by Amelia Wilde
His eyes burn. “Fuck.” Then his hands leave my face and a pressure at my middle intensifies along with the lightning-bright anger in his eyes until I’m afraid.
“Stop,” I say. “Please, stop.”
“No.”
Then he tears the front of the dress in two.
It was no cheap bodice, no flimsy material, but it’s no match for him and it hurts coming off, almost more than it hurt going on. It doesn’t want to relinquish my skin. Zeus curses again and stands for more leverage. The dress shreds. I don’t care about the nightmare wedding gown but the puppet-string pull of the fabric makes me feel like I’m falling to pieces, too. And if I know him, he’ll fuck me when he’s done with the dress. It will be vicious. It will be senseless. And I will never get over it.
The tulle comes next, then the slip and the petticoat until I’m naked in the remnants of a wedding dress.
I’ve lost it.
I can’t stop the tears, so I don’t even try. Closing my eyes doesn’t stop them either. Hot droplets make their way down to my breasts and I can feel my mind losing its connection to my body. Please. Happen faster. Happen faster so I don’t have to be here with this man that hates me and this man that I still want, god, it’s so fucking embarrassing how much I want him.
How much I hoped for him to save me from that cathedral. How many times I prayed for him to come rescue me and take revenge on my father and my uncle for daring to touch me.
Will Zeus touch me now?
He doesn’t. There’s only the scratch of tulle against my bare shin.
I open my eyes.
He’s moving across the room, jacket off already, shirt unbuttoned. It comes off with the same precision he uses for everything. Zeus tosses it and it lands on a chair, but still manages to look freshly pressed. His belt. His pants. They all fall to the floor. He disappears from view. He’s so beautiful to look at. All muscle and height and grace and why, why do the most dangerous men have to be the most intoxicating? It’s not fair.
His hand on my cheek is the thing that alerts me to the fact that I’ve closed my eyes again. His touch is gentle, shockingly so, as it glides down to my shoulder, then my arm, then my wrist.
Zeus takes my hand.
And because I am useless, worthless, crushed, I follow him.
In the bathroom the shower is already running, the air heated, the kiss of the humidity on my skin relaxes me against my will. The shower is huge in the same way the tub is huge—big enough for him, and by extension big enough for me. My feet warm on wet tile when he positions me under the hot stream of water. I didn’t know they were cold in the first place.
My eyes are so swollen that the plain water stings, so I close my eyes again and vow to let it happen. Let anything happen. It doesn’t matter. I’ll survive it, because there’s nothing else to do but survive.
What happens is a pair of big hands in my hair, working through the hairspray and curls at a pace so leisurely I can’t believe it’s him.
Shampoo. Conditioner. Warm scents, gentle hands. He’s thorough. It’s difficult to keep crying when this is happening. It soothes the raw nerves. I shouldn’t trust him this way. I know that.
I know.
At some point I become aware that he’s humming.
A song—a familiar one. We were dancing to it the other night, before he destroyed me in front of the entire world.
“Who are you right now?” I don’t open my eyes when I ask the question and his hands don’t stop moving over my hair.
“The same person as always, dearest.” He resumes humming the song, and without looking at him I can picture how he might be if he wasn’t himself—if he’d had a different life, if he wasn’t so cruel, so awful. On a beach somewhere. In the sun.
“You don’t do this.” My throat is raw.
“Don’t I?” He clicks his tongue. “Either your memory is extraordinarily poor, or you take things too literally.”
Yes—the bath. He has done this once before. It’s just that the bath doesn’t fit with the rest of him. My teeth chatter. Impossible. It should be impossible, because the water is so hot and nothing about this room is cold.
“It’s the shock.” His hands drop down to rub circles around the hinges of my jaw. “That, and adrenaline.”
“How would you know about that?”
“Do you think I was born in a suit with piles of money?”
“Y—yes.”
“I wasn’t.”
The mind likes a good story, and mine is no exception. I can feel myself leaning in, wanting more, even though I shouldn’t. Jesus, I shouldn’t. “F-fine. I know they don’t make suits that small.”
He laughs. “They make suits in any size. Not many homeless women can afford them, however. From what I gather my mother had a fondness for hard drugs and harder men, so she left me at the public hospital at the edge of the city.”
His hands leave me, and it’s all I can do not to reach out for them. Come back, come back.
Then—a soft cloth on one of my shoulders. He lets it rest there until the tension crawling up my neck is gone again, then works it over my arm, down to my wrist, and over each of my fingers. “Why,” I whisper.
“Because you couldn’t hear me in that state,” he says, as if he regularly sees women in such a hysterical state that they’ve lost the ability to hear.
Of course he does. Of course. It brings my defenses rushing back, weak as they are. “There’s nothing you need to tell me.”
“Open your eyes.”
It’s mortifying how quickly I obey him. The water drips off my eyelashes but he’s close enough to see clearly. Zeus takes my other hand in his and starts at my fingertips, moving the washcloth up and up and up. “What happened was an unfortunate accident.”
A knife to the heart. That memory will always be a knife to the heart. “You accidentally humiliated me in front of all those men?”
