Fallen Rose

by Amelia Wilde

  He swallows. “I have a confession.”

  “Tell me. Please. I love you.”

  With his hands on my face, looking into my eyes, Leo tells me everything. He tells me about his meeting with Winston, and the conversation they had about Caroline. He tells me about showing Winston proof. His eyes darken at the mention of it, so I don’t ask. Winston is at the party, I learn, because he did believe Leo—he just couldn’t convince his mother to back off in time. He came to the party to tell Leo.

  And then he tells me about the visitor he met with. Explains that he was the man from the library—the one with the strange eyes. The one whose wife was like a little moon. That man, a man named Hades, tried to buy Jane Eyre for her, and that’s how they know each other. Leo tells me how, in their one phone conversation, that man heard the pain in his voice and asked him about it. He’s talking about the pain in his back, the chronic, never-ending pain.

  “No one else,” Leo says. “No one else has noticed it before.”

  “So you invited him to our engagement party?”

  “No. I found out—” He shakes his head. There’s a color to his cheeks that’s not usually there, and my heart beats in the hollow of my throat. I don’t know what it means. “I found out he owns a diamond mine. His master jeweler is the best one in the country. I wanted a ring for you.”

  “I love what I have.” It may not be worth a bunch of money, but it means commitment. It means love. And I would cherish it even if Leo Morelli didn’t own a castle.

  He gives me a gentle smile. “This is better.”

  A velvet box appears in my hands, and I open the lid carefully. And gasp. A large diamond sparkles in the center, but it’s not white. Or yellow. Or pink. Or any of the other colors I’ve seen my Constantine cousins wear. Instead it’s a brilliant black. “How?” I manage to say, my voice shaking. “This is… too much. It’s beautiful. I can’t.”

  He seems to understand my babbling. “It’s naturally that color. Magnolia cut. Five carats.”

  It’s an intricate shape with curling edges, surrounded by a row of plush diamonds, as if it’s cradled in a cloud. I tilt the box, moving the ring in and out of the light. In the shadows it looks almost opaque. Only in the light can you see the millions of perfect facets. It reminds me of Leo Morelli himself. “It’s perfect, Leo. How did you know?”

  “I wanted something unique for you.” Leo doesn’t quite meet my eyes as he pulls the velvet box from my shaking hands. He takes the ring from the satin and twists it gently. “There’s an inscription. There was too much I wanted to say. Not enough space.”

  I take the ring from him, needing to read it. The gold band has incredibly fine engraving on top, something that looks both antique and timeless. On the inside it’s mostly smooth except for a script that reads I am no bird, no net ensnares me. Tears heat my eyes. “It’s a quote from Jane Eyre,” I manage to say, feeling breathless, faint. “My favorite quote.”

  His dark eyes swim before me like black diamond. Through watery eyes I watch him slide the ring onto my finger. “I want you to be free. Not trapped here, Haley. Not because of a contract or anything else. I want you to choose this.”

  “I do.” And I prove it by throwing my arms around his neck. As always, I’m careful. Even when I’m full of emotion, full of passion, I’m careful that I don’t touch too low on his neck. That’s where his scars begin. Where his pain begins, and I don’t want any pain in this moment.

  Leo pulls back and gives me an unreadable look.

  “Something’s wrong,” I say, sensing his uncertainty. “Whatever it is, you can tell me. The ring. Is it too much? Oh, of course it’s too much. I don’t need something that expensive.”

  “It’s not that. No, darling. It’s—” He shakes his head. “The owner of the mine. He knows about pain. He’s the only one I’ve ever met who knows anything about the way—” He takes a deep breath. “He has a different kind of painkiller. One that’s only made for him, for pain like this.”

  Leo described it to me once. An unsolvable tangle of nerves and scars. Anything can hurt him. Touch. Stress. Anything. He seems so angry to other people because he is constantly in pain. He uses his rage to distract from the truth.

  “How is it different?”

