Flowers of Desolation

Chapter 3

Valerie's POV ( House passcode)

It was Mr Harrison, the manager at the restaurant where I work as a waitress.

For a moment, I wondered why he was calling me this early.

“Pick up your call already, your cheap, loud ringtone is disturbing my sleep,” he said.

How mean and cruel can a good-looking man like him be? I thought, and picked up the call. I slowly placed the phone to my left ear.

“Hello, Mr Harrison. Good morning,”

“Good morning to you too, Valerie.”

“Check your email and reply A.S.A.P,” he mentioned the alphabet one after the other.

“Hope everything is fine?”

“I'm sorry, Miss Valerie, but there's nothing I could do,” he said, his voice entangled with sympathy.

I didn't totally understand what he meant, so I hung up the call and went straight to my email.

My stomach churned with anger and anxiety, and sweat came rushing down my body and the email turned out to be my sack letter. I silently stared at my phone for some seconds, with a few drops of tears sneaking out of my teary eyes, at the same moment anger welled up in me, I tried to understand what I have gotten myself into.

“I figured out that it would be difficult to have you sign your resignation letter, so I had to make the firm sack you,” he said with so much confidence and audacity in his voice.

“You what?!” I opened my eyes wide, finding it difficult to understand why nature had decided to bring such a plague, in a human form, on me.

“Receiving a sack letter from my previous place of work isn't good for my future career pursuit at all,”

“You are my wife, and you will do just as I said, come to bed,” he said with so much authority in his voice.

I hesitated for a while, before I agreed to go into bed with plans that I would sneak out once he falls deep into sleep.

“Okay, let's sleep, husband,” I said, getting into bed. He wrapped his arm around me in a cuddling way.

After a few minutes of getting into bed, he fell asleep. I gently took his arm off my body, with so much care to avoid him waking up. I went out of bed, went down the stairs into a well-furnished and decorated living space.

The stair walkway screams luxury, the couches and everything in that space screams of luxury.

I went to the door, trying to figure out how to get out of the house, then and there I realized that I needed a passcode to open the door.

This bastard, I felt like a trapped prisoner in there, who puts passcodes on a door these days, if not a criminal, or a serial killer.

I thought calculatively about what the passcode could possibly be. I put in a few codes that turned out to be wrong. I tried a possible year of his birth, which I guessed, judging by his looks,. It waited longer than the rest, a glimmer of hope grew in me as I waited. After a few seconds of waiting, it displayed the wrong code.

In frustration, I hit my legs on the door,

“Don't hurt yourself, wifey,” he said from behind me.

I froze for a moment. Wasn't he sleeping all this while?

“Like you care,” I said, my expression reacting to the pain rising from my leg mixed with the chaos of my heart.

“Of course I care, you're my wife, my responsibility. If you should get hurt, I will be the one to spend money treating you,” he said.

I silently hissed, does this person have consciousness at all? Is he from this planet? Am I stuck in this space with a dangerous alien? Tons of questions ran in my head.

“Were you trying to escape?” he asked softly as he walked down the stairs.

I looked at him with so much disbelief. Would he let me go if I told him the truth? “No Valerie, this monster doesn't look like he will be moved by the truth,” a voice inside of me warned.

I shoved it off and concentrated my gaze on him.

“You want to leave the marriage without keeping the hundred thousand dollars stated in the contract,”

My eyes opened wide the moment he mentioned hundreds of thousands of dollars. In my entire life I have never had more than a thousand dollars.

I blinked my eyes, “What's the money for?”

He chuckled, “Oh my bad I guessed you skipped that part to on the contract,”

Let me do you the favor again wifey, “ it's clearly stated in the contract, that either party that wants to terminate the contract will have to pay the some of a hundred thousand dollars to the other party,”

I leaned on the door and slid my body down in frustration.

“Wait, are you that daft to sign a contract without reading its contents? You're so pathetic,” he said.

At this junction, I'm so much out of ideas about what to do, that amount of money I cannot afford, which means I am stuck in this sham of a marriage.

I rubbed my palms randomly on my face in frustration, “Val, what have you done to yourself?” I whispered with my palms covering my face.

“Wifey, don't sit on the floor, sit on the couch, you cannot be seen sitting on the floor in your husband’s house,” he said as he approached me.

He stretched his hand towards me and leaned to help lift me up.

His touch on my skin sends my ever active hormones rushing down my spine and for a moment I felt the spark I felt the first time I saw him in the bar.

“Why would you do such a thing?!” I asked.