Chapter 47
Penance
THE REQUIEM | Past
Idon’t know how many days it has been. Or weeks.
Time doesn’t live here anymore. Sometimes the sky outside the high windows is a blinding, painful white, and sometimes it drops into a suffocating black. People drift in and out of the room like shadows wrapped around me.
Some man in spectacles comes to press cold metal against my wrist, checking my vitals. Whispering that I’m losing contact with reality. Some woman comes with food, her face a blur of meaningless features. I don’t recognize her. I don’t care to.
All I recall, the only constant in this shifting, warped world, is my husband. The monster who controls the shadows.
The voices always start before I open my eyes. I hear it all before dawn. Again. Again. Again.
They say I should kill myself. They remind me all the time that my husband is the murderer. I want my Mama. But this monster has taken her away from me. I see her daily, though. She’s sitting in the corner of the room. She calls me her Stina. She sings lullabies to me, and I smile at her.
I think I am forgetting her face.
Her eyes are always dark; there’s a hollow where her irises are supposed to be, but I’ve managed to come to terms with reality.
This is my reality.
Not Zagreus, or the child he said I was carrying.
These shadows, my Mama sitting on the couch and Crystella hanging off the fan. I smile and wave at her.
Is it fun up there?
Crystella doesn’t answer, her blue lips stretched into a frozen grin as she sways gently. She just points down at my stomach.
They all point to my stomach.
It’s growing inside me. The parasite is slowly eating me from the inside out, making me weaker with every breath I take.
It’s a parasite born of the monster, designed to tie me to this blood-stained house forever.
And the bitter white pills the man with spectacles forces down my throat?
They aren’t helping. They make my Mother disappear.
Every time I take them, her comforting, singing shadow fades into the wall, leaving me alone with him.
I need to make it stop. I need to get it out.
My hands clench over my stomach, my fingernails digging deeply through the fabric of my nightgown, scratching at my skin. If I can just squeeze hard enough, if I can press deep enough into the flesh, I can rid myself of the parasite. I can make the blood flow. I can bring Mama back permanently.
I push my thumbs down. A breathless gasp escapes my lips as pain flares across my abdomen.
“Selene! Stop!”
Before I can finish what I’m doing, a pair of hands violently yank my wrists away from my body. The impact jars my bones, and I am slammed back against the mattress.
My monster hovers over me, his towering frame blocking out the light from the window. His broad chest heaving as he uses his weight to pin my arms over my head.
“Let me go!” I shriek, thrashing wildly beneath him. “Get off of me! Let me do it! I need to get it out!”
“Look at me, dammit!” he roars, his rough hands sliding up from my wrists to clamp onto my jaw, pinching my cheeks so tightly it bruises.
He forces my head up, tilting my face back until I have no choice but to look directly into his eyes.
“Look at me, Selene! Focus on my eyes!” I gasp, staring up into the stormy grey depths.
For a fraction of a second, the haze in my mind sways. The violent crashing of the waves slows down, and I recognize him. I see the raw exhaustion, the terrifying desperation bleeding through his rigid demeanor. A phantom memory of the man I used to know surfaces.
But then, a cold breath hits the back of my neck.
I look past his broad shoulder. Right behind him, Mama is standing by the closet, her red hands pointing accusingly at his back. Beside her, Crystella drops from the ceiling, landing soundlessly on her feet, her hollow eye sockets staring right through my soul.
“He is a monster, Stina. He will kill you just as he killed us.”
“No!” I scream as I bring my knees up, slamming them hard into his torso, and use the momentum to push his chest away from mine. He stumbles back, momentarily caught off guard by my desperation.
I don’t waste a single second. I scramble off the opposite side of the bed and sprint toward the doors, throwing them open and hurling myself out into the corridor.
“Selene! Come back!”
I don’t look back. I fly down the staircase, my heart hammering against my ribs so violently that it hurts. I don’t know where I’m going. I just need to escape the room, escape the chains, escape the monster.
I round a sharp corner at the bottom of the stairs, my hands scraping against the cold molding of the walls until I burst through a swinging door into the kitchen.
Two women are standing near the island. At the sound of my ragged breathing and the violent slam of the doors, they both turn.
A loud, horrified gasp escapes the older woman’s lips.
“Selene?”
It’s his Mother. Another shadow.
She takes a step toward me, her pale face filled with a mixture of shock and terror as she takes in my appearance.
But I don’t see her face. I look straight past her, to the counter beside her.
Resting on a wooden cutting board is a silver knife.
Take it.
Protect yourself, Stina!
Before the women can even react, I lunge forward and pull it up, holding it out in front of me with both hands. My chest heaves as I back away into the center of the kitchen, pointing the steel directly at his Mother’s chest.
“Stay back!” I scream. “Don’t touch me! None of you touch me!”
Zagreus fills the doorway, his eyes instantly locking onto the blade reflecting in my hands. His entire frame freezes in lethal stillness as his gaze cuts from the knife in my hand to his trembling Mother standing just feet away.
