My heart raced, feeling as if my chest might implode with the force of it. I felt every pulse of blood surging through my veins, my fingertips tingling as I grappled to find the words to speak to the man who had deceived me.
To the boy who had left me and never looked back.
“Calix?” I whispered, my voice barely a breath. It hovered between us, Malva’s stare shifting back and forth between the two of us as she tried to process how I might know the man who had murdered my fiancé and led the slaughter at my wedding. I couldn’t spare a glance down at her, even though her hand tightened on mine.
I couldn’t take my shocked eyes off of Calix, where he stood staring at me with his head held high as if he had nothing to be ashamed of. As if he hadn’t torn my world apart and ruined the only good memories I’d had of my childhood.
I fought back the burn of tears, shutting out the echoes of screams and shouts trailing through the closed door to the sanctuary of the church and echoing in the silence that hung between us. Calix didn’t speak, looking back at me with his brow tensed and that intense light in the gray eyes I’d never thought to see again.
That I’d convinced myself I never wanted to see again.
“You knew,” I said finally, the soft accusation cracking through the space like a whip. He didn’t so much as twitch in reaction to the hurt in my voice. I’d wanted one reckless night with a stranger before resigning myself to a life of misery where I was nothing more than a walking corpse. I wanted one person who desired me and not the family name that came attached to the space between my legs.
Instead I got another game, another manipulation in a long line of twisted, ugly half-truths that dominated my life. As if it hadn’t been bad enough to feel used by the very system I’d wanted to escape, even after all these years, Calix was the one person who had the power to hurt me.
I sank my teeth into the tip of my tongue, clenching my jaw to keep the tears at bay.
Never let them see you bleed.
I wouldn’t die with tears in my eyes, but with the promise of haunting him until his very last day on this earth staring back at him. “Did it entertain you? To know that you fucked me before you’d kill me?” Malva gasped at my side, completely unfamiliar with that kind of language coming from me. Even if she hadn’t been, the admission of what I’d done would have been a death sentence only moments before.
Now, it hardly mattered.
He stepped toward me, those long, muscled legs closing the gap between us until he towered over me. He reached up, his thumb touching my bottom lip and tugging it to the side. The metallic scent of blood reached me, a fierce reminder of who he was and what he’d done. His eyes gleamed as he looked at my mouth, transfixed on the place where he touched me before he raised his silver gaze back to mine. With the knowledge of who he was revealed, the faint white scar on his cheekbone shone in the light streaming through the windows. I hadn’t noticed it before or drawn the similarity to the injury Calix sustained in ο λάκκος all those years ago; not until I knew I was looking at the very same person.
His full lips were set into a harsh line, his square jaw tense as he stared down at me. His dark hair was parted messily just to the side, framing his face in a way that would have made him look the part of a gentleman, if it hadn’t been for the blood staining his hand. His fingers painted my chin with it before he slid his grip down to grasp the column of my throat. He wrapped his hand around it, squeezing either side gently as his lips tipped up into another smirk. There was no doubt he was thinking of the last time he’d cut off my breath, depriving me of air as he fucked me into the bed of the hotel room we’d shared for a few short hours.
Malva trembled at my side, curling around to my back and pressing herself tighter into my body, but there was nowhere for her to hide. Not with the guards lurking at our backs to keep us from leaving the church.
“I’ve no intention of killing you, λουλούδι μου. As I said, there will be a wedding.” He tilted his head to the side, leaning forward until his nose brushed against the end of mine in a mockery of something affectionate. “And I find myself in need of a bride.”
I snapped my head back, stumbling as my body hurried to catch up. I nearly fell over Malva, catching myself on shaky limbs just in time to prevent further embarrassment. I took another step away from him, shaking my head in denial. He didn’t move to follow me, instead staring at me with the calm assurance of a predator who had caught his prey in a well-maneuvered trap they had no chance of escaping.
