Sometimes, I dreamt of what it might be like to experience a garden in color, but every time I reached for a rose in the hopes of seeing it, and of holding something vivid in my hands, it faded away. Withering to the ashen dust of gray in my hands, it dissolved as if it decayed while I watched.
I woke, my eyes opening slowly to the foreign room that surrounded me. The curtains were still pulled closed, the room bathed in dim light from the open doorway to the hall.
I sat up, feeling the cold expanse of bed at my back and knowing that Calix had been gone for some time. Suspicion rose in me, the reminder of the fact that I wasn’t allowed to touch myself, and yet he could sneak out of our bed before the sun finished rising.
I forced myself not to care. Every moment he spent in another woman’s arms was a night of freedom for me. Every minute he spent away from me was another chance to remind myself how wrong my twisted feelings for him were.
Swinging my legs over the edge of the bed as I pulled back the covers, I ran my hands over the narcissus-covered bedspread. I wished I could see the orange at the center of the flower, so I could know what warmth looked like in a world filled with cold.
My eyes stung with tears as I stood from the bed, crossing my arms over my chest and crossing to the bathroom to brush my teeth. When that was done, I walked toward the open bedroom door.
My thirst drove me down the stairs toward the kitchen, my stomach pitching with something between nausea and hunger. I was far too familiar with the feeling, from never feeling satisfied with the meals I was allowed to have.
My hand touched the iron railing as I stepped down slowly, the sound of someone moving around in the kitchen reaching me as I made my way to the curved landing at the bottom and moved toward the dim light filtering in through the enormous windows at the back of the house.
My feet were cold as I padded across the marble floor, crossing to the wooden planks in the kitchen. Calix stood behind the kitchen island, slicing tomatoes on a cutting board. His body was encased in a dark suit, his hair drying from the shower he must have taken before I woke up. He was the perfect image of a gentleman, getting ready for a day of business and ready to conquer the world. There wasn’t a mark on him from the violence of the day before, nothing to signify that he and his men had slaughtered an entire church full of people—all but eradicating two family lines from existence.
“I didn’t think you’d be up so early, λουλούδι μου. I meant to bring you breakfast before I left,” he said, finishing with the tomato and wiping his hand on a towel before he stepped around the island. He approached me without hesitation, leaning over me as he dropped a quick kiss to my mouth.
“You’re leaving?” I asked, raising an eyebrow at him. Only a made man would leave his new bride in a home she’d never even gotten a tour of, on the day after their wedding.
“As much as I want to spend our day together, I have business to tend to before the Council summons me to deal with the consequences of yesterday. It’s important that everything is settled on my end before then, and I thought you might like the day away from me at any rate. I know you like to be alone to process,” he said. His words were another reminder that he seemed to know things about me, almost as if he’d never truly left the city.
But that wasn’t possible, and I would have known if I’d seen him before that night in the hotel.
He nodded toward the doorway to the back patio where a pool overlooked a secluded garden and yard. The man who stepped into the doorway made my breath catch in shock.
Christian stepped into the house, his hands tucked into the front pockets of his slacks as he strolled in a manner far more casual than I’d ever seen in my father’s home. “Hey, Monster,” he murmured, the guilt in his voice erasing any confusion I’d felt in the moments after he’d stepped into view.
Torn between pure elation and absolute betrayal, I looked back and forth between him and Calix while the two men waited for me to speak. I couldn’t find the words to articulate what I was feeling or to express the heartache that the man who had treated me as something more than a pathetic damsel had ulterior motives, too.
“I can’t believe you!” I gasped suddenly, spinning to pin Calix with a glare. My throat burned with the tears I refused to shed, my teeth grinding together as I realized just how long Calix had been working toward this goal. This manipulation and massacre.
Christian had been employed in my father’s home for years.
“Where are the others from the house? Were they all working for you, too?” I asked, trying to think of every man who had treated me horribly, who had refused to even look at me for fear of angering my father.
“They’re dead, Monster,” Christian answered, shrugging his shoulders as he moved farther into the kitchen. “I made sure of that.”
“Christian will be overseeing your personal security while I’m away. You’re not to go anywhere without him,” Calix explained, closing the gap between us. He dropped a hand to the small of my back while I tried to digest the fact that Christian had murdered the men he’d worked alongside for years.
He’d slaughtered the men who had been his friends, in a way, all for Calix.