  His eyes widen, the expression over so quickly I could have blinked and missed it. “There are no side effects. It doesn’t render a person like him unconscious. A person like me.”

  I don’t know whether to hope or despair. I’m caught between the two, and I don’t know what the emotion in Leo’s eyes means. “He came here to tell you about it?”

  “He came here to deliver a ring for you. Along with what he called a wedding gift.”

  “The wedding isn’t until next month.”

  “That’s what I said. He just laughed.” Seriousness comes over Leo’s features, and it takes my breath away again. It’s a miracle I can keep breathing at all when I look at him. “He brought some of those painkillers for me. Enough for a long time. And the nosy bastard sat here watching to make sure they didn’t kill me.”

  “You thought it might kill you?”

  “No. I didn’t. But the pain was killing me. I haven’t—” A breath with the hint of a shudder. “I was honest with him. When I bought that book for you. I told him I didn’t think I could survive it. It’s been so long.” He brushes a kiss to my lips. “I couldn’t let it take me away from you. So when he offered me a chance tonight, I took it.”

  “Leo—”

  “Forgive me, darling, if the risk scares you. I had to try.”

  My heart is going to burst if he doesn’t tell me now. It feels like I’m standing at the edge of a cliff, my toes curling over. “There’s nothing to forgive. But, Leo—did it work?”

  “It hurt so fucking much,” he says, his voice breaking.

  “Did it work?” I hate to press him. I just want this for him. More than anything. He’s awake and clear-eyed, the way he needs to be to survive. “Does it hurt now?”

  “No.” He takes a breath verging on a gasp. “Nothing hurts at all.” Leo covers his face with both hands, a sob tearing free under his palms, and lets himself fall back into his chair.

  For the first time in eighteen years, he lets himself rest.

  Chapter Thirty

  Leo

  Haley climbs into my lap, into my arms, and it forces out a hot wave of tears to hold her this way. Without also holding myself up and away from the fucking furniture. She asked me for this once. I gave her twenty minutes of her head on my chest, curled against my side, and paid for it with a sleepless night in agony.

  I would do it again for her.

  But I don’t have to.

  Now she’s the one holding herself up, hesitancy in every muscle. I lean harder into the chair. Pull her in closer. She puts her head on my shoulder, giving me her weight.

  I had forgotten what it was like.

  For so fucking long, the only place I could touch the memory of living in a body not dogged by pain was in my dreams. Even then it never lasted. It was never complete. I could feel the cuts on my back in the distance. In the last few years it’s been worse in increments, like slowly boiling alive.

  So when Hades—who looks like a fucking Constantine, how’s that for irony—handed me the second black box, I didn’t let myself imagine an outcome that didn’t involve living in hell.

  I remember now, because there is no more pain. No more pressure across the scars on my back, digging into the nerves. No more radiating gashes circling around to the front of my ribs and slicing between. No more nails in the back of my neck. It’s just gone. Banished.

  It won’t be gone forever. These tiny, pill-shaped miracles don’t last indefinitely. But if Hades is to be trusted—and I have no choice but to trust him—it will not start at the peak. I’ll have time. I’ll have a life.

  I’ll have Haley, her sweetness curled into me, letting me hold her the way I always should have been able to.

  Fuck, I was so
close. So close to sinking into inescapable darkness. Haley would have stopped it, for a while. I love her too much not to put up a fight. But it would’ve happened, except for that prick with the strange eyes blocking my path.

  That pain was a cage. A physical cage, yes. One that held me away from the physical world. And an emotional one. I don’t know what to do with it, all that feeling.

  Eventually the floodgates close. The grief eases.

  “Are you sad?” Haley brushes an errant tear from my cheek.

  “No.” I kiss her, and I feel nothing but the softness of her lips against mine. Nothing but the way she takes a quick little breath. Nothing but her. “I’m free.”

  We go back to the party, and Haley can’t stop staring at me. Studying my face. I want to tell her it’s the same as it always was, but it’s not. I know from the way her eyes shine.