I shoved Malva toward the guards at the back door anyway, racing for the slight space between them. They stepped together in a synchronized move, blocking our path without a word. “Let us out!” Malva shrieked, kicking one of the guards in a move that might have made me proud if it didn’t make me fear for her very life.
Once upon a time, I’d known Calix better than I’d known myself, but he was no longer the knight in shining armor who protected me from my father’s violent impulses. He was the villain from my nightmares, the thing that could kill everything I loved with only a twitch of his fingers.
As one of the men reached down to haul her off her feet, I lunged. The icy breath of panic filled my lungs, burning me from the inside out. The thought of a world without Malva, without the only bit of light that existed for me, felt unimaginable. I’d follow her to the end of the world and the depths of Hell to save her if it came to that. Protecting her would always come first. She was the only thing that mattered.
I grabbed at his arm, sinking my nails into his suit as if I could bleed him through the fabric. He hadn’t hurt Malva, not yet, but the sight of his thick hand on her was too much for me to bear.
An arm wrapped around my waist, pulling me back as I fought to stay by Malva’s side. I thrashed in Calix’s grip, shoving at his arm to try to get free as he lifted me off my feet.
The sound of a gun cocking next to my ear made me freeze, watching in horror from the corner of my eye as Calix lowered it to his side. He didn’t point it in Malva’s direction, didn’t do anything to even motion toward her, but the threat was clear. “NO! Not her!” I screamed.
Calix’s grip around me twitched, tightening as his breath sighed into my hair. He paused as if in thought when I froze in his grip.
“I have no need for two Karras girls. What is her life worth to you, Little One?” he asked, the cruel set to his words and lack of anything human in his voice making my heart throb in my chest.
It was all the confirmation I needed that the boy I’d loved as my protector was dead and gone, as lost to me as my mother was. “What are you doing?” I asked, my voice cracking as I shifted in his grip, trying to turn to look at him.
“What will you give me if I let her live?” he repeated, loosening his arms as he finally allowed me to turn and face him. Staring up into that impassive face, tears pricked my eyes.
“Anything,” I whispered on a broken sob. “I’ll give you anything.”
He nodded, shoving his gun back into his holster and nodding to the men behind me. I spun to watch as one lifted Malva onto his shoulder, carting her shrieking form through the back door and disappearing from sight.
“No! Please, she’s just a child. You can’t hurt her,” I begged, touching frantic hands to his chest. The need to claw at him was nearly overwhelming, but I fought to restrain the urge.
Only for Malva.
I stared up at him, willing him to turn his attention back to me and to see that this would be the moment that broke me. I’d survived losing my mother, survived losing him, but if he was the one to take away from me the only thing I had left to cling to, I would wither and die on the spot.
He didn’t have to pull the trigger to destroy all that remained of me.
“I never said I would. You jumped to that erroneous conclusion all on your own. But that doesn’t mean that I cannot take her away from you and send her somewhere you will never be able to reach her without my permission,” Calix said, raising an eyebrow. As harsh as the words seemed, the confirmation that he hadn’t intended to kill her soothed something inside of me. As if it was a hint of whatever humanity might remain inside of him, even if he was using the only person I loved as leverage.
At least she’d live.
“Bring her back,” I pleaded. “She’s scared.”
“Jorges won’t hurt her. He is merely taking Malva to stay with my mother for the time being,” Calix explained, lifting a hand to touch my cheekbone.
“Her home is with me,” I said, my shaky voice shifting into something more resolved as I twisted my head away from his grip.
“Perhaps when you’ve settled into your new life, then we will be able to arrange for Malva to come and live with us. For now, I suspect we’ll need some time to ourselves for you to come to terms with your place by my side,” he said, his hand lingering where my face had been, hanging in the air as if I might press back into his touch. “She’s far better off with my mother until we know that you don’t intend to try and kill me in my sleep.”
“You’ll keep her locked away from me so that I can’t murder you without risking her,” I snapped, flinching away when his hand finally dropped and his fingers touched the tips of mine. He laced them together, entwining our hands until he used his grip to guide me toward the doors to the sanctuary where the massacre awaited. “Why are you doing this? I didn’t do anything to you.”