“No. It was planned.” I close my eyes again. I can’t bear how nonchalant he is about this. A squeeze at my shoulder reminds me that I’m supposed to be looking at him. “Your uncle was on the guest list that night.”
The bottom drops out of my stomach. “You didn’t tell me.”
“You weren’t supposed to be there.” Frustration flashes in his eyes. “I told you to stay in bed, if you recall. If you’d done that—”
“You had a speech prepared.”
“Of fucking course I did, Brigit. It was going to be delivered whether you were there or not. It was designed to draw him out, to get him to show himself. But he didn’t. He wasn’t there.”
“No. He was busy sending people to capture me.”
The washcloth makes a slow circle between my breasts. “That was also me.”
I put a hand on his wrist and he stops, but only for a moment. “What the fuck,” I whisper.
“Such language,” he says, and no matter what Hades said in the car, there’s some familial resemblance there. “It was an exit strategy. Even if your uncle turned out to be the highest bidder, there would be a turn of events out of my control.” His jaw ticks. “There were obviously complications.”
“Complications? Is that what you call it?” I giggle, horrified. “Do you know what my uncle did? He threw me over the countertop and he pulled up my dress and—”
“He touched you?” The washcloth is down over my belly now. Zeus doesn’t move. “Brigit, did he touch you?”
My head. The mirror. Bang, bang, bang.
“Worse than that.”
Zeus takes a slow, even breath, and then he brings the washcloth around to the outside of my hip. “I’m sorry.”
I wait for him to say more. He doesn’t. A man like Zeus does not fall to his knees and howl when faced with information like this. He stays standing. I hate him for it.
“What was supposed to happen, then?” The conversation can’t be over.
“You were supposed to be taken to a safe house, then returned to me.”
This breaks down the last
of my shell. “You didn’t come after me.”
“I sent Hades instead.”
“You didn’t come after me.” My heart throbs, aches, cries. “You sent a stranger.”
“I sent the best person for the job.”
“I wanted you.”
Then my knees have had enough. My body has had enough. Exhaustion takes my feet out from under me but Zeus doesn’t let me fall. Somehow, somehow, he catches me on one knee, the washcloth making quick work of the rest of my body. It’s dark in the bedroom when we go back out, dark when he dries me off, dark when he tugs a brush through my hair, dark when he tucks me into his bed.
I want to keep talking to him.
I can’t.
I want my heart to unbreak.
It won’t.
It’s dark when sleep steals me away, eyes still burning, chest a hollow pit.
It’s dark when I hear him say, from over a great distance, you didn’t want me, sweetheart. You wanted to live. You have to stay alive.
8
Zeus
Even before I took over the whorehouse from my son-of-a-bitch father, I’d seen quite a few things. He made sure of that. But I’ve never seen a woman so completely shattered as Brigit.
Should I dress her in my shirt, put her in my bed, and let her sleep it off? No. It’s possibly one of the most reckless things I’ve done. She doesn’t know that yet. I’ll have to dash her hopes in the morning, when she wakes up.
It’s two in the afternoon, but I made the room dark. I left only enough light so that I can see the blanket rise and fall while she breathes.
And then I sit by the side of the bed and try to determine if I’m having a heart attack or just emotions, wearing only slacks and a t-shirt.
Worse than touching.
Brigit no doubt thinks I have taken this in stride, what happened to her. What happened to her because of me. If I melted down every time a woman told me a horror story I’d have walked off the roof of the building a long time ago.
This is different.
There’s a checklist to run through to convince myself that I’m here, in the present. Sometimes, if I’m very drunk, reality loses its firm grip on me.
It’s losing it now.
I feel—
I feel.
Fuck. I drop my head into my hands. There’s no one here to see it, or notice how long it takes me to control my breathing. Heart attack. It must be. It’s a neverending throb, again, again. You did this. You did this. You did this. I’m sick for her, sick to the core, dying of it.
A man can find himself on the night of his twenty-first birthday, listening to that fucking song. After my father died I gutted the whorehouse and when I remodeled it, I had it decorated to provide specific cues. It’s why the walls are all white and it’s impossible to find the shade of red—blood, running toward maroon—that decorated the carpets in the women’s wing on the second floor.
It’s why I’ve let the light in, whenever possible. A signal to my own fucked-up brain that I am not, in fact, reliving that night over and over again.
It only exists in my memory.
Except for when it doesn’t.
And during those times, I look for those landmarks. They are similar to the reality checks used to tell if you’re dreaming or not. Unlike clocks that change time or light switches that don’t work, these are disguised as decorative elements and color schemes. Not nearly so obvious as what Hades has done for himself at his mountain. But then he would prefer to live in complete darkness, where no one would ever be able to make guesses about him.
I don’t have to make guesses. I’ve seen more than he knows.
The furniture is black. The sheets are white. The walls are white. Nothing my father has ever touched is in this room. Nothing Demeter has touched is in this room, unless you count the poison she slipped her via Savannah.
Which reminds me.
It’s time to resurface.
I take out my phone and text Reya.
Has she moved?
The answer comes without delay.
