Bschoen515 You're safe and thank you for braving life and limb to let me know how my work is received. I don't want anyone to feel like I can't take constructive criticism, I can and I welcome it because I get better. I write to elicit emotions from readers so telling me you like this or hate about a story is quite alright too. What isn't alright is flagrant disrespect and bigotry.

Eric

Chapter Twenty-One

"I wish you would tell me why you're unhappy," Pam said, rubbing my face gently.

I smiled at her and leaned into her touch but said nothing. To think she had a string of lovers believing that she was a self-centered asshole. She was actually quite perceptive when she wanted to be. It just wasn't often.

"Maybe if you drink," she said offering her wrist.

I kissed the offered site, but placed her arm by her side. "If I'm not mistaken you told me marriage means being miserable half the time," I teased.

She scoffed, moved my papers off my lap, and rested her head there instead. She began talking about a redevelopment plan she had for an area not far from her office buildings in Montreal. I ran my fingers through her hair and let that comfort me as we flew into LaGuardia together. While she was happy to take half of my major bank under her holdings, she wasn't going to do the paperwork associated with it. I needed her to sign off on some papers and that had to be done in person. This was part of the reason I'd been with her more over the past week. The other was to avoid my wife or what was left of her.

Learning of Sookie's infidelity was a testament to the disease of the human condition that some vampires occasionally suffered. I told myself what I felt was transference and displacement. I'd simply substituted her personality for a lack of excitement. I'd taken a desire for something non- monotonous and transferred it onto the first semi-interesting thing I saw. This just so happened to be my wife.

If only I'd had some damn perspective, I would know that stubborn irrational women weren't so rare. I told myself this. I told myself I didn't care. Even as the thought formed I didn't really believe it; but for some reason, I'd put doing something that sordid as beneath her. It didn't occur to me how ridiculous such a thought was until my idealization of her character had been ripped away. I was a fool.

I'd punished Sookie for her for the slight, severely. Since then I'd been living with a ghost of the woman who had awakened my passions. I'd turned her into something I did not recognize. She lived in terror of me. She said nothing other than what she thought I wanted to hear. True to her words, she didn't talk back or leave the house. Acting out was a thing of the past. She didn't cry anymore either. She didn't do anything.

No matter her trespasses against me, it had never been my aim to break her, yet this was how she looked. She looked empty, void, and so very shattered. Batanya had been the one to open the envelope that contained proof of her infidelity. She had cleared the mansion, faced me, and braced for the day we had both feared.

My bodyguard felt nothing; her neck didn't sting. It wasn't anger that fueled what I had done to Sookie's lover. It had been pain. She'd dealt me a blow I would have never thought could come from the heart alone. I just wanted her to want me even if only a little. I wanted her to want me. I loved her, I thought I did. It was an obsessed and broken kind of infatuation but it was all a creature like me was capable of. My adoration of her had fueled everything I'd been doing for months. We had fought less and I thought that she was getting used to me as her husband. I'd placed my nebulous hopes on that being the start of something different and it had blown up in my face.

My pain had been her only objective from be the beginning. She'd betrayed my trust. She lied. She had violated the terms of our union. What was worse? I'd denied myself the solace that the tiger's death would have brought. I did it for a woman who didn't love me, want me, or even like me. Learning of her affair had hurt but continuing to watch her suffer was unbearable.

Every lash her lover suffered she bore the scars in her heart while his had been washed away. I had no intention of forcing her into giving me her body or gaining a child but this was a compromise that allowed me to save face and end her pain. That was all I wanted. I wanted it more than I wanted Quinn dead. I wanted it more than I wanted her to want me.

John Quinn had once owned E(E)E it was a company that in the past coordinated occasions of every sort. His specialty was supernatural events but I used him because of the security concerns Batanya often had. He did satisfactory work but it was his sister that was the problem. He knew this and still brought her along to a banquet my bank hosted three years ago.

All she did that evening was steal. Me and all my subsidiaries dropped him as a vendor. The hotel pressed charges against her. He appealed to me. I refused. He bankrupted his business trying to buy her a lawyer. She went to jail and he blamed me. That was who my wife was willing to do anything to save. Again I wanted to spear her pain more than I wanted anything else.