Calix paused at my side, staring down at me with a gentle look on his face, but his eyes glimmered like steel, all hard edges and cold retribution as he glanced toward the door. “They took everything from me. I’m taking it back.”
“You can’t take my friendship by force and expect things to go back to the way they were. I adored you because you protected me from men like you,” I said, tearing at my hand to try to get it free from his grip.
“It was not your friendship I sought with my cock between your pretty thighs, λουλούδι μου. You are no longer a child, and I am no longer a boy waiting to become a man.”
“I preferred the boy,” I snapped when he tugged me closer to that looming door and what waited beyond it. The thought of my family lying dead didn’t horrify me and the idea of seeing my father lying in a puddle of his own blood made satisfaction course through me.
But there was a wedding lying in wait, and I couldn’t help but feel like the sacrifice he tore from me would be far greater than the one I would have given to Damianos.
“I’m sure you did, all wrapped around your finger and expecting nothing in return. I have always done what I could to protect you from the men who sought to abuse you; now my protection comes at a price,” he argued, placing a hand on the knob and turning it. He spun to look behind us, nodding his head at the remaining guard where he shoved the priest forward. They stepped around us as Calix hauled open the door, stepping through into the carnage on the other side.
Bodies littered the room, the stain of blood on the wooden floor slithering across the planks.
“It hardly counts as protection if you are the one who wants to abuse me!” Calix turned to me, tugging my hair over my shoulder. His fingers trailed over the scars on my upper back, on the reminder of just how cruel the people in my life had always been.
“I’m not a good man, but I am not capable of something like this, either,” he said, his lips twisting into a grimace as he pressed his fingertips into the sensitive, white scar tissue gracing my shoulder. “You won’t know this kind of pain by my hand.”
His other hand held mine tightly as he turned back toward the door, tugging me after him. My feet moved sluggishly, as if they couldn’t process what my brain had already determined. It would do me no good to fight what was coming; not when he had Malva to hold over my head.
So many bodies.
The pews were stained with the splatter of blood and gore, the sanctity of the church desecrated with more death than I’d ever thought to see. Damianos’s mother lay on her stomach, blood pooled beneath her with her face turned toward the altar as if she’d tried to run when they gunned her down. Wives and women were usually exempt in the power struggles between the families; harming one of them was considered something of a sin amongst The Six.
To see one of the mothers of a council member gunned down at her own son’s wedding was unfathomable. It was a line that none had dared to cross. The last time a man had violated the understanding that wives and daughters were off-limits, the Regas family had been banished from the city.
Her blank eyes stared at the altar where her son lay in front of it. Half of Damianos’s face was covered in blood where Calix had shot him. Jeno lay crumpled in the aisle between the pews, his white shirt covered in dark, inky stains.
He’d been a terrible brother. He’d let our father abuse me in the name of crafting me into a woman he could marry off easily. But he’d also been the one to shield me from our mother’s gruesome death, and sometimes when he’d heard me crying at night in the weeks that followed, he’d stepped into my bedroom and sat in the chair beside my bed until I fell asleep.
I sank my teeth into the inside of my cheek and turned away, following the path that Calix set for us. My father leaned against the wall opposite the doorway, clutching a gunshot wound in his side. Lydia had torn a scrap of fabric from her dress, pressing it into the wound as he paled, as if she could prevent the way death called his name. It wouldn’t be long before my father was gone from this world if the fading of his skin was any indication.
Eugene Regas lingered over my father, a gun held in his hands as he glared down at the man who had been responsible for his banishment by bringing it to the council. The guard led the priest to the altar, resuming the place he’d taken when I’d thought I’d be marrying Damianos.
Instead, Calix Regas stepped over the body of my former betrothed, kicking his corpse out of his way. His dark shoes glistened with the wet sign of blood as he moved into the place a groom would occupy, pulling me with his grip on my hand until I faced him and gave my back to my father and stepmother.