Still glaring at the wall in your office. Would you like me to move her?
No. Leave her where she is.
Savannah now spends all of her free time on one of the round couches in my office. They’re particularly convenient for this purpose because each one is aligned with a steel loop on the floor. Add a collar and a narrow chain to the arrangement and there’s a suitable consequence for trying to poison someone in my house. She is allowed to leave the couch to prepare for clients and to meet with clients. If she needs to get up for another reason, one of the other girls leads her there by her chain.
There is no possible way that Demeter will get to her again, if it was indeed Demeter who made contact. Savannah wouldn’t say. Not even after the whipping. She claims she never saw the woman’s face when they met in the alley.
How Demeter knew to attack Brigit is another lingering question.
It likely won’t be solved today.
What else?
It’s quiet in the city, like you ordered, Reya writes back. The kitchen is preparing for a normal evening. James doesn’t have any news.
Good.
I check to make sure Brigit is still breathing. She is, turning under the covers. Rustling. Not waking up. Pain beats at my ribs like they’ve been bruised, but I can’t allow myself to feel this particular combination of guilt and grief now.
I meant what I said to her. The fucking van wasn’t supposed to be intercepted. But the way she said I wanted you, her voice cracking, won’t get out of my head. It is a mistake to want me. It will always be a mistake to want me.
Katie could tell her that.
In the dark, a whisper of memory comes into the room and circles me, never stepping fully into view.
I almost believed you, the memory says, fingertips on the back of my neck, dipping below the collar of my shirt. A laughing breath on the shell of my ear. I almost believe you when you say it’s a mistake.
“It is a mistake.” The tumbling, frozen feeling that accompanies these memories is hellishly unpleasant. It’s the only thing that keeps me from following a ghost to my own death. “Don’t play those games.”
A giggle, barely audible. In my mind the whorehouse rearranges itself on the floors below me until it’s the way it was. But it’s not. I check the furniture, and the bed. It’s the memory that won’t comply.
What if I want to play like this?
I grip the phone with one hand and put the other in my pocket. “What do you want from me?”
A kiss, she whispers, and then she’s gone. Not she—only a memory, a figment of imagination, a hallucination. Not real, not real. Brigit turns over again. She is real. The bed is real. The white walls are real. My father is truly dead.
The pain around my heart becomes a wretched twist and I banish all thoughts of red dresses and dark hair and the way she laughs. I look at Brigit sleeping until I’m certain that she’s not another woman arranged on the bed like a sacrifice.
When I check my phone again I discover that I’ve lost two hours.
And I have guests for dinner.
I wonder if they’ll make their announcement while we eat or wait until Persephone actually gives birth. Or if they’ll try to hide it. With Demeter on the loose in the city, it’s something that should be discussed.
Brigit doesn’t stir while I put the rest of my clothes on. My shoes. Button my jacket. Summon James to stand outside her door until I return. He meets me in the hall and I hold up a hand to the light while my eyes adjust. At small moments like these, I can imagine how the uncomfortable sting of bright light would multiply and multiply until it’s unbearable.
Other moments—most moments—I don’t care.
I find Hades downstairs in my private dining room, already seated, watching the waiter put plates on the table. Naked suspicion is in his eyes. I note the condition then brush away the information. An old habit. “You’ve come alone,” I tell him as I sit. “Are
you hoping to bond with me?”
The waiter disappears and Hades ignores me, looking down at his plate. “What game are you playing?”
I pick up a fork. “The game where I’m a consummate host and you’re an unhinged asshole. The words you’re looking for are thank you, Zeus, for remembering my dining preferences.”
“My dining preferences don’t involve seeing your face.” He might be unhinged and an asshole, but he still has his table manners. And he doesn’t argue with me about the food.
Because I do know how he prefers his steak and that he is allergic to blueberries. Demeter used to put them in his mouth when he was unconscious. Family fun and games.
I also know that it annoys him to have revealed, accidentally or not, any personal information. Ah, it can’t be helped. We grew up together.
“Did you send Persephone back to the mountain?”
A flicker of distaste. “No.”
“Does Demeter know?” Eyes on mine, a frigid blue around the always-expanded pupils. “For god’s sake, Hades, don’t insult me by pretending that I don’t recognize a pregnant woman when I see one.”
“No one knows.”
“Early, then.
“Yes.” Candlelight dances off the polished silver of his fork. I can tell he’s thinking about killing me with it. “She didn’t feel well enough to travel.”
“As you know, you are a welcome guest for as long as you need.”
He scoffs at this. “Of all the people on the planet, I hate you the most.”
I put a hand to my still-aching chest. “You wouldn’t believe how flattered I am. How honored.” And how tired. I’m fucking tired. It’s not that staying up all night is a particular hardship in my line of work. The worry is what’s different. “I notice you traveled with her here.”
Hades looks down at his plate. It’s several bites before he replies. “It was a necessity.”
“For me? You shouldn’t have.”
“For me, you stupid fuck. She’ll never be apart from me again.” Now the chill in his eyes reaches past my defenses. “She’s the one who wanted to go after your runaway whore. I wouldn’t have taken the time.”