I sighed internally. Maybe I should have told Sookie instead of doing what I had done. She would hate him and not me. Maybe then she would have let me kill him. Now, she would never believe me after what I'd done to him and she would hate me all the more for the presumed lie. No, she could never know not now or ever. I never wanted to be the one to deal her that blow. Death would have been more merciful than that.

Telling my wife about any of this would have hurt her more than anything else I could have done. She loved that mongrel. I knew that, I saw it. He had sent me more than a few pictures. There was video too. He didn't spare me an ounce of dignity or her any honor. Every time they had been together, even the first time, her first time he had recorded to humiliate me with. Just the thought of it…I calmed myself as Batanya winced in her seat. She didn't bother rubbing at her neck. The pain was a constant these days. I was always angry.

It wasn't easy to hold onto my anger. It was my fault. I'd convinced her I didn't want her and she wasn't wrong, at least not entirely. Asking for her fidelity on paper had just been a strategy. When the documents had been drawn I cared nothing about her. Now things had changed and grown beyond my control. I didn't want to care. If I could help it, I wouldn't care whom she gave her body and her heart to.

"Leta," Pam called, pulling me from my thoughts. My child was grinning ear to ear with her hand pressed against the window. "Flying lessons,"

We were still at cruising altitude, but I knew she was going to jump off the plane. There was an anticipatory smile on her face that lit her eyes and accentuated her dimples. I looked as the clouds danced and formed dozens of puffy white ravens that morphed into a larger one. It was something my sister only did for Pam. In the distance I saw her lingering in the air and waving at us.

"Forge my signature," Pam said. She was placing her phone and bags with her guards. They were used to her behavior and simply rolled their eyes and went back to what they were doing. It wouldn't be the first time she jumped out of a plane.

"You can't. Flying lesson won't change that," I reminded her gently. "The last time you decided to practice from an aircraft the FAA fined you seven digits."

She rolled her eyes, took the band from my hair, and pulled hers into a ponytail. "Tell Zee I'm still in love with his wife."

The pressure in the cabin of the plane was unstable for less than half a minute as Pam slid through a crack in the door and squeezed out of the craft. I saw her bounce through the clouds, fangs out and laughing her head off! No matter what else was eating away at me I smiled to see her so happy, even over something so insane.

With Pam AWOL I could cancel with Alexander because nothing could be finalized without my child'd signature. But I didn't. There was the meeting or returning home. I went with work. I landed at the airport in New York, Alexander met me, and we headed back to his apartment. The work we had to do would take a good part of the night and he preferred to work from home because of his daughter.

Andy was absent for most of the evening but when she came in search of her father she wasn't a distraction. Being at work with him often meant little Andy was well behaved. Unlike most toddlers she wasn't vying for his attention or loud. The hour was late and she was simply looking for somewhere safe and familiar to rest her head. Her father sat on the floor with his legs crossed and she tucked between them and slept. Absently his fingers combed through her hair or stroked her cheek. Most men would never care so deeply for the product of their mate's rape. It seemed he did so, not only with ease but with a devotion that was true of all real fathers.

"Came to see if you guys needed a drink." Rebecca said. She had two heated bloods in hand.

"Yes thank you," I said accepting the beverage.

Rebecca served Alexander his with a kiss and that brought my mind back to the one place that I didn't want it to go. Work had succeeded in taking my mind off Sookie. I watched Rebecca go with the child cradled in her arms and I found that I envied Alexander. I envied him the meaning his daughter brought to his life. I envied him the love his wife showed him.

"Do you ever think about killing her?" I asked before I could stop myself.

"Turn her, you mean?" he asked, looking a bit too calm.

I stayed quiet for a few seconds, trying to gather my thoughts. The thing I enjoyed most about Alexander's company was that he didn't flinch just because I moved too fast. He was unlike every other vampire, even Thalia and her gang. They worked for me because it was me, or nothing. No one would have them. It was different with Alexander. He knew the stories about me, but he didn't judge me by them. Acting like a confused madman would unsettle him, but I couldn't keep from wondering because I wanted with Sookie what he had with Rebecca and I hadn't any idea how to get it.

