Birds of Paradise

by Anne Malcom

  My lips were a stark red against the white, fuller than they should’ve been. Almost, but not quite, sex-vixen lips. It was comical because they didn’t belong on my mousy face.

  My angular cheekbones were too sharp and high to be defined as striking or model-like. Drab brown eyes so close to the color of my pupils they almost looked black. My forehead was slightly too high and made my features look scrunched to the middle of my face.

  My hair was the same muddy color as my eyes. I didn’t color it. Well, not anymore. I toyed with the honeysuckle strands that crept halfway up my locks. They were like my scars, another reminder of my life before. Christopher had made me color it. He didn’t ask, he told. With his words, not his fists, or his knife, or his dick. I was so grateful I happily went to the overpriced and bitchy hairstylist he’d organized.

  I was sure he was fucking her. Mostly because she was beautiful and he’d met her. Christopher liked beautiful women—still a mystery as to why he’d married me—and he loved fucking them. He loved forcing me to watch too. Watch how he’d fuck them roughly, but the right kind of rough, the kind of rough those women liked. The kind to make them scream in pleasure. He taunted me with that. Because once they were gone, with a handful of cash and a flushed face, he’d fuck me.

  Rape me.

  Rough.

  Not like any woman wanted.

  And I didn’t scream. At the start I did. It was never in pleasure.

  I never left like those women did. Couldn’t even leave the room under my own power most times.

  He’d never fucked the bitchy hairstylist in front of me, but I was almost certain he was fucking her. Because of the way she tugged at my hair with needless violence, the way she sneered at me, her brisk snapping of my head. Though she never made my hair look terrible like I was sure she wanted. She wasn’t that stupid.

  It looked nice, beautiful, when she was done. Shiny, healthy, light like someone had cracked open my head and honey had poured out, evenly coating my hair.

  I hated it. How beautiful it was.

  Because someone—my husband—had cracked my head open. There was a scar to the right of my parting to show this, and I knew honey didn’t pour out, and it wasn’t beautiful. It was ugly and wrong and terrible, but at least it was real.

  It was growing out now, that honey. It took longer than it should’ve because my hair had barely grown an inch since I’d been taken from my home. I was surprised it didn’t all just fall out, that my body didn’t just give up on me after all the horror I’d put it through.

  But that was the funny thing about the body—it kept going, kept repairing itself, even after unthinkable horrors.

  The soul was another story.

  I squeezed my eyes shut, as if I could erase myself into the blackness. But when I opened them I was still there. There was no choice. The slaps of my bare feet against the tile echoed in the room as I padded into my closet naked.

  My hand reached toward the space reserved for my chunky jumpers, on regular rotation. I paused, touching the fabric that was rough and soft at the same time.

  My hand released it and I walked to the other side of the closet, yanking down a formfitting long-sleeved shirt. It was red. The color of blood.

  Perfect.

  I found tight stretchy black jeans to go underneath. My entire body was covered and yet still the most on display it had been since Christopher picked out my attire.

  It was uncomfortable. Scary. Painful. But I didn’t take the clothes off. I was scared, uncomfortable and in pain every part of the day anyway. Maybe adding to it was the only way to make it go away, make it bottleneck and explode so I might finally stop feeling all this. Maybe I’d be able to leave the death and decay of this place behind.

  Leave him behind.

  But to leave him behind, I had to find him. I had to push myself to do what every fiber of my being warned me not to do: go to the dead room again. He’d be watching through his cameras. And I was certain he’d come. Because that room was for beautiful dead things. Not hideous, walking, talking complications like me. He’d need to remove me from his carefully curated collection before I tainted it.

  I didn’t even get halfway there.

  Going to his side of the house required me to skirt past the dining room and the sitting room—with the gorgeous french doors opening to the beautiful and mysterious garden. Usually I looked at it with yearning, sadness, muted anger.

  Today I didn’t even glance at it because of something infinitely more mysterious and deadly right in the middle of my path.

