Chapter 42
CORDELIA
One Thousand Years Ago
A s I sit waiting for my mother, I realise it would be remiss of me not to address the darkness swirling about my heart.
This is the story of the worst night of my life. But what I need you to understand is that neither of us wanted this.
There is no magic, no curse, or argument that could tear my heart from Eleanor’s. Regardless of what happens, I will find my way back to her.
If fate wills it, and she is not to be mine in this life, then I will forge my way through space and time until I find her heart anew. She belongs to me. Hers is the only love that twines with my soul and makes me complete.
No matter what happens with Mother, Eleanor will always have a place in my heart.
Let me begin with that fateful night.
* * *
E leanor’s sturdy frame sits at the kitchen table in the latest cottage we have commandeered.
She buries her head in her hands, her loose waves falling free and covering her face. The strain of the last few months is visible in the taut shape of her shoulders. I sigh as I sit next to her and pass her a cup of tea. A fire sings a symphony of crackles in the corner of the room.
She sits up, her hands sliding over my knees, the light press of her fingers against my skirts just enough to tell me I’m hers.
“We should talk,” she says, pushing the tea aside.
This is the tension in her shoulders. We’ve been avoiding this, despite the fact we’re both aware. For weeks, they’ve been gaining on us. Neither of us have wanted to confront it.
But we are exhausted.
“We should,” I say. “But... Can we pretend? One more time before we face reality?”
“Anything for you.” She slides her hands to my arse and pulls me up out of the kitchen chair and into her arms.
I swing my legs around her back and lock them. My lips find their way to hers, pressing a gentle kiss.
She kisses me, deep, intense pressure building between our caresses. It’s as though our lips hold everything unsaid. Her hands roam my skin, heavy and wanting, and filled with a strange mix of sweet strawberry and something darker. Hungrier.
But more than anything, the kiss aches all the way to my heart.
It hurts like knives and blades and paper cuts. How can some kisses heal and some kisses hurt?
This kiss tears my heart in two.
My eyes well because I know what this is. That this isn’t just a kiss, it isn’t just making love.
It’s saying goodbye.
“Eleanor,” I gasp against her mouth. “Don’t do this.”
I kiss her again, my hands finding her neck, her jaw, tugging at her hair, like that will make her understand.
If I plead hard enough, maybe she’ll stay.
“No talking,” she says, as if that’s enough to make me forget the way she’s kissing me. The way her hands grip my body, tugging and pulling at my clothes, my skin.
She wants me. Owns me. Is still letting me go.
The tears fall, but I can’t bring myself to stop them. I need this. Need her. All of us, even if this is the last time, I’ll have it.
I want to carve her touch into my memory. Make the shape of her a scar on my heart, so I never forget.
She tugs my dress over my head and lays me on the makeshift bed we pulled together of sofa cushions and blankets.
I return the favour, yanking at her shirt buttons until they pop open and free her ample breasts.
Her nipples are tight, and I feast my eyes on them, like I feast on the rest of her. I commit every inch of skin, every cell in her body to memory.
Eleanor is crying too now, only her tears are silent. They make her ocean blue eyes bright, intoxicating.
She doesn’t graze my skin with kisses the way she normally does. She doesn’t waste time on making me excited. Instead, she dives between my legs, plunging her mouth over my most intimate parts.
She’s rough, her hunger making her devour me. This isn’t making love anymore. This is fucking.
Her mouth owns me the same way her hands did earlier. She swipes her tongue along my centre like she’s marking me. Leaving trails of sensation between my legs that I know will never leave my body. She gifts me a shadow of her touch that I’ll never forget.
She thrusts a thick finger inside me, filling me, making me moan. Everything about this is new and different, and I crave it. How can something feel so good and hurt so much all at once?
The tears run quicker as I absorb this is a side of Eleanor I’m never going to experience again. For so long, she’s treated me as her queen, hers to protect and love and care for. And now she treats me like property, like I’m hers to do with as she sees fit. I like both sides.
The thought of the latter makes excitement pool between my legs. There’s a moment of fear where I think Eleanor will be repulsed by how wet I’ve grown. But instead, she moans a delightful sound, and continues to kiss my intimate region.
She pushes a second finger inside me. It makes my head roll back, my eyes shut, and a curse fall from my lips.
“Fuck, Eleanor.” My heart breaks over again. Why did she keep this side of her from me? Why did she protect me when she could have had every piece of me in this way and all the others she wanted?
And now this is the only memory I will keep of her.
Harder and harder, she glides inside me. I glance up to watch the rocking motion of her breasts as she leans over me, her trousers still on, shirt discarded.
My body tightens, ripples of pleasure pulse where she kisses me. It’s a tide, a swelling ocean of pleasure. Her free hand reaches up and pinches my nipple, and I cry out.