I figured honesty was the best way to proceed seeing I was already blurting it out. "No," I said. "I mean kill her, as in ‛not alive in any sense' anymore."

He rose from the floor to take a seat. "You mean like wrapping my hands around her neck, then squeezing and or shake the life from her," he supplied.

I nodded hesitantly. "Yes, exactly that."

I wondered how he knew, unless he had some experience in the matter. He couldn't. His relationship with his wife was nothing like the one I had with mine. Yet he understood this underlying, antagonistic feeling that came with my inexplicable and unexpected attraction to Sookie. I wondered if this was common. Nothing made sense anymore, and the emotions that one single soul elicited from me weren't healthy. I knew they weren't.

Alexander loved Rebecca and she loved him. It was clear the instant her name was spoken or she entered the room. It was the reason Pam constantly hit on Rebecca. His devotion was such that vampires simply avoided her for fear of him. Precisely it was from fear of anything befalling her while they were around. Alexander was not an enemy any wanted. In part it was because of his association with me but he was feared before that.

"Yes," he affirmed leaning back into his seat. "I did, and sometimes still do. Her ears are for decoration it seems, because she certainly doesn't listen. You know, she came to this crime-infested city because she wants to save the world. Despite all she's seen and suffered, she won't accept that it's already gone to hell."

"So you disagree on the matter," I gathered.

He chuckled and shook his head. "When you're married it's called fighting," he informed me.

So it wasn't just Sookie and me and that gave me some. "But you cannot compromise because it involves her safety."

"Neither does she. It's trying." I saw some genuine annoyance but he shrugged it away, "I hate that about her but it's also what I love most."

What he had described were the two extremes I was struggling with. I loved Sookie because I wanted everything with her that I never wanted with anyone else. For all the wealth I had, and the power it amassed, she was beyond my vast reach. It was a bad joke by the universe if I've seen one, the first woman I wanted in what felt like forever didn't want me. It hurt and that was what fueled the thoughts of violence. I was male. I had pride. It had been wounded and the vampire came to the surface wanting to do her harm because of it.

I couldn't talk to Pam because she would attack anything that made me unhappy. That was the last thing I needed. Illeta was too partial to peaceful solutions to understand. Alexander was as close to a friend as someone like me could have and he listened. I set my work aside, and for an hour I simply voiced the frustrations, aggression and pain my wife caused me. I told him about everything, her infidelity too. It wasn't the fact that she was with someone else though that was infuriating. I could get over that easily even though that someone was John Quinn. What rankled and hurt most was the fact that she lied and abused trust I'd given without prejudice.

"How much would it set you back if you killed her?" Alexander asked at the end of my venting.

"Three hundred and fifty seven million, five hundred and forty-one thousand, five hundred and fifty-six dollars and seventy-one cents." I'd been chanting that figure like a mantra every time she crossed me.

He shrugged. "You can afford it."

"I can," I admitted, but that wasn't what I wanted.

It had begun as a desire to make her obey me, but now I wanted her to like me and she didn't. She hated me for what I did to the tiger. I didn't know what would change that. I didn't even know how I got to this. I didn't understand any of it because for all the affection and tenderness she awakened in me, it was unintentional. She couldn't care less and I resented her for it, hence my wanting to kill her. Also, it wasn't that I wanted to kill her kill her; I wanted to wrap my hands around her opinionated, ungrateful, irritating, lovely neck, and silence those tempting lips while shaking some sense into her mouthwatering body. Even in my own head all of that sounded entirely too morbid.

"First visualize it" he said, and I tried.

In my head I pictured my wife with her lover. I saw her leaving me and running off with him. I imagined every infuriating argument we've ever had. I wrapped my hands wound her neck and it all stopped. I flinched and unclenched my fists to shake off the dread I felt.

"I can't," I confessed.

I hadn't been entirely sure when I told her if I hadn't killed her yet I wasn't going to. Now I knew for sure. She could make me angry enough that I wanted to, but thinking it through…was horrific to put it mildly. Doing it was impossible even if she made me feel like it. There was no more confusion in what I felt. Nothing would be as torturous as not having her with me.

"Congratulations," Alexander said with sympathetic shake of his head. "You, my friend, are in love with a human woman."

Damn.

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