Door of Bruises (Thornchapel Book 4)

by Sierra Simone

  “I want us,” Saint bursts out. “The three of us. I want to be yours, but God, Auden, you can’t expect me to choose us without some fucking certainty that we’re not brothers!”

  Auden is roiling with the need to make, to hurt, to fuck. He rubs his hands over his face, the roar of his instincts louder than anything else—louder than wisdom, than compassion, than logic.

  Take him to your bed.

  Show him all the certainty he needs.

  Fuck. No. He won’t do that.

  He loves St. Sebastian too much to have this discussion in a language he knows he can win in. Because Saint would go to bed with him. Saint would let himself be fucked and spanked and handled, and Auden will have won, but only for a time. Only for a night, maybe for a few nights, if he were lucky.

  He won’t have won his little martyr back. Not for good.

  “You have to decide,” Auden says. His voice is shaking, and his body too. There’s something caught in his throat and prickling the backs of his eyelids. “You have to choose. If you come back to my bed, it won’t be temporary, and it won’t be contingent on a phone call that could come at any point down the line. If you come back to me, it will be because you’re ready to accept whatever may come, without fear and without shame. Because you’re ready to choose me, even if we are both Ralph’s sons.”

  Saint is looking up at him like Auden is the cruelest man he’s ever met. “So it doesn’t matter to you that I could be yours right now,” Saint says dully. “Tonight.”

  The obstruction in Auden’s throat is downright painful now. “Of course it matters, Saint. You matter. Which is why I’m not going to fuck you on the chance Freddie’s claim is true, and then have you hate yourself when the tests come back and you are still Ralph’s son. You have to be the one to decide it doesn’t matter. You have to learn to forgive yourself for this, independent of whatever alleles you and Freddie may or may not share.”

  Saint looks over to Proserpina, and whatever he sees seems to fill him with defeat. “You really mean this,” he says. “You’re really pushing me away right now.”

  Auden’s eyes burn when he says, around the knot in his throat, “I’m only a man, St. Sebastian. I can only lose you so many times before I lose myself too.”

  He and St. Sebastian look at each other for a long time, Auden’s breathing labored and Saint’s eyes wet. And then finally Saint gets to his feet. “Fine,” he says raggedly. “Have it your way.”

  “My way is having you—don’t forget that. It’s only that I’m asking you to choose me. For better or for worse, as the vows go.”

  “Just like in the chapel when we were young,” Saint says. He’s pushing tears off his cheeks, but there is a small curve to his mouth.

  “Just like in the chapel,” Auden agrees.

  And then St. Sebastian leaves.

  Auden’s barely even opened his mouth to speak before Proserpina is tucked in his lap, her fingers curled into his jumper.

  “Do you have a lecture for me?” Auden asks as he shoves his fingers into her inside-out jeans. She’s only a little wet, so he lifts his fingers to his mouth and licks them, so he can work them inside her hole. She squirms for him, squirms so prettily. The inside of her cunt is like the softest, silkiest thing against his fingertips.

  He would like to fuck it.

  “No,” she says as he stands her up on her feet and starts tugging at her jeans. “You did the right thing.”

  “Did I?”

  “You know you did.”

  “I don’t even know what’s right and wrong anymore.” Her jeans are off now, and so are her knickers, and soon she’s wearing nothing but a soft, slouchy jumper that keeps sliding off one ivory shoulder. “All I know is that I’ve chased him and chased him and chased him. And it never works. It never sticks.”

  His throat still aches something bloody awful and his eyes hurt even worse, but when she frees his erection and positions it against her opening, he forgets about all that. There’s only her, only her green eyes and her wet cunt.

  “Kings were chosen by the people they would lead. Not the other way around,” she says, sinking into his lap. They take a moment to shiver like that, just like that, her bottom on his thighs, her thighs around his hips. She’s too short for her feet to properly brace against the floor, and so she is suspended almost helplessly in this position.

  Auden loves it. He wraps his hands around her plush hips and savors it, her needing him for balance, her sweet powerlessness. “What are you saying?”

