I’m the contracted bride of the billionaire

Amelia shuddered against Philip’s solid frame, steeling herself to excavate the jagged fragments of her traumatic upbringing. She knew the next plunge into her past would feel like submerging in shards of broken glass. But perhaps finally giving voice to those entombed agonies would begin lancing the endless cycle of shame.

“My father…” she began in a small, hollow voice. “That miserable bastard was the architect of most of my childhood torment and inherited demons.”

Her throat felt coated in ash, burning with each harrowing remembrance dredged up after so many years of calculated avoidance.

“Donnie Anderson was just your classic case of small man syndrome mixed with raging alcoholism. The angrier and more bitter he became at life, the more he seemed to relish making us as small and insignificant as he felt himself. It was like knocking Mom and me down was the only power trip he could get off on.”

Philip listened in solemn silence, his thumb tracing soothing circles over Amelia’s knotted shoulders as she spoke. But he couldn’t mask the muscle ticking in his taut jawline… an subtle glimpse at the molten fury roiling beneath his otherwise composed exterior.

Visions of Amelia’s father in yet another drunken stupor blitzed through her mind’s eye like a barrage of stomach-churning slides. The slurred verbal assaults and backhanded blows, all delivered in the name of asserting his pitiful dominance over their rundown household:

Seven-year-old Amelia peered around the scratched kitchen doorframe with fearful eyes, watching her mom struggle to tend to their meager dinner while dodging her father’s wild flailing. Donnie towered above her, a half-finished bottle of whiskey sloshing in his beefy fist.

“Worthless sow!” he boomed, spittle flying from his mouth. “I gotta go out night after night, back-breaking labor surrounded by ungrateful shits who suck up to the bosses. And this is the thanks I get when I come home, you lazy cunt?”

A swift backhand sent Maggie Anderson stumbling backward, her eyes screwed shut as angry tears leaked from beneath the purple shiner blossoming on her cheekbone. Amelia’s nails dug into the doorframe with impotent rage, but she knew better than to intervene. It would only earn her twice the beating.

Another vivid snapshot played behind Amelia’s haunted eyes: Christmas morning in the Anderson household, except for the dismal lack of any festive decorations or gift wrap scraps littering the hovel. Amelia, age nine, nervously waited on the stained couch with her emaciated mother as Donnie finally rose from his drunken stupor at 11 am, strung out and wild-eyed.

“The hell you girls looking at me like that for?” he growled, snagging a rusted metal spatula from the counter. “Unless there’s some goddamn presents waiting for me under a tree you forgot to tell me about, in which case I got a jolly old surprise for you both…”

Head down, lower lip trembling, little Amelia silently slid off the couch and scurried back to the seclusion of her bedroom where she stayed huddled under her rickety twin bed, listening to the muffled shouts and dull thuds of violence.

At least this time, Santa had spared her by forgetting to drop off any gifts for their dismal excuse for a home…

Recounting these disturbing flashes from her childhood caused Amelia’s whole body to turn to stone as she relived the trauma cycles, yet again. Philip’s strong arms enveloped her, his low, soothing murmurations momentarily drowning out the haunting echoes of her father’s deranged rampages.

“Easy, Lia,” he murmured softly, his breath stirring the fine hairs at her temple. “Stay present with me here and now. That monster from your past doesn’t get to hurt you any longer.”

Amelia released a shuddering breath, centering herself in Philip’s grounding embrace before pressing on.

“If my father’s drunken, entitled raging wasn’t enough of a source of torment growing up… there was also his tendency to disappear for days at a time on these mysteriously lucrative ‘jobs’.” She punctuated the last word with sarcastic air quotes and a sardonic grimace.

“Back when I was too young and confused to know what he was up to at the time, my mom tried to make excuses. Big out-of-town construction gigs or working overtime on Donnie’s ‘union jobs.’ But even then, I knew she was just grasping at straws.”

Amelia’s jaw tightened, the old emotional wounds lancing open and weeping pus like overcorrupted lesions. “Donnie was nothing but a two-bit hustler and con man who got mixed up with the worst crowd in South Philly. I won’t go into details of what kind of ‘jobs’ those sleazeballs hire out for, but let’s just say they usually involve using muscle for intimidation or score settling.”

Though Philip remained silent, she saw his throat constrict, no doubt imagining the harrowing scenarios and criminal underworld her father dabbled in.

“Did he ever… Did Donnie ever try to pull you and your mom into his seedy dealings?” Philip asked, his deep timbre laced with a protective edge. “Force you to get mixed up in that dangerous lifestyle?”

Amelia shook her head, feeling ill at the thought of how much worse it could have truly been. At least her father’s willful negligence had stopped short of conscripting them directly into his shady hustles… most of the time.

“No, he tried keeping me and Mom at arm’s length from the really bad stuff, for whatever that was worth.” She barked a hollow, humorless laugh. “Donnie liked having a false veneer of respect from our neighbors as a ‘family man’ to separate himself from the bottom feeders, even though he was just as slimy underneath his nice guy facade.”

