebecca. We'll talk in the morning."

I could not sleep.

I lay in the dark, listening to him laugh on the phone in the next room, and I felt something shift.

'I am leaving. Not in the morning. Now.'