  She slides her hands behind his neck and kisses him as he fucks her. Her breath is hitched when she speaks, and even through her bra and jumper, Auden can feel that her nipples are bunched into needy points. “You can’t choose for him,” she says. “You can’t chase him into choosing. But you can remind him of why you’d be a good choice.”

  “Oh, can I?” The inside of her caresses him, kisses him. Strokes wetly up and down his cock. He is close. He wedges a thumb against the ripe berry of her clit. “And how should I remind him?”

  She nips at his lip, which earns her a low growl. He spanks her to settle her down, and then—deciding that’s not enough—he rises to his feet with her thighs wrapped around him and her backside firmly in his hands, and carries her over to the bed, where he flips her on her stomach and ruts into her without mercy.

  The roughness, the prerogative, has her coming in an instant, and it’s that same prerogative that sends him over the edge. He loses himself in the utter sensation of her, and with a series of vicious grunts, he pumps his release free of his body and into hers. Enough that it trickles out around them and onto the duvet. Enough that he thinks maybe he’ll never stop coming, and this is his new heaven, his new eternity.

  He wouldn’t complain if it were.

  He stays on top of her for a long time after he’s done, because they both like it, and when he finally rolls off and pulls her against his chest, she answers his question. “By being yourself, Auden. You remind him by being yourself.”

  “And if being myself is being a kinky pervert?”

  She laughs against his chest. “Isn’t that why he fell in love with you in the first place?”

  Later that night, when Proserpina and Sir James are both snoring on the bed, when Delphine and Rebecca and Becket are asleep in different rooms, when Saint has disappeared back to the village, Auden walks up to the south tower and looks out over the lawn and the dark, muddy stain of the excavation.

  He can’t sleep: his eyes hurt, his chest hurts, he’s hard all over again. Saint should be in his bed. Delphine and Rebecca should be in bed together too. And Becket shouldn’t be orbiting Proserpina like a lonely moon, but Auden doesn’t know how to fix that any more than he knows how to fix anything else.

  All of them are miserable. Sick with love for each other.

  He can’t seem to blink and see properly, like there’s something caught behind his eyelids. Something more than his feelings, anyway, and there in the tower, with the moonlight streaming in and making rosy, thorny patterns on the floor, he starts to cry.

  The tears feel like hot knives, big, slicing, burning, and he is blinded by them and felled by the pain. He’s never had tears hurt before, not like this, not like something is inside his head and trying to climb out through his eyes, and there’s a flash of real fear that he might need serious help—A&E help—when he finally succeeds in crying something free from his right eyelid. It tumbles down his cheek to the floor.

  The pain abating, his vision clearing, Auden looks down at it.

  In a way, he’s almost not surprised.

  A single rose petal rests between his bare feet, wet but untorn. A red so dark that it’s nearly black.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Proserpina

  “Are we all quite settled then?” Rebecca asks.

  We’re all gathered in the library, some of us—me, Delphine and Becket—are sitting in pools of September sun, while others—Rebecca and Auden—are on their feet, paci
ng. St. Sebastian has returned from the village and, as usual, is slouched in the shadows, his eyes on his boots and his lip piercing glinting out from the dim cove of bookshelves where he’s currently hiding.

  We are all together, all about to talk Thornchapel business, and so everything should be as it was. It should be like old times, all of us crowded on chairs and sofas, Delphine wondering if it’s too early to drink, Becket giving an impromptu history lecture, Sir James begging for ear scratches.

  But it’s not like old times.

  Delphine and Rebecca are situated a painful distance apart, as if repelled by some kind of force field, and they’re doing their best not to even look at each other. Saint also seems to be doing his level best not to look at Auden . . . but of course, Auden only has eyes for Saint, like he can rich-boy-smolder his way past Saint’s moral defenses.

  And Becket? Well, he is here from his retreat early, and he’s not wearing his collar, and he’s not mentioned going to St. Petroc’s once—so none of that can possibly bode well, but Becket doesn’t look like a man bereft of his calling. In fact, he seems as content and charming as ever. Maybe even more than usual. And the looks he keeps fixing me with . . .

