The evening is cool, like the sky promised it would be.
A rumpled vista of yellow gorse and pinky-purple heather greets me as I reach the equinox stones, panting from my punishing run from the house. I stagger in uneven circles as I unscrew the cap of my water bottle and take an ill-advisedly long drink—gulping the water down and immediately feeling nauseous. I stop drinking and focus on pulling in precious air, very aware that the wind seems to be gasping with me. Aware that the grass and gorse around my feet are slowly tossing in agitation, as if trying to catch their breath too.
I thought a run would clear my head, but it didn’t. Instead, I feel even fuller of everything: my missing Poe and my missing St. Sebastian, Rebecca’s grief, Delphine’s seclusion, Becket’s forced retreat. The graves. The chapel.
The roses.
The door.
I can nearly see the chapel from here, although not quite. The view from Reavy Hill would be better. Instead, I can see above the lip of the Thorne Valley, I can see out to the myriad villages, tors, farms, fields, hedges, rivers, and rocks that make Dartmoor the beautiful place it is. I can see nearly to the farthest north end of the valley, where the Kernstow farmhouse huddles against the wind, bleak and beleaguered.
It was the Kernstows first, before the Guests. But it was always a king.
For centuries and longer, it seems, people have been going to the door. The door which is now open.
And what’s terrible is I don’t even care.
I don’t even care right now, because I turned into my father and St. Sebastian ran from me, and I made Proserpina run after him, because I’m a monster who should be alone and I’m a man who can’t be trusted.
I’m the wrong kind of king.
I should go back to the house. I should go back and eat the supper Abby’s prepared for Rebecca and me, and I should sit in the library with my friend and work in silence until one of us breaks down and gets the gin or the scotch or whatever our nightly poison will be.
I should go home and pretend I’m not checking my phone every five minutes, pretend I’m not miserable at the prospect of more and more days like this. Working at Thornchapel, working in London. Sleeping alone.
Regretting everything and yet not regretting enough.
Would I do it again? Would I tie antlers to my head and chase St. Sebastian through the forest knowing we shared a father? Would I make him vow to be mine forever and ever?
I don’t even have to ask myself that. Of course I would. I won’t absolve myself, I won’t release myself from the utter wrongness of lying, but when it felt like the other option was saying goodbye . . . losing him once I’d finally gotten him back . . .
No, I would have held on to him with my teeth if I could have.
See? I told you.
The wrong kind of king.
I turn away from the moors—currently misting over with an effete evening rain—and make to go back down to the house below, and that’s when I see it, tucked against the base of a standing stone. A small sheep . . . or a large lamb. I think it’s asleep until I realize its eyes are open, and it’s in fact quite dead.
I pull out my phone to call the Livestock Society—dead animals are common enough that I’m familiar with the reporting process—but the reception up here is shit. I’m going to have to wait until I get back to the house to report it. With a sigh that would definitely earn the label of dramatic if Rebecca were around, I get closer to take a quick picture in case the livestock people want it.
I see it on the screen of my phone before I see it on the sheep itself: a rope of thorns caught around one hoof. Strung along the thorns like fruit on a vine are several black roses, looking fresh and full and totally out of place up here in the open hills and the green grass.
The sheep must have wandered into the chapel and back out again. It’s not uncommon for the sheep to find their way down there, not at all, but the sight of the roses gives me pause all the same.
I walk closer, approaching the carcass like it’s a trap designed to snare lonely architects, and then crouch in front of the animal to examine it more closely. It must be recently dead—there’s no bloating of the belly, no awkwardly jutting legs indicating rigor mortis. No flies, no nothing. It looks like it simply laid down to rest next to the standing stone and never got up again.
Unease crawls along the back of my neck and I stand up.
It’s nothing, it’s absolutely nothing at all. This is Dartmoor, sheep—alive and dead—are everywhere. That it could have been in the chapel is nothing. That the animal doesn’t look sick or injured or anything other than half garlanded with the roses from near the door is nothing.
I’m just on edge because I miss the two other pieces of my heart, because I found eight graves within sight of my bedroom window today. It’s nothing and perhaps if I keep telling myself it’s nothing, I’ll believe it.
I turn and jog down the hill as the rain finally comes, as listless and feeble as I feel.
Chapter Three
Auden
I hadn’t meant to keep it from him. Not at first.
I’d set the letter from my father down, and I’d stared at my desk—brand new, empty, the desk of a fresh start—and I’d let myself quietly bleed out onto the floor.
My father was a murderer, an abuser, an adulterer. During his life, he’d inflicted his strange combination of toxic charisma and cruelty on anyone within reach. That he fathered a child I hadn’t known about shouldn’t have surprised me; it shouldn’t have counted among the worst of his sins.
In a way, it made a perfect kind of sense. The money my father gave Jennifer Martinez, the way Jennifer stayed here in Thorncombe long after her husband’s death. My father’s reaction to our assault in the graveyard: cold fury and possessive concern not only for me, but for St. Sebastian too.
The way St. Sebastian himself seemed drawn to this place, to its wild edges and lonely secrets. The way we seemed drawn together—to fight, to fuck, to love the same person—and the way that however we came together, we also always fit somehow. Even with fists and blood, even with bites and kisses, we fit.
