In Damien's Keeping

I stared at my wedding dress soaked red from my husband’s blood. My husband, whom I had married an hour ago, who was in the car with me going back to our home when we faced the horrible attack. He was lying in the operation theatre while I waited for him to survive from the bullet that pierced his neck.

Sucking in a sharp breath, I realized what had just happened. A new page of my life had been opened and, immediately tainted with the blood of my husband. A newly wedded bride and not even a day after my wedding, I was about to lose my husband. How lucky I was...

Lips trembling and tears falling like a stream, I felt a hand on my shoulder and looked around to see it was my close friend, Norah. My arms circled around her and I burst into hysterics.

“It’s okay, he will be fine,” she whispered soothingly, rubbing my back with her hand. My hiccups seemed to be going on, my body begging for comfort and warmth.

“How’s Mark?” I heard another voice ask and recognized it in a nanosecond. It was Damien. My insides shattered hearing his voice. I didn’t wanted his presence to be known, since he didn’t attend our wedding, so why did he care now?

Not having the energy to ask him to go, I let him be there. Just then the doctor came outside with a face void of any emotions. Heart beating wildly and with each beat a prayer sent to God to heal my husband. I expected the doctor to say that my husband was fine and out of danger, to say that I was free to spend my life with him.

“I am sorry, we couldn’t save him.” These words came out of his mouth, seeming foreign to me and my mind registered them after it echoed a thousand times. I opened my mouth to speak that my perfect husband couldn’t have left me alone like this, but nothing came out because he already had left me.

How will I live without him? What will I do now?

Norah hugged me tight sensing my shock, but my body couldn’t respond or move anymore. I was stuck in this life alone without Mark. It, only, took a bullet in the heart to turn my life upside down and who did it? Was it so easy to take a life and get away? Then I could take my own, too.

I could no longer take it and I blacked out.

I woke up to find myself on a bed. I groaned and sat up. I didn’t recognize the cream colored curtains, the red comforter, the wood brown furniture and the and I started to breath heavily in a state of panic.

“You are safe, it’s my room.” I glanced on my right to see Damien perched on a couch with a laptop.

Why was I in his room?

He looked at me and our eyes met, then the recent events came rushing back to me and hit me like a rock. I looked away, clenching the bed sheet in fists and hiding my tears. My innocent self gulped and gulped again but the pain didn’t go away.

“Funeral will be held tomorrow,” he declared. How could he take such decisions? Mark was my husband not his.

I opened my mouth to say that he had no right to decide and it was my right to decide but he beat me to it, saying,

“And from now on...” He emphasized on the phrase raising his eyebrow, “You will be living with me.”

That was not going to happen, I thought and rolled my eyes.