Max glanced at her from over his shoulder, one dark, questioning brow perfectly arched over an intelligent set of sparkling blue eyes. “Do you know the strength it would take to actually kill me with that cleaver? I’m not sure you have it in you, Alice.” His chin nodded in the direction of the weapon that now lay useless on the floor. “Pick that up, would you? It needs to be washed, as well.”
She hated him for everything he’d already done to Delilah and her, but hated him more for the casual tone in which he spoke. As if he hadn’t just dragged her across the floor by her hair, or worse, the despicable violence he’d committed against a person she loved simply because she’d dared challenge him. A shiver ran up her spine and she imagined the same bruises that dotted her sister’s skin running a constellation of pain up her own until she was just as beaten and marked, marred by the large, strong hands of a man that had no concern for the devastation that remained in his wake.
When he glanced at her again, a smirk pulling at the corner of his sculpted lips, she bent over to retrieve the cleaver and walked it around the island to stand next to him at the sink. He plucked the weapon from her fingers and sunk it down into the soapy water before handing her a dishtowel to dry the unbroken plate he handed her next.
When they’d settled into a routine of washing, rinsing and drying the dishes and cookware, Alice thought she would scream if for nothing else but to break up the cruel silence that wrapped them both like a suffocating shroud.
“A lot of people think it’s easy to stab someone either in the chest or back, possibly the face or neck, and cause them to die from bleeding out.”
He spoke like he was discussing something as mundane as the weather, or a movie he’d seen on a lazy Friday night. He didn’t bother looking at her, his gaze held steady on the task at hand, the dishes that needed to be cleaned and polished to a shine so that they appeased his need for a clean and tidy house. Glancing at the plate in her hand, Alice hated the reflection that stared back at her, the lifeless eyes of a woman who had so easily submitted while barely putting up a fight.
“But it’s not easy. It takes knowledge on where to stab if you hope to disable your opponent. And it takes strength to sink the blade deep enough so that it punctures a vital organ or damages a muscle in such a way that renders the limb useless. Even then, if your opponent is strong enough, or has a high pain tolerance, the single stab will only serve to piss him off, so you have to keeping stabbing, over and over again, until you’re covered in his blood, a spray of thick, hot liquid against your skin that’s enough to make any decent person vomit from having committed the act.”
He turned to her at that moment, his body dangerously close to hers, his hair brushing over his shoulder as he angled his head in question while mocking her with lazy and admiring eyes. Scanning her body, his liquid gaze started at her hips, settling on her breasts as they worked their way up until coming to lock with the terror behind her eyes. “Do you think you could do that, Alice? To me or anybody else that pisses you off?”
As if daring her to commit the act, he pulled the cleaver from the soapy water, washed it slowly until all traces of the meat he’d used it to cut were absent from the blade and handed it to her to rinse and dry to a perfect polish. The blade was heavy in her hand as she worked the towel over the surface, fear reflected back at her behind the darker blue color of her gaze rimmed red by tears that hadn’t stopped falling.
She shrugged before swallowing down the venomous knot of seething, jagged hatred that clogged her throat and cut off the air she needed to breathe into her lungs. “You said I was a fighter. What makes you think I couldn’t?”
“I never said you couldn’t,” he finally answered, his hand working slowly over a platter that he’d used to carry the food to the table. “I said you don’t have it in you, not unless you were pushed that far. However, in this house and in this particular situation, you’re powerless to do anything with that cleaver because you’d only end up killing yourself in the process.”
A shiver crawled along her spine nestling at the base of her neck, the hair standing on end where it settled. “You’d use the cleaver on me?” It was a hope she couldn’t allow herself to digest fully because too many other factors came into play. Namely, that if she died, what would happen to her sister?