  Him.

  I was surprised, shocked but not silent.

  “How is it that I still don’t know your name?” I demanded.

  He didn’t pause for the same amount of time as usual to answer. He didn’t even glance at me and my less-than-usual attire. I rejected the feeling of disappointment that came with this.

  “Oliver,” he said easily, as if he hadn’t withheld it for the entire time I’d been here.

  “Oliver,” I repeated, tasting the smooth and pleasing name on my tongue. And it was pleasant. Harmless. It didn’t suit him at all, nor the accent he did such a good job of disguising. “That’s not a Russian name.”

  The slight widening of his eyes was the most dramatic expression of shock I’d ever seen on his beautifully and cruelly harsh face.

  “What?”

  I resisted the urge to smirk in triumph at catching him unawares.

  “The woman who celebrates small triumphs is also the woman who loses great wars, with others and, most importantly, with herself.”

  The words took me by surprise, mostly because they were coming from inside my head. Not that I wasn’t used to hearing a voice inside my head, but this was not my own. This was Agna’s, the woman who, until now, I’d forgotten completely about.

  I’d banished her to the absolute corner of my mind because she’d been kind to me for the two weeks she’d been in my family’s employ. One had to banish memories of kindness when cruelty was all they knew. It was one thing to live with cruelty without the knowledge of anything different. It was quite another when you realized people were capable of being kind.

  I quickly shook Agna from my head.

  “Russian,” I said again. “Oliver is not a Russian name.” I paused, flicking through some folders in my head. “If I’m not mistaken, it’s a Norman French form of a Germanic name.”

  He regained his composure. “Old Norse, actually,” he corrected.

  “Still not Russian,” I countered with confidence as foreign as my attire.

  “How do you know I’m Russian?”

  “Are you Russian?” I asked. I had a strange certainty that he wouldn’t lie to me. He was a killer, kidnapper and a lot of other things, but I suspected he wasn’t a liar out of nature, only necessity.

  “My lineage does not make me one thing or another,” he said instead.

  I folded my arms. “I’m pretty sure it does. And you’ve done an excellent job at hiding your accent,” I complimented. “But I took linguistics since age five, specializing in identifying the main signifiers of different accents and the telltale signs of people trying to hide them.” I paused. “I’ll hazard a guess to say not many people you encounter will hear you speak enough to analyze your syntax, phonetics and phonology, among other things. Since I’m guessing you kill them before you can get that far?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “So I’ll repeat my question. What’s your name?” I asked. “Not the alias you no doubt adopted a number of years ago when you decided to distance yourself from whatever humanity you were born with.” My words, the even confidence and strength behind them, shocked me. I sounded in control. Capable. I sounded like a stranger.

  Now he looked at me. Slowly. Purposefully. Every time his eyes moved it was a physical touch, fire and ice. Pain. Hatred.

  I found myself full of sick satisfaction that I was wearing the red top and the black jeans, showing him my sharp edges so he could glimp
se some of the ugliness I hid beneath the layers.

  “Lukyan,” he rasped, a harsher and more pronounced Russian accent seeping into the word, as if speaking the name aloud welcomed that person back into him.

  “Yeah,” I whispered. “That’s your name.” That was the name suited to the cold-blooded, chiseled, haunting and hard man in front of me. With those piercing eyes and difficult features.

  It was something he hadn’t given freely in a long while. I knew this instinctively, like I knew some other things, by the way the air crackled with anger. His eyes burned with the hatred that had flowed through me two days ago. With the need to kill.

  Death was always lurking in the air, but it became more pronounced as soon as he offered me a little part of himself he had kept from the world. There was a reason he hid it, I was sure. Something that maintained his life. And I was threatening that by making him utter it, expose it. I was complicating things.

  Was I deliberately taunting him so he might kill me? Was that it? That had been my destination before I found him in my path—the room of dead things. Some part of me was going to make sure I didn’t leave it.

