Chapter 16
Every time I come here, I wonder why. This woman is the past. This woman is nothing but a ghost to me, a shell of her old self. And yet there’s something about seeing what you once craved, once coveted above everything with the rose-tinted glasses off.
With the dream of them stripped away.
With nothing but the hate left.
I watch her from the doorway, see how she’s bathed in the weak, sickly light of these damned artificial suns they passed for illumination down here. Her back is to me, her golden hair catching the light like a halo, but I know that halo is just dust motes trapped in a dying bulb.
I know the woman beneath it.
I remember her hair, that exact shade, catching the real sunlight outside the manor walls back then. I remember the way it fell in waves around her shoulders, the way it seemed to glow even in the gloom.
She was, she is still beautiful, there’s no denying that.
But the beauty is now overlaid with something else.
A weariness. A resignation.
Like looking at a flower grown in the shade, its petals still bright, but lacking the vibrant life they once had.
She’s wearing a silk dress, the one that hugs her curves like a second skin, shimmering in colours that aren’t natural. It makes her look like a fallen angel, or a goddess stricken with a mortal curse. Maybe both.
I undo the top button as I approach, then the next, letting the fabric hang loose.
My shirt is damp beneath, clinging to my back.
I shove the sleeves of my shirt up, exposing the scars on my forearms. Thin lines, white as chalk against my sun-baked skin, stark reminders of the things I’ve done, the things I had to do.
My footsteps on the floorboards are loud, echoing in the cavernous room. She turns as I approach, her eyes locking with mine. They’re still that pale glacial blue, but they hold a depth now of things I couldn’t have imagined when I first saw her.
Pain. Acceptance. And something else, something predatory, maybe?
Or perhaps just the weariness of knowing exactly what you are, and what you can expect from this world.
“Antonio,” she says. Her voice is soft, but there’s a hardness underneath it, like stone. Like the floorboards beneath my feet.
How many times have we played this scene now? How many times have I seen the flash of relief when she sees it’s me here, and not a different man? A different Lord come to fuck her, come to use her holes in whatever depraved ways they can think of.
I don’t reply. I simply walk over to the small table by the window and pour myself a generous measure of the amber liquid. The burn is welcome. I hand her a glass but she just looks at it, then back at me, her expression unreadable.
Just like everything I’ve offered her, she plays hard to get. She doesn’t take it.
“You’ve been with my daughter,” she says. Her voice is smoke-burned and cool. Not an accusation. An application for a fact to be confirmed.
“Yes.” I reply.
She closes her eyes and in the arches of bone beneath, I watch an entire lifetime pass. Grace was born in a pretty pink room in a four-poster bed, surrounded by every luxury. I did not visit that day but I sent flowers, lilies. Elaine hated lilies. She called to tell me so, still soft with drugs.
“She looks like you,” I say, because cruelty is most effective when it is true.
Elaine’s mouth tightens. It’s almost funny. She spent half her youth trying to erase her mother from the mirror, and now she is repaid in kind. That is the currency of daughterhood I guess.
“She is eighteen now I think.” Elaine says, and I guess it must be hard to keep track of time when every day all you do is fuck or be fucked.
“Nineteen in March.”
Her face falls at my words. “Then she doesn’t have long.”
“No,” I agree. “She does not.”
She breathes once, a slow exhale through her nose that the body uses when preparing to be struck.
The life inside this woman is stubborn and practical.
It is the life that taught her how to move through drawing rooms where the decanters weighed more than her wrists could lift.
It is the life that made her lift them anyway.
“How is she?” she asks, her voice regaining that soft edge.
I pause, the glass halfway to my lips. The question hangs in the air, heavy with unspoken things.
“She’s been sick,” I state, watching her face, wondering if she’ll reveal anything. I’m almost disappointed when I see nothing but concern there. “Being confined the way she is does not suit her temperament, but she is recovering now.” I add.
Elaine nods, her gaze fixed on some point beyond my shoulder, perhaps seeing ghosts or just the bleak future.
There’s no triumph in her acceptance, no joy that her daughter is getting better, just more resignation.
The same resignation I saw in her face when I walked through the doors of this place.
The same resignation I see now, reflected in her eyes.
She is her fate.