In architecture, we talk about honesty. An honest structure is one that shows its history and its bones. Visible struts, rivets, trusses. You can walk into a building and see what holds it up and why; you can perceive the need of each and every element; you can see the fingerprints of its builders, the concessions to budget, the compromises and the mistakes.
It is a thing of beauty to walk into a space and see with such unvarnished clarity its purpose, its very existence.
I was not honest later, but in every other way, my love was an honest thing made even more honest by learning the truth. Yes, I could see the rivets and trusses now.
Yes, I could see the stains, the splinters, the scars.
I chose it anyway. My sin was not trusting that he would too; my vindication was knowing I was right, because I lied and in the end, it was for nothing.
In the end, he chose to be alone.
“Shh,” I tell Sir James Frazer after a solid thirty seconds of growling. I’m typing my weekly email to Becket. While he’s on his leave of absence, he’s not supposed to have access to email and social media, so I don’t expect a response, but I’ve grown used to having him around, to having him only a few miles away whenever I wanted company, and so the emails are a temporary balm.
I miss him. I miss him, and now is when I would need my priest the most, not only his conversations by the fire, but his blessings and his absolutions. The way he looked at you like he was going to lead you right to God himself and help you press your forehead to the top of God’s presumably sandaled feet.
But now he’s gone and Poe’s gone and St. Sebastian is gone and Delphine is with her parents, and everything is hollow here, including me.
Sir James doesn’t listen to my admonishments and continues to growl at the glass. He loves the new office because the windows offer vantages out to the lawn—where bunnies quite rudely nose for clo
ver without his permission—and into the trees along the front of the house, where the even ruder birds flap around without giving him a chance to chase them. I assume he’s growling at the birds now, until his growls abruptly change into happy puppy-barks and he’s tearing across the length of the office and down the stairs.
I go to the window in time to see Proserpina locking the door of the car I lent her, a bag slung over her shoulder, her hair a waterfall of dark silk down her back. Even from here I can see the expression on her face—pensive, sad—and the short skirt she’s wearing with no tights underneath.
My dick is hard in an instant, my heart is outside my body even faster than that, and then I’m tearing downstairs just like Sir James, desperate to see her, to see those green eyes I feel like I’ve known forever. Eyes as green as the trees around the chapel. Kernstow eyes.
Twice while she was with St. Sebastian, she called me. I didn’t ask her to—in fact, when I told her to leave, I told her not to call, to spend all her time with him, to focus entirely on him. I didn’t want her to feel like her loyalty was bifurcated or split—I didn’t want her to be anything less than whole and happy with him, as much as wholeness and happiness were possible in the circumstances.
But even then she called me twice from the hotel room she was renting. Both times needing something only I could give her, and so I did, out of weakness or mercy—or both, because I needed it too.
The first time, I had her kneel alone on the floor, her skirt up and her cute little blouse unbuttoned, and then I had her prop her phone against the wall so I could watch as she slowly brought herself off. The second time, I had her pinch herself from the inside of each knee to the dip of her navel and then in one line across the soft stretch of her lower belly—making a long, skinny A of bright red blotches on her body.
And then she made herself come for me.
It was a relief—a small blessing in a time that seemed starved of them—but it wasn’t enough. How could it be enough? I’d barely been satisfied having both Proserpina and St. Sebastian constantly available to me in my house. Two phone calls, however filthy, were never going to slake me.
And so when I reach Proserpina downstairs, when I see her in the Great Hall murmuring to Sir James as she scratches his ears and he wags his tail in big, excited tail-circles, I can’t handle it, I can’t stop myself. Even though I know there are workers in the old wing of the house, even though I know she’s probably had a long drive. I love her and I want her, and the line between loving and wanting has always been thin for me.
As has the line between loving and taking.
I stalk over to her and thread a hand through her hair while my other hand moves her so she’s pressed against me, her back to my front. I find the placket of her blouse, run my fingers up the buttons until I find the top one resting at the base of her throat. “You’re not supposed to be here,” I say, popping buttons open and reaching inside. Through the lace of the bra, her nipples are drawn into hard little points. “I sent you away.”
“I couldn’t stay away,” she says, sounding miserable. “I missed you and I missed this place and I have a job to do and also I had this dream—ohhh.”
I’ve found a nipple, and I roll it between my fingertips. “No, little bride. You promised.”
“You know I think that promise was bullshit anyway—”
I’ve found her other nipple now, and I pull on her hair, not hard enough to hurt, only hard enough to tug her head to my shoulder and expose her throat. I can look down the front of her like this, down the path of skin and lace I’ve just exposed, down to where my hand is toying with her. Glimpses of berry-pink tease up at me through lace and between fingertips.
She shivers against me, and I’m shivering right back. It’s been so long, too bloody long, and when I think of her with him—when I think of him—I’m burning with that feeling again, that feeling I felt in the thorn chapel as a youth, that feeling I felt during Beltane. Like I’m full of the entire world, like I’m full of leaves and sunlight and fire and doors that will go anywhere I want them to, absolutely anywhere.