It stings, and that little act of violence pushes me over the edge. I spill into an orgasm that rushes from between my thighs up to the tip of my head. It tingles across my nose, my lips, races through my mind until I’m soaring.
I’m no longer in my body. I am only pleasure, and soul, and all of me is all of hers.
When I return to my body, I’m panting. Something inside me has snapped. I’m not the innocent little Cordelia I was.
She has fucked something into me, or maybe out of me. I am angry. I am ruined.
Our families are coming. They have done this, and I am furious.
“Take your trousers off,” I command. This is a tone I’ve never used before. I feared the words would come out strained. But they don’t.
I’m deep and sultry and demanding. Eleanor is always in charge, but not right now. Not after that.
She does as I ask, although I can tell she’s struggling to obey me. This isn’t us.
But then, tonight shouldn’t be happening to us, either. Strange nights call for strange actions. And I will make her mine the way she made me hers.
“Come here,” I say when she’s naked.
She places her feet on either side of my legs and steps up my body, one foot, then the other.
“Kneel,” I say.
And she does until her knees are on either side of my cheeks. I slide my hands to her backside and lower her down until my favourite place on her body presses against my mouth.
“I want you to look at me, okay?” I say.
She nods and I open my mouth, drawing my tongue between her intimate parts.
She inhales, tips her head back. I take my tongue off her.
“Eyes on me, Eleanor, I want to watch you come apart.”
She rocks back to face me, locking her gaze on mine, and I begin again. Slow at first, drawing my tongue everywhere, letting it mark her the way she marked me.
I focus on her bud, lapping and licking until her breaths are short and fast. She rocks her hips over my face. Leans down and loops my long hair around her wrist as if even now, she wants to hold a piece of me.
I dig my nails into her backside hard enough she hisses. But she also grows wet, soaking my chin, and I’m certain she likes this. I dig harder, hoping my nails cut her skin and scar her.
I’ve never wanted to hurt her before. I wonder if I should be ashamed. But I’m not. I want to keep her, and if I can’t, then perhaps she can carry a piece of me with her instead.
She juts against my face, rocking her hips in sharp motions as she reaches the edge of pleasure. I lap faster, tasting every morsel she gives me.
She leans forward, grinding herself on me. But her eyes never leave mine, and as she tips over the edge of pleasure, they come alive.
The ocean burns in her gaze, as if she sets the waves alight, the clouds on fire and my heart ablaze.
I watch her shatter, the space between my legs soaking all over again. I want to spend the rest of my life watching this. Consuming her as her nipples tighten, the hardening bud of her apex against my tongue.
I want to taste the pleasure that trickles from between her legs.
I want to keep her.
But I can’t.
I grip hold of her for a moment longer until I know this is it. She tears her gaze away, lying flat next to me on our makeshift bed. She runs her fingers along my stomach, drawing gentle circles.
“Our families,” she says finally.
“I know.”
“I don’t think we have long. I’m not sure we can keep running...” her voice breaks, the words fracturing the same way my heart is.
Little pieces and fragments of it drifting into the space between us.
“We can continue to run, but I think it’s going to break us. Look at how tired we are. We should not be hiding in the shadows. We should not be living in the breaths between days,” she says.
Her hand comes to my cheek and wipes away the tears I didn’t know had fallen.
“Then what if we truly leave? Change our names, our identities, leave this city and the next. Run far enough they can never find us?”
Eleanor’s hand falls away. “I want that. Truly I do. But I also wonder whether we will ever be free. Won’t we constantly look over our shoulders? Spend our days with one eye on the horizon?”
“Always wondering if this is the day they catch up?” I whisper.
She nods. “I would live that life if it meant I could keep you.”
“Oh, Cordelia, you are my oxygen. You are my light and love, but I want to live my life free with you.”
“What are you saying?” I ask.
She shakes her head. “Nothing. Today, I’m saying nothing. But I can’t keep doing this. I’m exhausted. And if we keep running, nothing is going to change.”
“So we have a decision to make?”
Eleanor nods, brushes a loose strand of hair behind my ears and kisses my forehead.
“I will always honour your wishes. If you want to keep running, we’ll run. But we need a new plan. One that isn’t exhausting.”
“And if I don’t?”
“Then if you don’t, we turn back. We return to our families and try to fight from within our prison walls.”
I pull my hands over my face. I know what my heart wants and what my head thinks we should do.
But as is the case with many of the important decisions, if you wait too long, the decision is taken from you.
A deafening roar booms around the living room, the front door in the kitchen explodes off the hinges and clatters over the table we were sitting at a moment ago.
I scream.
The back door does the same a second later, flying off and slamming against a bookcase on the wall.
Men flood the kitchen and the living room. Men that seem familiar, some that don’t.