  He blinked at me at the same time he stepped forward. No, stalked forward. Like he had that night in the dim glow of the lamp. I hadn’t noticed it being absent from his gait before, but I knew it now. He was coming forward with death on his heels.

  I didn’t retreat, though some of my last remaining survival instincts screamed at me to. There weren’t enough of those left to move my feet.

  So he came, and death did too.

  I exhaled in relief. Some sick part of me was glad he was doing it. Glad he got that intimacy of killing me, that he’d keep my death with him in his house. In his collection.

  I expected his hands to fasten around my neck, to squeeze, crunch my windpipe, neglect me of air. But they didn’t. They were aiming in that direction, I was sure of that. My gaze hadn’t left his, which was cold and unyielding, a chasm that I was going to willfully surrender into. But then it closed off at the same moment his hands fastened tightly and painfully around my shoulders.

  Surprise stopped me from fighting as he moved me. My feet that had once been concrete cinderblocks attaching me to the floor lifted and easily let themselves be led. It was only when the garden rushed at me through crystal-clear windows that my mind caught up with me and started to struggle. And of course, it was too late by then.

  “I’m not going to let you create another prison,” he said flatly, opening the door.

  I immediately tensed against the crisp air assaulting me, pressing backward to seek solace in the house that still terrified me. Against the man who still terrified me as much as he intrigued me.

  But nothing terrified me more than that breeze, that wide open sky, the outside. My struggles may well have been that of a child’s; iron was at my back, pushing me forward with the force of his step.

  The world rushed forward as I teetered on the edge of the doorstep. Fragrances assaulted my senses: freshly cut grass, flowers… life. It should’ve been refreshing against the stale scent of death my nostrils had become accustomed to.

  It wasn’t. It was suffocating. Nauseating. I didn’t need life in my nostrils, in my lungs. I didn’t need to be taunted with it. I would’ve rather died than be presented with that.

  “The world will always be here, whether you insist on letting yourself rot within four walls and a roof or not,” he said as he pushed at me. “You still exist in it on the outside, the exact same way as you do on the inside.”

  Something in me broke the second it became painfully apparent that I had no control over the situation. That I was, for the second time, being pushed out into the world I’d been hiding from. Whatever it was that broke, it wasn’t quick. It was jagged and ugly and loud. I screamed like a banshee. My struggles became that of a wild animal, a feral cat. I struck out with every single one of my limbs. Scored flesh with my nails, chomped my teeth, willing to sink them into flesh, rip it from the bone.

  But I didn’t. I didn’t get the blood I so craved. No, instead I had a pause in my wild insanity within the calm insanity of ice blue eyes. This was quickly followed by a fist plowing into my face, a flash of pain, the slight crunch of bone and then nothing.

  I awoke with a horrible sense of déjà vu. And a terrible headache that rattled the back of my eyeballs. Streams of light were shards of glass, cutting into my skin, settling from a sharp sting to a persistent dull ache as time went on. Eventually it subsided enough so I could open my eyes and blink at my surroundings.

  Another time waking in an unfamiliar room, not what had become my room, and another time waking up to Oliver—no, Lukyan watching me, a statue with a heartbeat and a need for death.

  He didn’t move or speak when his eyes met mine. Neither did I. He might’ve expected me to. To yell, scream, like I had before. Before he’d punched me in the face. I was sure he was expecting me to proverbially throw that in his face.

  I did not.

  I had been punched before.

  I’d had much worse.

  My face felt hot, and the skin was tight where a bruise would form purple under my eye. Nothing, really. If I was lucky, I had one of these weekly in my other life.

  In my other life, the male responsible for my injuries gave no apologies, so I expected none from Lukyan.

  Instead, I inspected where I was. On a bed, for starters. On top of the covers. They had the same familiar softness and luxury as mine, but they were darker and heavy. I fingered the velvet-like fabric. It was a dull charcoal, like most of the décor in the room. It was just enough lightness to make sure you could separately identify each object from the black suede armchair Lukyan was sitting in in the corner.