Calix, who led me to the patio doors, bringing me to the stone pavers surrounding the pool, where we stared at the gap in the trees as the sun rose to the left of the house. “I know this is probably another shock,” he said, brushing my hair over my shoulder. He ignored the bedhead that I hadn’t bothered to brush out after waking, dropping a kiss to the back of my neck and lingering there. His breath tickled my skin, sending a shiver through me despite the torrent of emotions I couldn’t seem to grasp. He sighed when I didn’t answer. “I’m going to go make you some coffee. I’ll be right back.”
He turned back to the house, leaving me to watch the sun rise in a moment of peace that felt anything but. The silence pressed in on me, weighing heavily as I fought to restrain my anger. I didn’t understand any of it.
I made my way to the steps of the pool, placing my foot on the first one as the cool water slid over my toes. My other followed, gliding down the steps one by one until I was waist deep in the shallow end of the pool and watching the sun rise over the horizon in the distance.
The cold shock of water against my skin contrasted with the humidity of the summer air around me. With the silk of my nightwear floating around my hips, I dropped my hands and held it in place, half wondering why I bothered.
Nothing was a secret from Calix, anyway.
I felt the moment he stepped out onto the patio, and the rage that seemed to pulse through the air when he thought I’d tried to run. He sighed when he found me in the pool, and I moved to the edge and laid my forearms on the ledge. Leaning onto it and ignoring Calix, I tried to restrain the tears that threatened and refused to turn to look at him.
“I thought you’d tried to run,” he admitted, the clank of a coffee cup setting down on one of the patio tables echoing across the open space.
“What would be the point?” I asked, knowing the truth in the words. Running would be futile, because Calix had long since had more power than the rest of the families gave him credit for.
“You don’t have to seem so dejected about that, you know. You’ll be treated in ways you can’t even begin to imagine,” he said, and I could just visualize him running his hands through his hair. Even after all these years, even after all this time, there were hints of the boy I’d known in the mannerisms he had.
They only made it more painful to look at him.
“Another pretty cage,” I whispered, running my tongue over my teeth. “You shouldn’t have wasted it on someone who can barely fucking see it.” All my life, I’d been surrounded by pretty things, but none of it was for me. It was everyone for else; it was just the wrappings on the gift I’d make for one man.
“We’ll discuss it later after you’ve had some coffee,” Calix said, his knowledge of my morning crankiness only serving to drive my rage higher. He turned to walk away, the sound of his steps shuffling over the stone pavers making me spin to face him.
“What happened to you?” I asked, the rage fading from my face as I thought of the boy who had never been anything but sweet to me. Of how much I missed him.
He stopped, his steps faltering as he slowly turned to face me. His eyes were trained on the water surrounding me, glowering and hard by the time he raised them to my face. “They took me from you,” he said, his jaw clenching as if it irritated him that he even had to explain himself to me. “So I became the man I needed to be to find my way back.”
My hands clenched and unclenched, fighting with the urge to scream, and to remind him that he’d stayed away for nearly two decades. “You left me here with them!”
“They dragged me away unconscious, λουλούδι μου. What would you have had me do?” he asked, crossing his arms over his chest.
My voice softened, the hurt showing even as I tried to hide it behind the rage of a woman abandoned. “You never came back for me.”
“I was no good to you dead,” he said, running a hand over his face. “And if I came back before I had any power or ability to take a stand, that was exactly what they would have done to me. Killed me and laid my body next to your mother’s in ο λάκκος.”
“You promised me I would never be forced to marry—”
“Someone who didn’t care for you,” he finished, stepping toward the edge of the pool. He lowered himself to a crouch beside it, staring at me as if he could will me to see things his way. “I remember every word I ever said to you. I slaughtered an entire church full of people to keep that promise. You would do well to remember that, because if you doubt everything else you’ve ever been told about me, never question that I am a man of my word, Little One. Never doubt that I would slaughter the entire world just to fucking keep you.”
He stood smoothly, rolling his head from one side to the other as I gaped up at him. Then he spun on his heel, storming through the doors to the house and disappearing from my sight. Something shattered in the house as I hauled myself up over the ledge of the pool, grabbing the coffee off the table, ready to chase after him and throw it in his face.
The scent that wafted off the cup made me pause; my favorite brew with what I suspected was the perfect creamer to sugar ratio made me drop it back to the table as if it had scalded me.
Christian leaned his shoulder against the doorway, crossing his arms over his chest as he raised a brow at me. “Things are going well, I take it.”