  But. I also can’t stop the guilt that twists my stomach or the worry that cinches in my chest. I was the reason Becket was caught. I was the reason he was sent away. And the worst part of it is that I don’t know if there’s any silver lining to that. I don’t know if I can offer him anything that was worth losing everything.

  I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to love him like he loves me, not in this life at least. Not when my heart is already sewn to Saint’s and Auden’s and has been since I was twelve years old.

  “We have to close the door,” Rebecca is saying, walking up and down the length of the first library table. She has her braids down today, and they sway with each and every step she takes, with each and every click her ankle boots make against the old wooden floor.

  Delphine is watching Rebecca’s feet like how people in deserts watch rain fall.

  “That much is certain,” Rebecca continues. “And the sooner we close it, the better.”

  Delphine looks very much like she wants to ask why but can’t seem to make herself speak to her ex-Domme. She turns to Auden instead. “But why? I know you didn’t want the door to appear at all, but it is just a door after all, not a landmine. We won’t walk through it, or whatever it is you’re so terribly worried about.”

  Auden sighs, giving Delphine a smile that seems reserved only for her. Gentle and indulgent, utterly fond. “It’s more complicated than that. You’ve seen the roses.”

  She waves a hand. “So the chapel will smell like the Chelsea Flower Show? Who cares?”

  Rebecca stops pacing. For the first time today, she stares down at her ex. “This isn’t a joke, Delph.” She corrects herself with a small shake of her head. “Delphine.”

  “I never said it was, Bex,” Delphine says, sitting up straight in her chair and glaring at Rebecca. Even from here, I can feel the thing between them—sharp and charged with anger and longing. Even from here, I can see the way Rebecca’s eyes drop to Delphine’s lipsticked mouth. Even from here, I can see the pulse in Delphine’s throat.

  Rebecca steps back with a soft oath and turns away.

  “Quartey, tell her what you saw,” Auden says. “She deserves to know.”

  “I know she deserves to know,” Rebecca says brusquely. And then her shoulders slump and she raises a shaking hand to her forehead. “I just don’t like talking about it,” she says. “That’s all.”

  Delphine sits quietly, a furrow between her dark blond brows.

  “I’ll tell you what I saw, and then you’ll understand,” Rebecca says, and then she explains to Delphine—and Becket and Saint—about the night she went to the chapel alone, and what she saw through the door. She explains about the bird and the blood and the flowers that blew over the threshold.

  Delphine’s hand flutters to her chest as Rebecca describes the wren—its snared wing and its pearly-pink feathers and its bright, black eye—and when Rebecca describes its death, Delphine shivers and shivers, like she’s just caught a draft.

  And then the violet and the roselle, both bloody from the bird’s miserable death, and Delphine looks up at Rebecca again. The stubbornness has left her face now, and what’s left is something that looks to me like trust. Like even now after they’ve broken each other’s hearts, Rebecca is still the person Delphine trusts most in this world.

  “My scent,” Delphine says to Rebecca. “It’s violets.”

  “I know,” Rebecca says tiredly. “I know, Delph.”

  There’s no correcting the nickname now, there’s no stepping back. They look at each other and a shared understanding arcs between them.

  After a few seconds of this, Delphine nods. “Well. I suppose this changes things.”

  “If I may,” Becket cuts in. “Have we considered that the door wasn’t showing Rebecca the wren’s death out of some sort of ill will?”

  Auden half sits on the edge of the library table, crossing his ankles and curling his fingers around the edge of the table, drumming them in apparent thought. He’s in a cream turtleneck and velvet slippers and trousers the color of Japanese maple leaves in fall, and he should look ridiculous, but he doesn’t at all. With the hair tumbling over his forehead and the muscles moving under the thin cashmere of his sweater, he looks like money and sex and I wonder if it would be too distracting if I went over and sat at his feet right now. If I bent over them and started kissing the bare skin above his slippers.

