Chapter Five #2
“They cannot, because people are not simple,” he argued, that dark gaze seeming to wind its way inside me as he gazed down at me. “People are desperate and complicated, wicked and grasping.”
“Is that what you are?” I asked him, and it felt like the most dangerous question I could possibly have dared utter.
Jovi shook his head, and for a moment I thought he looked like he was in pain.
“Most people scuttle about this planet, imagining that the things they do make some kind of difference. That they matter. Their petty feuds, their heartbreaks, their daydreams about futures they will never make real.” He bent down and this time, when he smoothed his hand over my jaw, he kept going.
He speared his long, elegant fingers into my hair, then used it to tug my head back.
“But you and I, we know different, do we not?”
That didn’t seem like a question he wanted the answer to, and that was a good thing, since the most I could do was stutter out a breath.
“You and I know that all of it is futile,” he told me in that low, dark, rumbling voice of his that I could feel take up residence behind my ribs.
“The bright, happy, pointless lives of people who are nothing more than prey. Just as you and I know that the world is sharply divided, is it not? Life belongs to the predator. Prey lives only insofar as predators allow it, and we both know that more often, they die.”
“I’ve always heard that Italians are poetic,” I murmured, and his grip in my hair was tight. It should have hurt.
Maybe it did hurt, but that, too, was sensation—and it turned out I was a glutton for every last scrap of sensation that I could hoard.
That I could feel when for as long as I could remember, there had been so little but boredom, apprehension, and the inevitability of my own surrender.
The tedium of the chokehold of the life my father allowed me, in the convent or under his disapproving eye.
The endless stretch of these prison days without number.
I had no reason to think that marrying one of my father’s cronies would be any different. Aside from the marital expectations, that Katarzyna had made certain to tell me were far better tolerated with wine. Or anything else I could get my hands on.
Because there are always dynastic expectations, she had said in her matter-of-fact way.
I don’t know that I want to do any of those things, I had replied. I don’t like anyone who does.
She had lifted her wineglass in my direction. It is as my mother always said about giving birth, she replied coolly. Yes, of course, a woman can do it naturally, as women have done since the dawn of time, but why should she?
“If I were you,” Jovi told me in that forbidding way of his, undercut—or perhaps enhanced—by that electricity I could feel crashing all around him like an incoming storm, “I would be grateful that you do not have to live out the rest of your life as some plastic representation of a rich man’s trophy.
Pretending you do not know exactly how dark the shadows are all around you.
All the blood and pain tied to every single moment that bores you. ”
“I have already lived that life,” I reminded him. “As a rich man’s daughter instead of his wife. I’m not sure it’s any better.”
“You and I do not get to have these blameless, anodyne years you speak of. Wandering down city streets, thinking we might read a newspaper in a café or while away an afternoon over a cribbage board.” He laughed.
It was a harsh, aching sort of sound. “This is not reality, Rux. Not for monsters like us, raised by demons and devils to suit their own ends. We don’t get to be silly and dream of happy things.
The moment you were born, your destiny was set.
I am no different. The only difference between the two of us is that I accept what I am and what that makes me. ”
“But why did you accept it?” I asked, only understanding the urgency in the question when I could hear it hang between us. “What would happen if you refused to accept it?”
Jovi let go of me then, looking down at me as if he couldn’t believe I’d asked him the question.
As if I’d reached into his chest and ripped out his heart.
I was half convinced that if I looked up at one of my chained, dangling hands, I’d see it there.
Bright and red in the middle of this otherwise colorless room.
“Tell me one thing you think you’ve missed out on,” he growled at me. “One thing that you imagine life would have given you if you’d been a happy little sheep, halfway to her own slaughter, like everyone else out there.”
And I knew the answer immediately. I could feel it in my mouth, as surely as when he had pressed his thumb there.
“There are a lot of things,” I told him. “There’s a reason they say ignorance is bliss. I think they’re right.”
“No one who says such a thing is ignorant. They only fantasize that if they were, they would like it. But if that were true, everyone would be ignorant. Eve would never have tasted that apple.” He shook his head. “One thing, Rux.”
“I always thought I’d like to be kissed before I died,” I said, because I couldn’t seem to stop myself. “It seems a shame that never happened.”
It seemed like a lot more than a shame.
But once I said it, the silence became deafening. So loud that it seemed to press in from all sides, a clamor beyond reason.
The look in his eyes was the same.
But I didn’t back down. I looked straight at him, and I didn’t let myself look away. I reminded myself that all I had in this life were the choices I made with what little time I had left.
So I tipped my head back and I didn’t look away.
And I chose.
“The least you could do,” I said quietly, “the very least, Jovi, is kiss me before you kill me. Don’t you think?”