Footsteps Read Free Page A

snug
ball, his blue stuffed dinosaur shoved tightly under his chin. The
room was illuminated by a domed nightlight, throwing a rotating,
glowing blue starscape onto the ceiling and walls. Even in sleep,
Trey’s world was in motion. Carlo bent down and kissed his tousled
blond head.
     
    He had to make his way and give his son a
life. It was just the two of them.

 
~ 2 ~
     
     
    Her torn gown discarded in a heap on the
bedroom floor, Sabina Alonzo-Auberon sat on the toilet in her
black-and-white marble bathroom and dabbed a wet washcloth over her
bleeding knees.
     
    She’d thought at first that something had
been broken or chipped. Her right knee complained bitterly when she
put weight on it, but sitting here on the toilet, the washcloth
bunched in her hand, she’d pushed around thoroughly, and it didn’t
feel worse than bruised. And bleeding.
     
    She was a strong woman. She told herself
every day that she was strong. But here she sat. On a toilet,
cleaning up new wounds delivered unto her by the man she’d once
loved. And there was no way out, as far as she could see. Not until
he was done with her.
     
    Why he wasn’t done with her, she had no
idea.
     
    “Here. Let me.”
     
    She jumped; she hadn’t heard James come in.
The insulation in this house was impeccable, and sound did not
carry from one room to another at all. But she had expected him to
be late, if he came home at all. He’d seemed to have found ample
distraction at the event tonight.
     
    That he was home so shortly after she was
boded ill for her, she thought.
     
    Wearing his pleated shirt and his pants, he
walked into her capacious bathroom and gently took the washcloth
from her hand. He tossed it into the sink and opened the mirrored
cabinet on the wall. He took out a bottle of rubbing alcohol and
then collected a few cotton balls from the jar on the counter.
Squatting before her, he smiled.
     
    He was a handsome man. Tall and lean,
compact muscle clinging to his frame. He was forty-five, with no
sign yet of grey in his auburn hair, and just enough creasing
around his eyes and between his brows to give his face gravitas.
His eyes were an arresting shade of green and had the remarkable
ability to transform from kind to terrifying with a blink.
     
    She’d fallen in love with and married the
kind eyes. She lived with the terrifying.
     
    Now, though, he smiled sweetly and turned up
those terrifying eyes, and she took a slow, deep breath as he
soaked a cotton ball in alcohol and pressed it against the open
wound of her right knee. The sting was sharp, was actual pain, but
she didn’t allow herself to flinch or even blink. She knew it would
be easier if she did. What he wanted was the flinch, the sign that
he’d had an impact. He would press the point until he got it. That
was the game he played.
     
    That was what tonight had been. She’d grown
used to his infidelity, and, in fact, she no longer cared. But he
had not, until tonight, made public spectacle of his contempt for
her. And his power over her. She had stopped reacting to his
degradation of her in ways that satisfied him, and so he’d pressed
the point until she’d reacted.
     
    But the second time she’d found him with his
hands up another woman’s dress tonight, she had been prepared, and
she had reacted in a way that hadn’t satisfied him, simply walking
away, leaving the theater. As a consequence, now she was sitting
here with bloody knees, being tortured by the harsh drag of
alcohol-soaked cotton over her abraded skin.
     
    She wondered what he might have done if her
Good Samaritan hadn’t interfered. Whatever it might have been, he
would have gotten away with it. No one ever interfered with
anything James Auberon did. He didn’t often make a public show of
his dark side, but when he did, people let him. For the same reason
that Sabina still lived with him, still wore the ten-carat canary
diamond on her left ring finger. Because the power he wielded was
vast, and his aim