She accepted it long ago, wrapped it around her heart like a shroud, and now it’s part of her.
The whore. The concubine. Taking what she’s given, offering what she must. It’s the only role she plays anymore. A part she learned long ago, perfected, and never deviates from.
“You could marry her,” Elaine says, her voice barely a whisper, but the words hang in the air like lead weights. “You could save her.”
I stare at her, the glass emptying my hand. The implication hangs there, thick and suffocating. She’s offering me… what? Her blessing?
“I can do no such thing.” I snap back. Grace is as condemned as her mother is.
“You can.” She says, sounding more alive, more animated than ever. “You have the power Antonio, you have…”
She’s suddenly on her knees, clutching at the fabric of my clothes, begging me. My hand clamps around her jaw, tightening enough that my knuckles turn white.
It’s like there’s a crack in the brittle mask she wears, a glimpse of the desperate hope still buried deep beneath the resignation. Or is it just another tool in her arsenal? Another way to manipulate, to plead, to try and claw back something she lost years ago.
“Elaine,” I start, the sound of my own name on her lips echoing strangely. My voice is rougher now. “What are you talking about? It’s impossible, and you know it.”
Her eyes meet mine then, and the depth in them is terrifying. “Not for you. Do it before the auction.” She says like she’s giving me orders now. “If she is your wife, they cannot sell her. If she is yours, they will not touch her.”
There’s no malice, no guile. Just a raw, pleading vulnerability that cuts through the layers of her carefully crafted facade.
She drops her gaze, her long lashes casting shadows on her cheeks.
For a moment I see the young girl again, the one who I know did love me, the one who believed in impossible dreams. The one who saw a future, maybe with me, maybe without me, but not this; this bleak, degraded existence.
Then, without warning the mask slides back into place, faster than I can track its movement. Her head snaps up, and she’s begging in a way I bet she’s done to so many men before me. The silk dress slips over her thigh whether on purpose or by accident, baring the curve of her hip.
“Please, Antonio. Don’t do this. Don’t make me, don’t make her, don’t turn her into this, please.”
The image of Grace, pale and fragile, flashes behind my eyes. This is insane. Utterly, completely mad. She’s trying to emotionally blackmail me? To use her daughter as some sort of leverage?
“Take off the dress and spread your legs, Elaine,” I say, my voice dangerously low, the words clipped, stripped of any softness.
The command is absolute, leaving no room for negotiation or further pleading.
I need distance. I need to break the connection, to focus on the task at hand, the transaction I came here for.
Her head snaps up again, but this time there’s no defiance, no tears yet.
She looks at me, really looks at me and sees the wall I’ve built up.
The impenetrable fortress of my grief, anger, and sheer loathing that festers under the surface.
Slowly, almost unwillingly, she obeys. The silk dress slips off, pooling around her ankles.
She lies back, almost entirely naked on the bed, her movements precise, economical.
No hint of the desperate plea left in them, just the performer executing her cue.
I watch her from where I stand by the door, the last dregs of my drink forgotten in my hand.
She looks magnificent, terrifying.
Like some ancient statue brought to life for a single, forbidden purpose. Her skin gleams under the weak light, the curve of her breasts rising, her underwear already damp as if she’s eager for this.
She’s waiting. Patient. Ready.
My own body reacts before my mind can catch up. My cock strains against my trousers.
I need to touch her.
To possess her.
To erase the memory of Titus, of her husband and the past, and this insane entire conversation.
“Touch yourself.” I order, tossing the glass and letting it smash on the stone in a manner that makes her flinch. “Show me how much your cunt wants me and not him.”
She doesn’t blink, doesn’t react to my words beyond moving her hand and following the orders like a robot.
She pulls her thong aside, revealing her shaved pink flesh and I stand there, watching.
Pretending that we’re back in our twenties, that I’m the one she’s going to marry, that it’s my children she’ll carry, my cock she’ll beg for…
well, she’s begging for it now, isn’t she?
The jacket comes off first, tossed onto the back of the waiting chair. Then the shirt, the fabric falling away to reveal the hard lines of my chest and stomach, the dust smudges on my skin.
I step towards the bed, my boots making soft thuds on the floorboards. She watches me, her expression unreadable, her eyes fixed on my face while her fingers massage her clit like this is all routine.