  “Are you saying that you don’t think there was intention behind what Rebecca saw?” Auden is replying as I move over to him and settle on the floor. He drops a hand to cup the back of my head while he continues to talk, and despite everything—despite the unhappiness everywhere else in the room—I’m so content I could purr. I press my face against Auden’s thigh as Becket responds.

  “I’m saying intention doesn’t signify malevolence.”

  “What other purpose could there be?” Rebecca asks. “It wasn’t exactly a fucking Disney scene, Becket. It was slaughter. Gruesome, pointed slaughter.”

  “But is there no other alternative?” Becket asks. “Is there no way that it could have been something more . . . neutral?”

  “More neutral than death?” Auden interjects, a tad incredulously.

  “It’s a vision,” Becket explains. “They aren’t always meant as literal signs. In the Bible, Daniel sees a lionlike beast with its wings getting torn off, and he later sees a beast with iron teeth which gnash everything in its path, but the beasts weren’t meant to be seen literally. They were symbols of—”

  “Of the Babylonian empire and the Roman Empire respectively, yes, I did my catechism too, Becket,” Auden interrupts impatiently. “But we’re not talking allegory here, we’re talking about a threat. To one or more of us.”

  “This is the danger with symbols and omens,” Becket says. “They can be read more than one way, and yet we often pick one interpretation and stand by it. All I’m asking is if it’s possible that—like Daniel with his kingdom-beasts—the omen might be more explicative than existential?”

  “Hasn’t Daniel’s book been used to predict the end times?” a voice says from the edge of the room. I crane my head to see Saint, but all I can see are his boots under the table as he leans against the shelves next to him. “I remember that much from Sunday school. And the end times seem pretty existential to me.”

  “Also Daniel was a captive in the same foreign empire that destroyed his city and exiled his court,” Auden points out. Still impatiently. “What seems merely political to us may have been very existential to him.”

  “I’m not arguing that,” Becket says calmly. “I’m only pointing out that what Rebecca saw might have a meaning beyond terror. That’s all.”

  “What else can it be if not a threat, Becket?” Delphine asks him.

  “I don’t know,” Becket says,
leaning back in his chair. “I really don’t. I only know that we can’t be certain the door means us harm.”

  “It could be a warning,” I hear myself say. Auden’s fingers slide into the base of my braid; my face is tilted up to his.

  “What do you mean?” he asks.

  “If it’s not a threat. It could be a warning instead.”

  “A warning of what?”

  “I don’t know either,” I say. “I’m just guessing. But warnings and threats are cousins to each other. Read wrong and one might look like the other, you know?”

  There is a silence among us all a moment.

  “If it is a warning,” Rebecca says, “could it not still be a warning of itself? Of some force that lays beyond the door?”

  “More saliently,” Auden adds, releasing my hair and then standing up straight, “the price of ignoring a warning seems lower than ignoring the price of a threat. That is, if we close the door thinking it means us harm and we are mistaken, then we lose very little. But if we leave it open and then we are mistaken about doing that, we could lose quite a lot more. It’s a risk I’m not willing to take. Not with Delly or Rebecca or anyone else here.”

  “I’m not opposed to keeping our friends safe,” Becket says. “All I want is to be sure it’s necessary. That we’re choosing this knowing we might be wrong. Knowing that we might not be able to qualify the door in terms of good or bad or neutral, and that there might be some blessing or transformation to come from it that we can’t yet fathom or perceive. That’s all.”

  “That’s all, huh?” Saint says dryly.

  I can feel the tension in Auden’s body, and after giving his knee one last nuzzle, I stand up and take his hand. He seizes my grip with palpable relief as he speaks. “If I’m being asked to weigh the possibility of the door hurting one of us versus a conceptual gift, then you must know what I’ll say, Becket. Don’t you? You are a shepherd yourself, and you know that shepherds can’t lead their flocks near to a cliff because the shepherd thinks the view might be worthwhile. The danger is too great. The flock comes first.”