  Everything was dark enough to make you feel like you could disappear, melt into the inky black décor and never surface.

  This was Lukyan’s room.

  This was Lukyan.

  “Do you realize you fought harder against me when I threatened to take you out and live than you did when I dragged you in to die?” he asked, his quiet voice echoing through the room.

  I stayed silent.

  “Of course you did,” he continued, voice soft. Deadly. “Because it was all purposeful.” He pushed out of the chair, stalked toward me. “Because you want to die.”

  Unlike before when I hadn’t retreated, this time my body instinctively pushed back against the headboard. I would’ve crawled up the wall if I’d been able, but the ricocheting pain in my head stopped me from attempting it.

  Lukyan was at the side of the bed before I could scramble off it. “You wanted to die when you came looking for me, when you challenged me,” he continued, eyes anchors that kept me in place. “You wanted me to kill you because you’re too cowardly to do it yourself.” He inspected me. “But you need to realize, to remember, I’m not going to kill you just because you want to die. If I kill you, it’s because I know there’s no prospect of you ever coming back to life.”

  He leaned forward, and I was both terrified and titillated at the prospect of him touching me. A woodsy mix of linen and fury enveloped me. His face was inches away.

  “I’m never going to let you control me through your death wish. I control you. It’s become clear that I control your death. Which pleases you.” He paused purposefully. “I control your life. Which terrifies you.”

  He sucked in a visible inhale, smelling me, drinking me in, and my stomach jumped inexplicably, my thighs quivering.

  “I told you that I didn’t derive sexual gratification from other people’s pain and suffering, and that was the truth.”

  His hand ghosted over the spot where he’d punched me, not making contact, but somehow ice and tenderness melted together and sucked up the pain.

  “But you’re not other people. And you’re changing all the fucking rules. Because all you have to offer is pain, and I’ll have to take my pleasure in that.”

  He hung in the air right beside his words for a sliver of a moment, a
nd then he leaned back, straightening, the statue hardening before my eyes.

  My breath came in rough pants.

  “Now get the fuck out of my room before I decide to put us both out of our misery and kill you here and now.”

  His voice and words held such promise that I was on my feet and out the door before I knew what I was doing. I made my way back to my side of the house in a trance, my body vibrating with pain, excitement, fear.

  Desire.

  A cocktail of ugly emotions, the most overwhelming of which was need. Sickening need to have stayed there, enveloped in the blackness of Lukyan’s room, of his soul, testing out his promise. Risking death for another inhale of his scent, for the prospect of teasing out the glint of desire I saw in his eyes.

  It made no sense, that horrifying desire that pulsed through every part of me, prickling against my pain and terror. For a lot of obvious reasons, it made no sense. But the most shocking—to me, at least—being I had never felt desire. Not when I was battling with puberty and unstable hormones. Because puberty was overshadowed by different and deadlier battles and more toxic instability that was my family.

  When other girls my age were focused on boys, fretting over pimples and curfews, I was hoping my mother didn’t follow through on her promise to make me watch my father punish enemies in order to harden me up.

  There were no boys.

  I’d lost my virginity on my wedding night.

  I’d had a quick and violent lesson that, for me at least, desire and sex were worlds apart from each other. Sex, like every other part of my life, came with pain. Opened me up to pain I’d never been able to conjure up or realize a human being could survive.

  I came to think, to be certain, that desire was a myth as fantastical as happiness, hope and Harry Potter.

  Until now.

  Until I felt it for the man who’d promised to kill me.

  And meant it.

  9

  Everyone with agoraphobia is afraid. Of course, that’s a gross simplification of a complex mental condition, but at the crux of this crippling condition is fear, despite whatever clinical term it’s packaged into. Fear so crippling it becomes a separate entity from those within whom it originated. It’s a being that looms upon you, guards the door to the outside world, standing there confronting you, daring you to push it aside to regain a sense of normalcy.