Chapter 21 Aurora
Aurora
As soon as Curse pulls out, I adjust my clothing. But I’m going to need to do more than that. There’s blood and come mixed together, wet and staining me. I don’t want to get it on the nice leather of this bench.
My pussy aches. My muscles are weak.
It felt so good for him to hurt me.
“Do you…need anything?” Curse’s voice is stilted and strained.
“I’ll need a pad from my suitcase.”
He tucks himself back into his pants. I see the rusty streaks along his cock.
And it’s a reminder that we didn’t use protection.
I know I should be panicking about that right now, but I just can’t seem to make myself too.
There’s a blissful numbness spreading through me.
Every thought, emotion, and sensation dimmed in the aftermath of the intensity Curse just unleashed upon me.
I’ve never seen him look like that. When he was above me, inside me. His eyes, always so flat and cold, kindled to ferocious life. Burning me.
Curse is getting down my suitcase now. On the floor of the train, he opens it, and I point out the box I want. Peeling apart the carboard at the top, he pulls one pad out and hands it to me.
I take it, scooting gingerly across the bench.
Just as I’m standing up and Curse is returning the suitcase to the rack, the door opens and the porter comes back.
Or, a porter does, anyway. The other one before must be on break, or maybe there’s been a shift change or something.
This one is a younger man. Not as smiley.
When he asks if we want anything, I immediately say, “Water.”
“Two waters,” Curse adds. As the porter busies himself at his little cart, Curse sits down once more. He’s utterly still. Silent. Staring at me as I make my way to the little bathroom in the train car.
There’s not much room in here. It reminds me a bit of an airplane bathroom.
Cramped, and lots of shiny metal surfaces.
But it’s clean, and there’s hand soap, so I can’t really complain.
It’s hard to sit down on the toilet because my quads are shaking so much.
But there’s a bar beside the toilet, and by clutching onto that, I manage.
I pee, wincing, because it stings. There’s some blood in the toilet, and on the paper when I wipe.
He was right. He wasn’t gentle.
But I don’t think I would have wanted anything else from him in that moment. We aren’t lovers. We aren’t friends. Soon enough, we’ll never have to see each other again.
I want that thought to be empowering. To make me feel brave and strong. Just get through the next little bit and be done with him.
But it doesn’t make me feel like that. It just makes me think about all the ways things could have been different. In a different life. If we were different people.
But we’re not.
I stick the pad onto my underwear, flush, and wash my hands.
I take my time, just feeling the warm water running over my skin.
I’m not quite ready to go back out there yet.
So I remove my sunglasses and wash my face, too.
Then I slowly take my hair down, because it’s all messed up now, carefully placing each bobby pin on the side of the tiny sink.
I redo my bun three times, until it’s as close to perfect as possible.
I fix up my scarf and return my sunglasses to my face.
In the end, I spend upwards of fifteen minutes in there.
I linger so long I’m somewhat surprised that Curse doesn’t come banging on the door to make sure I haven’t escaped out some tiny hatch or window or something.
But clearly, he isn’t worried. When I go back out to the car, I find him asleep, slumped over against the table, his shoulders rising and falling with slow breaths.
One of his arms is bent beneath his dark head, his face turned towards the covered window.
The other is stretched a bit awkwardly across the table’s surface, almost like, in sleep, he’s reaching for something.
But the only something there is an overturned cup.
I guess it was flat water this time, not sparkling. The porter poured it into cups.
Kind of a bad idea, apparently, because my water has spilled over the side of the table and onto the carpet below. Maybe the train’s rocking tipped it over while Curse was asleep. His own cup is upright, but empty.
“No water for me, I guess.”
Honestly, that’s alright. I sit at the table across from Curse and close my eyes as well.
I don’t fall asleep, but I do zone out, letting the train’s rhythmic movements and sounds roll through my head like my thoughts are on their own set of tracks.
Each one packaged up inside its own little train car, disappearing into the distance until there is nothing left but silence.
Eventually, that silence is broken by buzzing.
Curse’s phone. I open my eyes. He doesn’t stir. I stand up and walk around to his side of the table. His phone has fallen out of his pocket and onto the bench beside him. The name on the screen sears into my brain.
Elio.
The one who ordered Curse to come and take me. The one who wants to get his hands on all of papà’s assets. The one who orchestrated all of this.
Not caring about how Curse is going to react, I snatch up the phone and smash my finger against the green call button.
“Elio,” I say. My voice is shaking.
There’s a pause. Like he’s recalibrating his expectations. Obviously, he never expected me to be the one to answer his brother’s phone.
“Aurora.” He’s recovered well from the surprise, His voice is deep but smooth. Not like mine was when I answered. “Good to speak with you.”
“Oh, is it?” I hiss. Its not my voice shaking now, but my whole body. I pace the train car, rage fuelling every tremor-like step.
“It is,” Elio confirms easily. “Where are you right now?”
“As if you don’t know,” I snap. “We’re on the train to Toronto. For the wedding.”
Another pause.
“Ah. So that’s what he decided, then?”
“What do you mean?”
“He decided to marry you.”
I stop pacing at once. My gaze slices to Curse where he’s sleeping.
“What?” I whisper.
“It’s what I would have done if I were him,” Elio says.
“It was either that or hide you away in some dark and lonely corner for the rest of your life, where you’d constantly be looking over your shoulder.
Or give you back to New York, of course.
But he was never going to let that happen.
Especially after the stunt he pulled on your wedding night. ”
My thoughts spin so fast I’m nearly dizzy with them.
What the hell is Elio saying? That he never ordered Curse to kill Marco? That it was never his plan?
That Curse acted on his own? And never originally intended to use me?
None of this makes any fucking sense.
“I need to wake him up.”
I don’t realize that I’ve said the words out loud until Elio responds. All the blasé smoothness from his voice earlier vanishes.
“Wake,” he says dangerously, “him up?”
“He’s asleep!”
“Asleep.”
Elio repeats it in a tone of flat disbelief. Like I’ve just told him that Curse is currently standing on his head.
“Yes, asleep. That’s why he didn’t answer his phone. You know that he’s a crazy heavy sleeper!”
“I do know that,” Elio says icily. “But I also know that he would never fall asleep while he’s responsible for you in a public fucking place.
” He swears, then seems to pull away from the phone, speaking rapidly to someone else nearby.
When his voice comes back to me, it’s only to utter a curt, “We’ll meet you at the station. Do not fucking move.”
I drop the phone.
“Curse?”
I run to him, grabbing at his shoulders and shaking. He’s so big and heavy, I barely manage to rock him. He’s completely limp. Still breathing. But he won’t, he can’t, wake up.
I’m so stupid. How could I have not realized something was wrong? He won’t even sleep in his own goddamn fortress of a house without handcuffing me to him!
“Curse!”
Still no response. What the hell happened?
And then I see them again. The cups.
He drank all his water.
And then, maybe with his very last shreds of consciousness, he purposely knocked over mine.
Horror squeezes me in the relentless vise of its grip, whispering the word poison to me.
“No, no, no, no!” I say it over and over again, clutching at him with frantic fingers, as if it could make any kind of difference. As if I could make any kind of difference. Above our heads, a pleasant female voice announces that we will be arriving at Union Station momentarily.
The door to our train car opens. Is Elio here already?
But when I stand and whirl, my eyes don’t collide with Elio’s.
It’s another pair of eyes. That murky dark hazel.
The same colour as Carlo Messina’s eyes.
The same colour as Marco’s.
“Alessandro.”
* * *
Thank you so much for reading A Monster So Merciless.