"Silly, I've been packed for weeks waiting for your call, I will be there to see you the day after tomorrow!" She said - and she was.
***********
The next Tuesday evening, Wendy showed up at the newspaper office while we were trying to put what would probably be our final edition to bed. The printer shop across the Towne Centre finally had a terminal breakdown to their photo-engraving machine (also very obsolete), thus we could no longer print pictures or even add new advertisements easily. Alice seemed ready to throw in the towel.
Wendy's arrival changed all of that. She had seen a photo that a private investigator had taken of the inside of our newspaper office but still couldn't believe that we were still making this antique run. No matter.
"The new computers and printers are supposed to be here by this weekend!" She cheerful announced to all after we had embraced and introductions had been made. The Lovett Starry-Beacon was finally going hi-tech and was getting a complete suite of commercial desktop publishing tools and hardware. It was going to cost a fortune though, but as it was all Wendy's money, I didn't care to complain, and it was probably the first good use any of my family fortune had ever been put to. Alice sold the newspaper to Wendy for a token payment of one dollar, but she still stayed with us as our editor-in-chief.
Wendy didn't think much of my old two-room shack, and pointedly mentioned that a growing boy and a 'still fairly young bride very much within her childbearing years' were both going to need some growing room. She had an eye on a suitable house in a nice row of large old semi-Victorian houses just south of Towne Centre, and she wasted little time and was a very motivated buyer indeed. We made Victor a comfortable bed on my tired worn out sofa and promised him something better 'soon'. Before we knew it and without any other preamble, Wendy and I found ourselves in bed together.
Our lovemaking that first night was very gentle and slow, almost like both of us were examining the boundaries of each other, like a gentle test lap of a racecar the day before the big race. It was comfortable, like we were still sleeping with each other years ago back in the dorm at college, and more importantly when I was with her and holding her, I didn't feel the ghosts of the hundreds (or thousands) of men and women who had held her since I last had.
"So," I joked with her while we were snuggled up together, "are you ready for me to make an honest 'one-man' woman out of you yet?"
She wanted that very much, but knew that her past had some very large shadows and she admitted that she had 'certain fondnesses' and sexual desires now that would be very difficult to satisfy within the bounds of a strictly monogamous relationship. She admitted it would be hard, but she would devote all of her effort to making our relationship work, and we would just take things slowly one day at a time, for as long as it took.
I did have one other really burning question to ask. "If Dragos kept gradually losing his power, from drinking, mental weakness or whatever, why did you stay with him as long as you did, especially once you got some sort of control back over your life? That was the hardest thing for me to forgive, that you didn't run away the very first moment that you could!"
"It wasn't quite as simple as that for several reasons." She replied thinking deeply. "First, his control was always very iffy, but if he could concentrate, he could lay down some firm short time instructions that I had no choice but to obey and follow. Especially in those early two years before we were married. I think I had become his absolutely favorite plaything, and just my being around him gave him pleasure at the way he had stolen me from you, and then framed you into a life in prison. When that thrill wore off after the wedding, I began to have more 'independence' but what could I really do? You were now in jail for life, where could I run? Home? He'd find me there too, and maybe cause dreadful things to happen to my parents, or other people I loved. I couldn't take the chance."
"There must have been something that you could have done?" I insisted.
"Murdering him? I certainly considered it, but I think I had been programmed by him not to be able to. I couldn't even hold a knife in my hand and think thoughts of killing him, without my hand going limp and I'd drop the knife every time. Then there was your father. Believe it or not, after your mother died, he and I became quite close (but not in that way!). We would talk together many late evenings if we knew Dragos was safely out of the house. He had made a great many mistakes in his life and he admitted most of them before he died. He was too concerned with money, influence and power and he allowed himself to be seduced by your Aunt's vision of your brother becoming even greater and achieving far higher political office. It would be start of another great American political dynasty, just like the Kennedy's, they had believed, but something never did seem quite right. Even Aunt herself realized not long after our wedding that she had made a tragic miscalculation and that Dragos was not the 'Chosen One', or whatever she had expecting. Father wrote you a very long letter just before he died, but Dragos found it and burned it. He wanted just a little of your forgiveness and he hoped that you and I would be together sometime in the future. With me gone from the house, there would have been no one who could protect your father. Without my presence, I'm certain he would have died a few years earlier than he did, and perhaps not of natural causes. Once you got out from prison and 'disappeared', he knew that something would soon happen, and Dragos days would be numbered."
"So, if Dragos was a mess, and mostly now impotent, who was the father of your child?"
"Yes, your brother was the father. I know exactly the weekend he was conceived, as I was tied up unable to move all weekend or take my birth control pills, while he repeatedly drunkenly raped me. Also Dragos later had a DNA test done on him, to make certain that Victor was his heir. With the birth of my son, I had another potential victim that had to be protected. Fortunately, once Victor was proven to be his, he did dote upon him. This also made it harder to grab him and run, as now he had even further reasons to want to recover me."
I had to admit that this explaination made a great deal of sense. A mother's first responsibility is to protect her child, and there at my old family home, with her hated husband becoming ever more enfeebled, there was little reason to rock the boat, so to speak, and awaken a sleeping but vicious beast.
"Then you got your sudden release from prison," she added, "with all of your charges dropped and your name cleared. This caught Dragos completely by surprise and it drove him nearly insane while he tried to find you and 'finish you off for good'. He was convinced you would soon appear and gun him down, and no matter how much money he spent he could never find a trace of you - even after he had your ex-cellmate tortured and killed, while trying to find a clue as to where you had gone. This successful escape made him even more paranoid and unstable. He drank all of the time after that and sometimes did other drugs to alter his moods. His mental control was now 'iffy' and light at best, but he was still a large, angry, and unstable man with all of the normal tools of violence that could be used to keep a woman and a small baby in line."
Dragos was certainly not beyond using pure single physical violence. Like many other battered women, she felt it was safer to remain in the abusive relationship. If she had run, he really would have very likely killed her, or done something nearly equally terrible in response. In this instance, her waiting paid off.
"In the end, I accepted your father's advice and to wait and see." She continued. "You could appear, or our own investigators could find you... and we did a lot searching that Dragos never knew about. I was fairly certain you were somewhere in Texas and would somehow be working for a newspaper, but probably a very small rural one - well out of sight and mind. In the end, we had agents gather up nearly seven hundred small regional papers and we began a very slow process of elimination. In the end, I identified a blurry photo of you taken through the newspaper window only about a month before Dragos death and before I could establish a plan.
"Finally, for my final excuse to you, there was the not insignificant matter of my membership at an elite international sex club for millionaires that I will just call "The Club." It has other names, and different branches everywhere where there is money and power, but all you need to know about it is that I spent a good deal of time there, and in time grew to love and prefer the place to my own home.
Dragos obtained our memberships, and it cost him a lot of money, but he hoped to obtain backing for another run at your father's old congressional seat or to obtain an Ambassadorship, particularly to Romania. I was just another 'means of payment'; with the tattoo above my ass, I was marked as being a slut, and common property of the club, and used, often and repeatedly, by all of its members and special guests. Dragos, never achieved a single one of his political goals - everyone hated him far too much. The Club did however enjoy fucking me, so they strung him along, dangling little carrots before him that would never materialize. After a few years, Dragos came to hate The Club, as he finally saw they had essentially cuckolded him, but he was now powerless to stop anything."