“Thalia,” my father rasped, shuffling sounds accompanying the words as I turned to look at him over my shoulder. He tried to sit up; tried to get his feet underneath him as if he could control what I did in these next precious moments. “If you even think about it…”
Calix grabbed my chin with gentle fingers, turning my face back around to meet his stony gaze. “You don’t look at him. He doesn’t get the satisfaction of your attention ever again; do you understand me, Little One?” he asked, holding my gaze until I gave him my nod of understanding.
“You little fucking bitch!” my father rasped, trying to override the command Calix had given me. But with my father’s death certain, I didn’t even so much as flinch away from the venom in his voice.
Calix lifted a hand, gently cupping my cheek as he tilted his head thoughtfully and looked over my shoulder at where my father was slowly bleeding out. “A long time ago, I promised you this day would come,” my childhood friend and more recent lover growled, his jaw clenching as he gritted out the words. “Your only son is dead. Your eldest daughter will be my wife and your youngest, my ward. I will wipe your very name from the face of this earth while you watch. Only then will I allow you to die for what you’ve done to her.”
Shock claimed me at the vehemence in his voice, and the growl that twisted his words into something brutal. It wasn’t from discussing his retribution for being banished, but in the abuse I’d suffered at my father’s hands. “I will take everything that was yours and make it mine.”
I swallowed against the nausea swirling in my gut. With my brother dead, I’d stand to inherit everything of my father’s when he was gone.
His money. His properties. His territory.
Despite the hint of pretty words hiding behind Calix’s threats, I was nothing but a conduit for more power. Nothing but a way to get more of everything he already had in abundance.
Used.
I fought back the trembling in my hands, reminding myself that the face of the man standing across from me hardly mattered. I’d been prepared to make this sacrifice to keep Malva in my life when it had been Damianos. I would do it with the boy from my memories lingering at the back of my mind.
“Get on with it,” Calix said, instructing the priest to look down at the Bible placed on the altar in front of him. He lifted it into his arms, stepping around to the other side to stand directly in front of us.
“The union into which you are now about to enter—”
“Does it look like you have an audience for all the bullshit? I’d like to be married before my soon-to-be father-in-law croaks,” Calix said, his voice droll.
The priest cleared his throat, swallowing loudly as he fought to turn the page in his Bible. The pages stuck together, coated with the inky stain of slowly drying blood. “Calix Regas, will you have Thalia Karras to be your wife, to live with her, respect her, and love her as God intends with the promise of faithfulness, tenderness, and helpfulness, as long as you both shall live?”
Calix held my gaze, my throat closing as his hand tightened on mine. “I will,” he murmured. He lifted it into the space between us, pulling a wedding set from his pocket. He slid the metal bands onto my ring finger, the glimmer of an ebony diamond encased in the center of a black, diamond-studded lotus flower. The tiny diamonds on the flower petals twinkled in the light shining through the stained glass windows of the church, making me swallow as the rings settled around my finger. They felt heavy, weighted down with far more than metal and stones, the smooth surface wet with smears of death.
“Thalia, will you have Calix to be your husband, to live with him, respect him, and love him as God intends with the promise of faithfulness, tenderness, and helpfulness as long as you both shall live?”
“I will beat you until you forget how to breathe,” my father snapped, his words chasing away the fear I felt. They pushed back the terror in my lungs and the way my mouth couldn’t seem to form the answer I needed to give.
Defiance pushed me forward, forcing me to set aside my fear of what had yet to come. I wouldn’t be a prisoner in my father’s home any longer, and I’d be damned if I’d change my jailor for the same man with a different face when I’d only just escaped the promise of a life with Damianos.
My future had been set in motion, and one day soon enough, I’d be free. I raised my eyes from the rings on my finger, accepted the simple black band Calix placed in my hand, and tentatively gripped his palm in mine so that I could slide the band down his ring finger. His eyes gleamed with satisfaction, probably never suspecting the thoughts of escape that swirled inside of me. I sealed my fate and my path forward.
“I will.”