Shouts rent the air, the noise blisters. Words are indecipherable. I grab my dress, clutching it as I manage to half pull it over my head.
Eleanor grabs my hand. Her eyes are wild and harried. She squeezes so tight I fear my bones will crack.
“I was wrong,” she pants. “We should have run. I never want to leave you.” This time she cries, and clarity floods my mind.
I glance frantically around the rooms, searching for the familiarity I’m afraid of and yet I know I’ll find.
The logos on their uniforms. My mother’s house: St Clair, and on the others, the Randall family crest.
They found us.
I lurch forward and clutch Eleanor to me. She’s put her trousers on and her shirt, though it’s not done up. She doesn’t even try to fix the buttons. Instead, we cling to each other, half naked and desperate.
Our hands dig into each other’s skin, only this time my nails don’t mark her as mine, but with a desperate plea: please don’t let go.
The first man, a Randall, lunges for Eleanor and grabs her around the waist. She jerks back; the force tugging away one of her hands, leaving us connected by one hand. Her grip stays firm.
She lashes at the man. Throwing wild fists at his head, his neck. Her leg kicks out almost pulling me over.
“Eleanor,” I shriek, as a second man grabs hold of her. I’m knocked forward, as a man, a St Clair, leaps at me.
“No!” Eleanor shrieks.
But I am not as strong as her. One of my fingers slips. The heat and sweat between our palms making it hard to hold on.
The man drags me up and yanks at me.
But I refuse to let go. My knuckles ache with the strain, the skin between my fingers stretching and splitting where I refuse to let go.
“Eleanor, please,” I beg.
But I no longer know what I’m begging for. This is inevitable. It’s too late to stop them. Too late to run.
A second man grabs hold of me, a third on Eleanor.
She is a force. Her shoulders and neck strain with the effort of not letting me go. Veins pulse in her face and down her throat while her muscles quiver and burn with the effort of maintaining her grip on me.
The same heat floods my shoulders, the strain feels like my joints will pop. But still I refuse to let go.
And then, two women walk through the front door and into the living room where Eleanor and I are now horizontal, being tugged apart like a rope across the living room.
Their faces are shadowed by the light behind them. But when they are revealed with their proximity, all the fight leaves me. I know we’ve lost.
“Mother,” both Eleanor and I say simultaneously.
The two matriarchs of our families stand before us. Both wearing scowls that could freeze oceans, destroy cities and sever heads.
“Release her,” my mother says.
“Mama, please.”
“Eleanor,” her mother says, her tone sharp enough to cut our wrists.
Our mothers look at each other and give each other a slight incline of the head.
But it’s my mother who speaks for them both. “We will ask you once, to choose to let go...”
She turns to Eleanor’s mother who says. “Or the consequence will start a war that will tear the city and both of our families apart. We are agreed. Our families cannot be joined. We will do whatever it takes to protect the integrity of this city’s economy.”
My mother nods. “There are scars that run too deep between us for one fleeting romance to change it. This is a phase, Cordelia. You will get over it.”
“No,” I breathe.
But Eleanor squeezes my hand, forcing me to look at her. Tears stain her cheeks like paint.
“They’re giving us the choice, Cordelia. Choose to let go, or they’ll hunt us. I can’t let that happen. I can’t let them kill you. I’d rather you live without me, than die because our families forbid our love.”
“E-Eleanor,” I plead, her name cracked between sobs.
But her fingers are already loosening, the iron vice-like grip slipping.
“Please,” she begs this time. “Don’t make me be the one to let go.”
I hold her gaze, and in that moment, time slows to a stop. There is only her and me, and the weight of our love, thick and endless between us. I try to let my eyes tell her all the things I wish I’d said.
That even though I’ve told her a thousand times, I should have said it a thousand more. I want to explain how deeply I love her. That my heart will bleed for eternity.
That I will carry an open wound in my soul for the rest of time.
I want her to understand that the way she looks at me made me feel like a queen, a goddess, wanted. Loved. Owned. Like I was her everything and nothing else mattered.
I want to tell her that there can never be anyone else, that no matter how many lifetimes I have to search, I will always hunt for her.
That even though I’m letting go, I will never stop looking for a way to get her back.
But she’s right. I can’t live in a world where she’s gone because of me.
So my fingers loosen.
I hold her gaze and plead with the gods to let her hear my message. To let her know that no matter how many millennia it takes, I will find my way back to her.
“Cordelia,” she breathes. One precious word, a sound I’ll hold in my heart forever; its echoes carving sharp memories in my mind.
My lips part to say something, anything, but there’s nothing else that can be said or done.
With our mothers standing over us, men tugging and pulling us apart, tears streaking both of our cheeks, I do the one thing I thought I would never do.
I let go.