Chapter 88 - Antonio
The weight of my child is a miracle in my arms.
Caspian is so small, a warm, breathing bundle of flannel and milk-scented sleep. His head, covered in a dark fuzz that is so like my own, rests in the crook of my elbow. His tiny rosebud mouth is slack, his breaths coming in soft, rhythmic puffs against my shirt.
The Brethren have reformed, have regrouped. Our Grand Master revealed to everyone the truth of his assassination, and we have never been stronger. I have never been stronger.
As I hold my son with a reverence I never knew I possessed, I know my future, my family’s future, my entire bloodline is secure.
I pace the soft carpets of the nursery, a room I designed to be a fortress of peace, of domestic bliss.
Filled with white furniture, soft grey walls, mobiles of spun silver turning lazily in the draft from the climate control.
I lean down, my lips brushing the shell of his perfect ear, and I whisper stories.
Fairytales. Stories fit for an infant’s ears.
I tell him about dragons, monsters, and princesses in high towers.
This son of mine, this sole heir to the Macrae empire. I will teach him everything. I will mould him, I will protect him the only way I can, by ensuring he becomes a carbon copy of me; ruthless, meticulous, deadly.
I glance towards the doorway. Grace was standing there a moment ago, leaning against the frame, watching us.
Her arms were crossed, but her posture wasn’t defensive.
It was… contemplative. The hard, glittering anger in her eyes has been absent for days, replaced by a deep, weary exhaustion that I chose to interpret as surrender.
She’s tired of fighting. Tired of resisting the inevitable.
She is slipping back to who she was.
The girl I bought, the girl I mastered, the one who trembled when I first touched her.
Motherhood has softened the sharp, fractured edges I created. Or perhaps my unwavering devotion, my patience, is finally sanding them down. Every time she sees me with Caspian a little more of the ice around her heart melts, I am sure of it.
This is it. This is the key.
This love I have for him, this fierce, possessive, overwhelming tenderness is my greatest weapon in winning her back.
She cannot deny the sight of me, her monster, brought to his knees by the weight of our son.
She sees the care I take, the way I never put him down unless it’s absolutely necessary, the way I watch over his every breath.
How can she not forgive me, when the living proof of our union is so perfectly, beautifully loved?
The nurse smiles at me from the rocking chair. “He’s never fussy with you, Mr Macrae. It’s like he knows his father’s voice.”
A surge of pride, warm and potent floods my chest. This is approval, this is normalcy.
This is the life I have built, stone by stone, and it is holding.
“He’s a good boy,” I say, my voice thick with an emotion that surprises me with its genuineness.
For a moment, the performance and the reality merge into one.
I am a father. This is my son. And Grace will be my wife in truth, not just in name.
I look back to the doorway to share this moment with her, to see the softening in her eyes, the ghost of a smile that has been playing on her lips these past few days.
Only, the doorway is empty.
A flicker of something cold touches the base of my spine. It’s nothing, I tell myself. She’s tired, she’s gone to lie down. She’s getting a glass of water. But the narrative of peaceful reconciliation I was spinning so perfectly moments ago frays at the edges.
I cross the room and gently place Caspian back into his crib. He stirs, letting out a small, disgruntled sigh, but doesn’t wake. Carefully, I trail my finger down his cheek in a silent promise.
I will secure your world. I will secure your mother too.
I walk out of the nursery, my steps measured but my heart has begun a slow, heavy drum against my ribs. The master suite is just down the hall. The door is ajar. I push it open.
The room is vast, bathed in the late afternoon light that streams through the floor-to-ceiling windows. The bed is neatly made, the silken covers undisturbed. She is not here.
The cold feeling in my spine intensifies, spreading, coalescing into a hard, leaden knot in my gut. This feeling… I know this feeling. It is the primal knowledge of a predator when his prey has slipped the trap.
The bathroom.
I don’t walk. I stride, my calm veneer cracking with every step. The door is closed, and there is no sound from within. No running water. Nothing.
I don’t knock. I turn the handle and push the door open.
The scene imprints itself on my brain in a single, horrifying snapshot.
Grace is sitting on the edge of the large, freestanding bathtub.
She is still dressed in her silk dressing gown but in her hand, held loosely between her fingers, is a razor; one of my old razors.
A straight razor, with a handle of polished obsidian and a blade of wicked, gleaming steel.
She isn’t moving. She’s just staring at her reflection in the mirrored wall, the blade resting on her thigh. She looks serene. Resolved.
The world tilts on its axis. The carefully constructed fantasy of the last hour, the doting father, the reconciled family shatters into a million sharp-edged pieces.
She wasn’t softening. She wasn’t surrendering. The bitch was saying goodbye.
“Grace.” Her name is a guttural sound, ripped from a place deep inside me I thought I had buried.