“Selene,” Zagreus murmurs, his voice dropping into a dangerously low whisper that vibrates through the entire room. He slowly raises his hands, palms open, taking a single step forward. “Drop the knife. Right now.”
His voice sounds like it’s coming from the bottom of the ocean.
He’s going to kill you, Stina!
Mama screams from the ceiling.
“Look at his hands, they’re covered in our blood!” Crystella screeches. “Do it! Do it! Cut the monster down!”
The voices collide. The world spins. I can’t breathe. The parasite in my stomach is clawing at my ribs. I look at Zagreus, but I don’t see my husband anymore. I see the beast from the chapel. I see the shadow that stole my family.
With a shriek, I lunge forward. I raise the knife, pouring every ounce of my terror, my grief, and my broken sanity into it as I aim the strike straight at his chest. I am going to end it. I am going to kill the monster.
“No! Selene, stop!”
A shadow suddenly blurs into my peripheral vision.
Before the blade can reach Zagreus, his Mother throws herself directly into my path. She steps in front of him, her arms outstretched.
The silver steel sinks into her flesh.
Time snaps back into reality. The screaming voices in my head instantly vanish.
I stumble backward, my hands releasing the hilt of the knife.
His Mother gasps, her eyes wide as she looks down at the stab wound in her sternum.
Red pours out, soaking through her pale blouse, splashing onto the cold marble island. It mimics the dress from my dream. Splashes of red on white fabric.
She collapses into Zagreus’s arms, her body going limp.
I look at her. Then I slowly look down at my hands. They are covered in the same warm, wet crimson. The blood is sticking to my skin.
“No…” I whisper.
What did I do? What did I do?
“Selene.” Zagreus’s voice is broken. He is kneeling on the floor, holding his Mother’s bleeding body against his chest. His face is entirely white; there’s agony in his grey eyes that I have never seen before.
But he looks up at me, and through the grief, he reaches out a hand, trying to grab my wrist. “Give me… give me the knife, Dolcezza. Please.”
“Don’t touch me!” I scream as I slash the knife through the air to keep him away from me. “You’re a monster! Get away!”
The sharp edge of the blade catches the side of his face.
It leaves a thin red line that immediately begins to bead with dark blood. He doesn’t even flinch. He just stares at me through the crimson mask of his family’s blood, his hand freezing in mid-air.
I freeze too.
The knife slips from my fingers, clattering loudly against the tile floor. The voices in my head are gone now. The fog clears entirely, leaving me stranded in the wreckage of my own shattered mind.
I didn’t kill a demon. I killed an innocent woman. I cut my husband.
I am just like him. I am worse.
I am a monster, too.
“No, no, no…” I sob, backing away from him, my bare feet slipping in the pooling blood on the floor. “No, I didn’t mean to… they said…”
“Selene, wait—” Zagreus chokes out, but his hands are pinned, pressing down on his Mother’s chest to stop the bleed.
“No!”
I turn on my heel and run.
I don’t look back. I don’t look at the shadows. I just run from the horror of what I’ve become.
The rain hits my face, washing the blood from my cheeks, but it can’t wash away the rot in my soul.
I sprint. In the distance, I see heavy gates. Freedom. If I can just get past the gate, everything will go back to what it was.
“Selene!”
I don’t stop.
“You’re trapped, Stina.” Mama’s voice whispers from the puddles at my feet.
“No, I’m not, I’m not!” I shriek at the empty air, spinning around to press my back against the gate.
A massive shadow crashes into me before I can even draw another breath.
He slams into me with enough force to pin me. His arms wrap around my torso, lifting my feet completely off the wet ground to stop my thrashing. I go wild beneath his touch, kicking, biting, and scratching at his chest as the madness takes total, violent control of my limbs.
“Let me go! You monster! You made me do it!” I scream as I throw my head back, snapping my jaw blindly toward his face, my eyes wide, bloodshot, and completely unfocused.
“Selene, look at me! Look at me, please!”
His voice comes apart. The Don of the Vitale family is trembling. His rough hands clamp onto my wet hair, forcing my head into the crook of his neck. The thin red line I sliced across his jawline is bleeding heavily, mixing with the rain and dripping onto my shoulder.
He buries his face into my neck, his broad shoulders shaking violently as hot tears mingle with the icy rain on my skin. “Come back, please… come back to me, Dolcezza. Don’t leave me in the dark. I have you. I have you, dammit, just come back…”
“She’s dead, Zagreus!” I howl into the storm, my fingers clawing at the skin of his throat, trying to tear through reality. “We’re all dead! Papa is waiting downstairs! Let me go down the stairs!”
Through the haze of my screaming, I feel a pinch on the side of my neck.
“I’m sorry,” he rasps, his grip tightening until it almost crushes my ribs, holding me so close I can feel the frantic, agonizing fracture of his heart against mine. “I’m so sorry, Dolcezza…”
The screeching voices of Mama and Crystella fade. My flailing limbs lose their strength, my fingers slipping from his collar as the adrenaline drains entirely from my veins.
“Zagreus…” I whisper.
My head falls heavily against his shoulder, my eyes rolling back into the dark as my body goes limp in his arms.