  I want to fuck her without having to ignore impending torment. It hurts less when I’m inside her, when I’m touching her, of course it does. Of course it did. But this is different. Being in that much pain was like being numb, in a way. It didn’t give me full access to any other sensation.

  When the bedroom door is locked behind us, I unwrap her like an engagement gift and lay waste to her panties and bra. I open her like a blooming flower on the bed and bury my face between her legs. She tastes even sweeter for how little it hurts to do this. I can sling her legs over my shoulders and make her come like that. I can let her dig her heels into me while her orgasm shakes through her. I can do fucking anything.

  She’s tired from the party, so tired, but she gives me all of her. Haley whimpers and cries when I punish her pussy for the crime of being so fucking perfect and cries some more when I fuck her throat.

  Her tears are drying when I take her to the pillows, spread her open wide, and make her take me all at once. I love the sight of her body when she works for it, all blonde hair and pulsing muscles. I love the struggle. I love to bite her, and hurt her, and make her pussy tighten in that sweet, filthy rhythm as she comes all over me.

  Haley interrupts her own series of moans with my name. “Leo. Leo—”

  I bite her again, and she makes a sound of pleasure-pain that I would like to hear every day until I’m dead. “Say it some more, darling.”

  “Leo,” she says, and the excitement in her voice makes my chest ache. “Do you think I could be on top?”

  I freeze, my cock buried in her to the hilt, and in the space of this one moment I’ve been shoved out of the bed. Out of my body. She’s been on top before, but never the way she’s asking for now. No one has.

  Except for Caroline.

  I push up and away from her. Need room to breathe. It’s awful, it’s fucking awful, because I want to keep fucking her. But this innocent question from the most innocent Constantine there ever was has nicked an invisible wire in my brain, or my soul. Somewhere hidden. Way down deep.

  And it’s now, it’s right now, that I understand the final piece of my penance. I understand that there is something separate from the experience of physical pain. It’s always been easier to let the torment of fucked-up nerves take up my attention, because something else did equal damage. It played an equal role in turning me into the beast I became.

  “Leo.” Haley’s voice is so soft. She’s been saying my name for a while now, I realize. “Come back. Leo.”

  I bend my head down to her collarbone and lick the bite mark I left. Concentrate on how warm she is around me. How tight, how soft. Let that feeling tamp down the urge to run. Not away from Haley. Never away from her. Away from the sickening memories.

  “I’ve never done that before,” I confess to her, and then amend my confession. “I haven’t done that since Caroline. Not in—not in a bed.”

  “Oh,” she says. “Oh, Leo.”

  I don’t hear pity in her words, and that, I think, is what compels me to tell her the rest.

  I have never told anyone the way it was with Caroline. The way she insisted on being with me. I was too young to see it for what it was. Not a real preference, except a preference for power. She wanted to be the one on top, literally and figuratively, so that’s how it was. It might not have left so many scars if it hadn’t been for that very last day.

  The day I took the videos. I’d been suspicious of her by then, suspicious and increasingly sick to my stomach at how it felt to be with her, and I thought the camera itself would act as a kind of talisman against more of her psychotic behavior. Surely she would assume I had one and call it off. Or come to the meeting as Caroline Constantine, de facto queen of Bishop’s Landing.

  She did neither. She did worse. And I have paid for it with every kind of pain every day since then.

  “My back was nothing but an open wound,” I tell Haley, and she does not tense underneath me. She doesn’t flinch. She just keeps running her hands over my shoulders, over and over. “The sheets felt like sharp rocks. Like fire. And the pressure of her body—”

  “It’s okay,” she says. She means keep going.

  “There was no one before her.” Haley glides her fingers through my hair. “And I never thought this would be possible afterward. I didn’t even fantasize about it.”