She doesn’t startle. Slowly, as if moving through water, she turns her head and looks at me. Her eyes are not weary anymore. They are empty. Vast. Like the deep darkness of a twilight sky just after the sun has vanished, leaving nothing but an immense, chilling void.
“I was only shaving my legs,” she says. Her voice is quiet, flat. Devoid of any emotion whatsoever.
It’s a lie. A pathetic, transparent lie. She hasn’t even run the water. There’s no shaving cream. I look from the lethal blade to her face, and I know.
I can see it in the terrifying calm of her expression. The game is up. Not my game. Hers. The game of pretending to live.
A rage, cold and absolute, obliterates the last vestiges of my paternal joy. It’s not anger at her. It’s anger at her defiance. At this ultimate rejection. After everything I have given her. My home, my security, my child, my fucking love.
After I just held our son and dreamed of our future. She was in here, planning to leave me. To leave him. After everything I did, everything I sacrificed for this woman.
I fucking killed for her.
I almost destroyed our entire fucking world for her, and this is how she repays me?
I hold out my hand, palm up. My arm is steady but a tremor of pure, undiluted fury is vibrating through my entire being. “Give it to me.”
She doesn’t hesitate. There’s no fight left in her, and that’s what frightens me the most. If she fought, I could match her. If she screamed, I could silence her. But this passive resignation, this welcome for the end, it is a void I cannot fill, a lock for which I have no key.
She places the cool, heavy handle of the razor into my palm.
I close my fingers around it, feeling how smooth the obsidian is. I look at her, sitting there like a beautiful, broken doll, and the plan forms in my mind, fully realized.
She cannot leave me. She will not leave me.
I will break her like I did before. I will crush the last of her until she is nothing but a vessel, a thing for me to possess entirely. I don’t need her love now, I don’t need her joy, or her happiness. Not now I have a son, now I have an heir.
“Sit,” I command, my voice low and controlled, belying the storm within.
A flicker of confusion crosses her blank features. She stays where she is, on the edge of the tub.
“I said, sit,” I repeat, the tone leaving no room for disobedience.
She slowly shifts, settling more firmly on the porcelain edge. I turn and take a towel from the heated rail, laying it on the floor in front of her. I kneel on it. The position is subservient, but the power has never been more firmly in my grasp.
“Spread your legs,” I say.
Her eyes widen, just a fraction. The emptiness recedes for a second, replaced by a dawning apprehension. She knows this script. It is one of domination, of ownership. It is a language we both understand far better than the language of gentle fatherhood and forgiving motherhood.
She does as she’s told, parting her knees and baring her cunt for me.
“If you want to be clean,” I say, my gaze locked on hers, “then I will do it.”
I reach for the shaving cream on the counter. The hiss of the can is obscenely loud in the tense silence as I take her left calf in my hand. Her skin is cool. I can feel the fine bones beneath, so fragile I could snap them with a twist of my wrist.
Instead, I begin to apply the white, frothy cream, starting at her ankle and working my way up. Past her calf, over her knee, to her thigh. My touch is not rough, but it is deliberate. Clinical.
I open the razor, and the blade winks in the bathroom light. I hold her leg firmly, and with practiced, precise strokes, I begin to shave her. The sound of the blade scraping against her skin is the only sound in the room. She doesn’t flinch, she doesn’t take her eyes off me.
She is staring at me with that same unnerving calm, but now I can see the understanding in her eyes; she knows this isn’t about shaving.
This is a reassertion. A reclamation.
I am tending to her, but I am also reminding her that every inch of her body belongs to me.
Her life belongs to me. Even her attempts to leave it are subject to my permission.
I finish one leg and start on the other. The same methodical process; Apply the cream. Hold her fast. Scrape away the fine, invisible hairs. I am cleaning her. Purifying her of these dark thoughts.
I am proving, with every stroke, that I control even this most mundane of acts. That I control everything.
When both legs are smooth and clean, I pause. I look up at her. Her face is a pale mask, her breathing is shallow.
“And the rest,” I say, my voice a soft murmur that hangs in the steamy air.
A faint blush colours her neck. She leans back slightly, bracing her hands on the edge of the tub, and allows me to perform the intimate task. I am meticulous, obsessively so. There is no passion in this act, only a terrifying, absolute possession.
All the while, she stares back at me. Her eyes are no longer empty. They are filled with a bleak, horrifying knowledge. She knows that I have seen through her, that I have turned her moment of desired finality into yet another scene of my relentless domination.
I finish and close the razor with a definitive snick. I rise, placing the razor on the high shelf, far out of her reach. I look down at her, sitting undressed and shivering slightly on the edge of the bathtub.
She looks small. Defeated.
I hold out my hand to help her up. She looks at it for a long moment, then places her cold, damp one in mine.
She is still here. She is still mine.
But as I lead her from the bathroom, back to our bedroom, I understand that the battle is far from over. In fact, the most brutal part of the war has just begun. And the prize is no longer her love, but simply her continued breath.