Free Insufferable: A Dark Erotic Romance by Alaska Angelini

brought my free hand up, still holding Jaime’s as I wiped the tears away.
    “Anyway, the neighbors heard my screaming. They called the police. I was a little over five months along. The baby didn’t make it. Neither did Tony.”

Chapter 9
    Jaime
     
    Had I thought I knew this woman and what she’d gone through? I had no idea. Looking into her past had told me nothing. Paper didn’t define a person, I knew that, but why hadn’t I come across anything on a baby? It would have been there and easily obtainable. Randle. I’d had him research most of the information. I had been wrapping up the last slave to get prepared for Lydia and trusted he would cover all bases. I was wrong. He was too new at this.
    “I’m sorry for your loss and for what happened.”
    Again, she brought up our hands to wipe her tears.
    “I sometimes wonder how things would have been if Christian lived.” She paused. “Not sometimes. All the time. He was so tiny. So … beautiful.” Her eyes closed and she took a ragged breath. I couldn’t stop myself from stroking back her hair as she turned into our connected hands and sobbed. “I haven’t been to his grave in months. It hurts so much. I wanted him more than I ever wanted anything. How do things go so wrong?”
    “I don’t know. I wish I had the answers.”
    Lydia’s lids lifted and she stared toward the wall, slipping into the past again.
    “Tony fled before the cops got there. He tried running, but they caught up with him. There was a chase, but he was wasted drunk. He wrecked his truck, rolled a few times. He wasn’t buckled.”
    Again she got quiet. The tears were stopping and I knew she was trying to numb herself out.
    “I left, then. Ran away to Los Angeles. I worked a few odd-end jobs, making enough money to put a roof over my head—sometimes. I was lost. I started drinking a lot. I made a few friends, but they were bad news. They did drugs and partied really hard. Nothing too hardcore, marijuana, sometimes cocaine, although I avoided that the majority of the time. It lasted a few months before I woke up in a stranger’s house. That’s when I came back home to Portland. I was out of control and knew it. I was drinking almost every day. I’d even go to work wasted, sometimes.
    “My mother was happy to take me back. It took a little time, but I got my act together and went back to school. I met more friends. Good ones. They were my age, but I don’t think they’d been through a quarter of what I had. I pretended to be happy and I guess at moments I was, but the sadness, the pain and guilt, would always return. I fought depression, all the while, focusing on my classes. A year in, I met Fred. I don’t know why, but it’s like you meet one abusive man and a flock seems to follow. We dated for all of three weeks before he hit me for the first time. I dumped him. A few months later, Travis. Same pattern. Dating was the last thing I wanted when Phillip came into my life. He was different. He was older, around thirty and a business owner. He treated me like no man ever had. I thought he was the one. A new start, finally.”
    Lydia turned to me, her red-rimmed eyes searching mine for something.
    “Have you ever loved someone, Jaime?”
    “Master,” I corrected. “And, yes, I have.”
    “How much?”
    I took in Lydia’s beautiful face, noticing my pulse spike at the truth that whispered into my mind. “I never do anything partially. It’s all or nothing. When I love, I love with everything I have.”
    “Me too,” she whispered.
    “And you loved Phillip?”
    “I thought I did. I mean, at the time, yes. But a part of me was always waiting. For what, exactly, I wasn’t sure. I think when you go through so much pain, you come to expect more to follow. You prepare yourself for it to show up in the happiest places. And it did. It just waited for me to get comfortable enough in my new marriage to show its ugly face.”
    “The pills.” My voice had her looking back at