  I confess that the memory has not lost its nauseating quality. I confess that I don’t know what will happen if we do this. I confess that I am afraid, I am fucking afraid, that Caroline has taken it from me permanently. That even with my pain conquered, I’ll still be wounded. Broken.

  “I was powerless,” I tell her. There is no greater sin for a Morelli than to be powerless. Admitting it is probably the greatest risk I’ve ever taken.

  Haley presses a kiss to my shoulder. “Not anymore.”

  I lift myself up so I can see her face. She’s watching me with such love in her eyes. More than I’ll ever deserve. She lets me look into that perfect blue until my breathing settles.

  And then she arches underneath me, stretching her body, resetting us.

  She takes one of my hands away from where I’m stroking her hair.

  Haley puts it around her throat. She locks both hands around my wrist and pulls my arm down toward her until I’m the one controlling the pressure. Until I’m rock hard inside her. Until she’s squirming on my cock. Beginning to fight the grip on her throat a little. Beginning to need more air.

  “Like this,” she manages.

  Fresh, animal desire explodes over me. The need to fuck her takes over every muscle, including my throbbing, unsteady heart. I feel huge above her. Solid. Strong against her softness.

  I roll over onto my back, taking Haley with me.

  I brace for pain before I can override the old habit, but none comes. Not physical pain. Not nerve pain. I land on soft sheets. On a firm mattress.

  No pain, but my lungs get smaller, not drawing in enough air. My heart races. My vision sharpens. My body prepares to get me the fuck out of this situation. Get me away from the torture I know is coming. The shame.

  Except it’s Haley.

  For all my body knows this is dangerous, this is wrong, it also knows she is right. She’s the prettiest thing I’ve ever seen. More beautiful for the way she lets me choke her while she rides my cock. I was afraid her body in this position would force me into an old memory but I shouldn’t have been. I should have trusted that I know her. I’ve felt her. I want her.

  I need her. Like this. Now.

  My heart tries to take flight again, but I focus on her. On the squeeze of her muscles around me. On her big blue eyes, staying on mine because she knows how much I love it. She knows how much I love to see her cry. I pinch one of her nipples until she does cry, then the other, her pussy clenching over and over.

  The ghost of that powerlessness comes again.

  But there’s Haley, panting in my grip, her body given over to mine. Sacrificed to mine.

  It whispers in my ear.

  Haley moans, her hands rising to hold my wrist, but she can’t stop me. She does not want to stop me. From causing her pain. And pleasure. S
he puts herself wholly in my hands.

  That sick, terrified feeling shrinks down into a shell of itself. It’s no match for her sweet cunt around my cock. It’s no match for the silvery tears that streak down her cheeks. It’s no match for me, as long as I have her. We’re stronger together.

  It is less and less and less and then, between one thrust and the next, between one whimpered moan and the next, I let it go.

  It’s gone.

  I angle her closer in so she has to work for it. So she has to brace her fingertips against my chest and pray for control. I bring her all the way down so I can sink my teeth into her earlobe. “You’re going to fuck me with that sweet cunt until you’re dripping with my cum, darling. I won’t touch your clit until I feel it on your thighs. You don’t get to come before then.”

  “No,” she moans. “Please. Touch me now.”

  “You can have my hand on your throat. Try harder than that. Don’t make me wait.”

  I keep my hand on her windpipe, her pulse moving through my fingertips, as Haley struggles. Against my hand. Against her body. It’s hard for her to find the rhythm, and once she does, I make it harder. I make her force herself down on me every time. I take a little air away every time she falters.

  It feels so fucking good. Gravity is on her side, and for once, it’s on my side, too. I can give myself over completely to the sensation of her cunt without worrying about holding myself away from anything.

  The harder she works, the wetter she gets. Her slickness only increases the longer I hold her throat in my hand. She’s fucking me hard, she’s fucking magnificent, when she starts to cry harder.

  “I’m going to come,” she sobs. “Please let me.”

  “Fuck, darling. If you come now, you know what I’ll have to do.”