Like a king. And not a king trimmed with ermine and jewels, but a king like how kings used to be. Stripped to the waist and panting, young, half reckless and sometimes-wild.
I wish it were Beltane. I wish I were running through the woods now, hunting the people I love, getting ready to claim them by the fire with ashes in the air and hunger in my heart.
Proserpina goes pliant against me, her body softening and molding against mine. “I know my safe word,” she whispers. “You don’t have to hold back. Not now.”
There’s a long table in the hall—old enough that I’ve never had the heart to throw it away, but ugly enough that I donated it to the renovation efforts—and I have Proserpina bent over the top of it in less than an instant, her hands braced next to a coil of wire and cans of paint, and her skirt flipped over her creamy bottom, which I quickly redden with a few judicious swats. Not as punishment, not as discipline. Not for any other reason than I like seeing her lips part as she gasps against the table. I like seeing the arch of her back and the reflexive kick of her feet. I like feeling her skin against my palm and knowing that here, right now in this moment, the gnaw of the thorns around my heart no longer hurts as it normally does. It feels right and necessary—and inevitable. Lightning finding the ground, rivers finding the sea . . . and my body against hers.
“You’re not wearing anything under your skirt,” I say, my knuckles brushing against her bare skin as I unzip my trousers. “Good.”
“I hoped for this,” she confesses, looking back at me as much as she can. “I missed this.”
I was the one who told her to leave, I was the one who made her promise, and yet I’m squeezed all over by miseries and longings too numerous to name. “Did you miss this? While you were fucking him?”
I sound jealous. I am jealous. And I’m also not jealous at all. There’s no explaining it, except to say that even jealousy can be exquisite sometimes. Who can account for all the ways we like to be bruised? The beautiful girl in front of me likes to be spanked and bitten. I instead have chosen to fall in love with two people who also love each other.
One of whom now hates me.
You’re being selfish and you’re trying to keep people who don’t want to be kept . . . you’re no better than him.
So that’s the equation you’re proposing. I’m not our father if I let you leave me.
He was right. And I was right to make Proserpina leave too, but I’m too selfish to make her leave again. I’m too selfish to let her go.
Maybe I am my father after all.
She’s nodding against the table at my question, panting softly as I run my fingers up her thigh to see if she’s ready to be fucked. “You know I did. You know he did. We can . . . try . . . with each other, but it’s not the same, it’s never the same.”
She’s mostly wet but not quite there. My aching cock surges in envy as I slide a finger inside her tight heat. “You try topping each other without me there?” It fires my blood to think about—both with hunger and with an irritated possession. “You let him, what? Spank you? Bite you? Fuck you rough?”
Her eyelashes are fluttering—I haven’t let up on my exploration between her legs—and when she answers, her voice is breathy and low. “Sometimes. If I make him do things, it almost works.”
Because she likes the pain, the roughness, the touch of it, and St. Sebastian needs the spirit of the thing, the subtextual anima that makes kink work. The compelling would almost be enough for him, and the pain would almost be enough for her.
Fuck me, I wish I could watch them do it. Not that I’d be able to stand it for very long. Within minutes I’d be on them both, my fingers in their hair, my mouth seeking theirs. Even imagining it has me crawling out of my skin.
“You know your safe word?” I confirm as I slide my fingers free. She’s still not wet enough, but she told me once that she likes it that way. She likes the first fe
w thrusts to walk that line between pleasure and pain. My organ is ready to oblige, throbbing painfully as I rub the dark, swollen cap against her skin, seeking out her entrance.
“Yes,” she says, moaning impatiently. “I already told you—”
I push inside without any further warning, spreading my hand between her shoulder blades to keep her pinned to the table as I fuck. Quick, shallow, a little mean.
She comes almost immediately, keening into the table as her hands scratch at the surface of it. I curse as I feel it, that first sharp quiver, and my testicles draw up tight to my body, already aching to come too. My head drops to my chest, and I drag in a long breath, fighting for control. But I can’t not look at her for too long. She’s too wonderful like this, pinned under my hand and whispering my name as her body shivers around my erection.
Though I’ve been keeping a loose watch on our perimeter, I check the doorway joining the old wing to the hall to make sure her hardly-quiet climax hasn’t brought us any voyeurs. The team is working on the top story this week, but workers on a site are like ants on an anthill, swarming everywhere, and so it’s very possible we might have someone coming through the hall for something. Proserpina is an exhibitionist and probably wouldn’t mind being seen so much, but “can the construction team watch me shag you over a table” is a conversation we haven’t had yet, and I wouldn’t cross that line until I was sure.
Satisfied we’re alone for now, I pull out again, looking down so I can see how her body grips mine as I slide away. She’s tight and warm and sweet, and her curvy bottom makes the perfect heart shape when she’s bent over like this. A heart shape I get to fuck.
“Auden,” she breathes. “Sir.” A hand reaches back for me, and I catch her fingers in mine as I pierce her again, this time driving all the way in until every inch of me is squeezed and wet.
“Fuck,” I say, because that’s it, that’s it, that’s it. Who can get anything done when there’s a Proserpina around?
Door of Bruises (Thornchapel Book 4) Page 3