With trembling hands, Amelia reached for Philip’s face and caressed his chiseled jawline, anchoring herself to his steady presence. His eyes searched her face with tender worry as she struggled to compose herself enough to continue.Còntens bel0ngs to Nô(v)elDr/a/ma.Org

“To be fair, my mother wasn’t entirely blameless in how toxic our household dynamic grew, but she was also a casualty of circumstance. Trapped in a cycle of abuse and degradation from which she couldn’t escape.”

The memories of her mom’s spiral into depression descended like a black curtain, choking out any trace of light or hope.

Maggie Anderson – once a vibrant, smiling young lady in their few battered family photos – gradually receded into a hollow, listless shell of her former self. Under the combined weight of Donnie’s abuse and life’s bitter cruelties, the fire in her eyes flickered and eventually extinguished, leaving a vacuous woman in its wake.

She spent weeks holed up in her dingy bedroom, curtains drawn and empty bottles scattered around the perimeter like leftover shrapnel. Dulling the constant soundtrack of her husband’s rampages and her daughter’s muffled cries by drinking herself into an anesthetized stupor. Yet even at her most chemically numb, haunting traces of awareness crept into her vacant stare.

Almost as though some dissociative part of Maggie understood she had utterly failed at protecting her only child from the depravities festering within their condemned household…

“My poor mom just gave up after a certain point,” Amelia said sadly, pressing her thumbs into Philip’s wrists to keep her hands from trembling as she spoke. “Donnie’s drunken abuse, his shady jobs that kept him gone for days, the poverty and violence that we were seemingly born into with no escape… it hollowed her out until there was nothing left inside. Just emptiness and self-medicating binges where she hoped half the bottles would kill her so she didn’t have to wake up to this nightmare of an existence.”

An anguished tear snaked down Amelia’s cheek, which Philip gently brushed away with the calloused pad of his thumb. “Both of my parents utterly failed at their most sacred duties: to love, nurture and protect their child. Instead, they set me adrift on an emotional raft with absolutely zero moorings or direction. Is it any wonder I spun so dangerously out of control as a teenager trying to find literally any kind of safe harbor in this cruel storm?”

She dropped her forehead to Philip’s shoulder, the hot prick of shame burning in her chest. How unfair and cruel, for a young woman with no positive role models to latch onto in her formative years? When she should have been discovering the innocent miracles and freedoms of adolescence, she instead found herself cast off into a churning darkness with no compass and an alarming capacity for self-destruction.

Philip wrapped his arms around her in a tight, soul-anchoring embrace, feeling the desperate tremors coursing through her petite frame. He nuzzled his cheek against her fragrant tresses, whispering a litany of soothing reassurances as she quietly wept out the anguish of generational cycles of neglect and abuse.

“You’re so strong, Amelia. A true survivor in every way possible. The bravery required to confront these demons and reveal your past only demonstrates how incredible you are.”

His heartfelt sentiment caused her breath to hitch in a soft sob. Philip pulled back just enough to cup her face in his calloused palms, their gazes locked in naked vulnerability.

“I want you to listen to me closely. Your parents’ reprehensible sins and failures are not your own burden to bear. Nothing you could have possibly done in your youth excuses their abandonment of the most sacred trust a mother and father hold. They failed you. Period.”

Amelia’s eyes slipped shut, the tears streaking her cheeks as she absorbed his compassionate wisdom like a balm for her festering wounds. As much as she longed to believe his absolution, a malignant voice still nagged from the furthest recesses of her scarred psyche:

If only he knew the unforgivable acts and transgressions she herself had gone on to commit in her wayward, unguided adolescence… would his acceptance remain so unwavering then?

Swallowing hard against the rising acid biliousness in her throat, Amelia steered herself back to the scalding embers of one last vivid memory from her childhood. The beginning of the tailspin that would obliterate her already tenuous self-worth and open the floodgates to total hell-bent rebellion.

It struck without warning on her 16th birthday, when Amelia cracked open her rundown bedroom door, ears ringing from the latest savage beating Donnie unleashed on her mother. Heart hammering in sickened anticipation of the gruesome scene awaiting her in the living room, Amelia instead found a hollow emptiness.

No overturned furniture or shattered liquor bottles littering the sagging carpet. No drunken rage beast collapsed in his recliner, each booming exhale reeking of stale booze and bitterness.

Only a barren, stifling silence and the echoing finality of abandoned shrapnel… a spatter of crimson droplets streaking across the scuffed wall where Maggie’s head must have struck.

And lying face-down in a sticky, congealing pool of that same wretched essence… a familiar emerald crystal ring, the sole surviving heirloom from her grandmother’s prized collection.

The ring her mother had feverishly clung to as her only remaining beacon of hope through the darkest nights of their harrowing household…

Now callously discarded and left behind, just like the two souls who had given rise to Amelia’s very existence.