Chapter 21 Curse #2
“Yes. My throat.” Her fingers brush shadowy marks, the imprint of his fucking fingers, on her neck. “And to get me on the plane…I was drugged.”
My insides unravel.
“You fucking drugged her?” Again, I drive his pathetic fucking face against the stone. His knees buckle, but I don’t let him fall. There will be no respite for him. His body could be completely falling the fuck apart, and still, I will make him stand here and take this.
“What else?” I demand. I’m asking Messina, though I highly doubt he’s capable of speech right now.
“That’s…That’s it,” Aurora stutter. “He hasn’t done anything else.”
“Oh, really?” I smash his face down again. “That’s for hitting her with your gun.” Again. “That’s for putting her in danger by driving us off the road.” Again. “That’s for fucking taking her from me.” Again again again. “For even fucking thinking that you could.”
Maybe some survival instinct is kicking in for Messina now.
Or maybe he’s just tired of getting his goddamn face crushed in against this stone.
Whatever it is, it gives him a sudden burst of strength.
He hurls his head back as hard as he can, catching my cheekbone and jaw.
If I hadn’t just gone through that car accident, it probably wouldn’t have had much of an effect.
But my brain’s been rattled once already. And I’m momentarily stunned.
“Curse!”
Aurora’s voice drags me back. Just like it always does.
Messina has made it out of the bathroom. He’s staggering towards Aurora, who is now backing away from him with terror in her eyes.
Both times he took her, I never actually saw it happen.
I never saw him advance on her this way.
Never saw her fear. But I see it now, and it does something to me inside.
Twists something. Maybe breaks it entirely.
Snarling, I leap at Messina like a fucking wolf, tumbling with him through the balcony door that I’ve left open.
He tries to gain the upper hand, to get on top of me, but all that face-smashing has taken its toll.
He’s slow. Sloppy. Even with my injuries, I’m able to subdue him.
I gather his pathetic, shuddering body in my hands. And then I throw him over the balcony’s railing.
He makes a wet, snotty sound of shock when he drops, like he’s tried to gasp through his destroyed nose, but can’t. The next sound is that of a butcher’s knife through meat. Only it’s not a knife. But the spikes of the fencing below.
Messina has landed on them.
His body is a sordid arch, his feet grappling weakly against the grass, his back pierced by the fencing.
Two of the wrought iron spikes protrude from his stomach, having passed all the way through him.
A third spike has torn open his side, spilling blood and the hot ropes of his guts.
But he’s still breathing, still alive enough to writhe like a worm on a hook.
One of his hands flops against his stomach, as if he can somehow pull the fenceposts out.
I’m back on the trellis now, clambering down.
I’m compelled to experience this shit up close. To watch the life drain out of his body the way his blood currently is. To get as near as I can to his pain. Fucking drink it down.
My own pain is a distant echo as I approach his shuddering form. Even now, that golden euphoria is unfolding in my bloodstream, that sick sense of calm.
“This is what happens when someone touches her,” I say, coming to a stop beside him.
I place my hand flat on his abdomen, between the black posts sticking out of him, and shove.
With a crackling lurch, his body slides further down the spikes.
When he opens his mouth, out pours a river of blackish blood.
I don’t let up the pressure. Not until the stare of his swollen eyes goes blank. Not until he’s dead.
I give one final, furious shove for good measure before stepping back. Moonlight scalds the scene, gleaming on the black spikes, so shiny with his blood.
He is never going to touch my fucking wife again.
I turn back to the house to find her on the balcony, bathed in that same moonlight, fucking glowing with it. Her slender fingers are wrapped around the balcony railing in a death grip, her face whiter than I’ve ever seen it as she stares down at the scene, at Messina’s body, at me.
Then, she turns and flees into the house.
I follow at once, her name like smoke in my throat.
“Aurora!” My pain from the accident comes rushing back in, my leg throbbing, head spinning. I have to find her. I always, always have to find her.
I can never be without her now. It will never work. I won’t fucking survive it.
When I find her, it’s not in the main bedroom upstairs, but a much smaller one on the first floor. She’s sitting on a tiny single bed, one that looks like it might be meant for a child, her knees drawn up to her chin, her stare glassy. Tears course silently down her cheeks.
“He had to die, Aurora,” I say.
What other words are there? I’m sorry? Yeah, well, I’m not.
I kneel before her, a supplicant at her altar. I wish that I could suck the guilt out of her, like pulling poison from a wound. I wish that I could make her as unfeeling as I am. So that she wouldn’t have to suffer this.
But then she wouldn’t be Aurora.
“I know,” she whispers. The tears shimmer in the hushed darkness of this little room.
“I’m not sad. Or…I am. I don’t know. I don’t know what I feel.
” She presses her forehead to her knees, showing me only the top of her shining head for a moment that makes my fucking rib cage feel too tight. I want to see her face.
“This is the room I slept in.”
I absorb this, unsure what the significance is, or why she’s telling me at all. It is strange this random room is the one she’s ended up in. I wait for more. It doesn’t come.
“When?” I prod. “After the fire?”
She nods, rubbing her forehead against her knees. Her hands twist against each other at the fronts of her shins.
“I’ve had my own personal curse. It’s been wrapped around me since I was six years old. But it’s never been you,” she chokes out. “It’s been the Messina men. Three generations. And this house.” She says the word like it tastes bad. Like this big, pretty, country home is a prison.
“Three generations?”
The only two Messina men who’ve ever made her hurt are the two I’ve killed.
Aren’t they?
“It’s a curse,” she says again. “But being here now, with you, seeing that Alessandro is dead, the Messina line is ended…” She raises her head, meeting my eyes with a sombre sort of serenity. “I think you’ve broken it.”
A violent shudder goes through her, and her breath hitches several times in a row.
“This room…It’s just a room now.” She pets the bed, like it’s a living thing to be comforted.
This is the room I slept in.
All at once, a black bolt of lightning straight through the core of me, I know.
I know without her ever having to say the words.
Every clue suddenly clicks into place. The way she doesn’t like men touching her.
The way she almost killed Marco Messina on their wedding night before he even got her clothes off.
The way she showers like it’s her fucking religion, like she never thinks she’ll be clean.
“Carlo.” My voice doesn’t sound like mine. It’s warped, the name singed by the rising fire of rage inside me.
She flinches at the two syllables, and I don’t know if it’s because of the name I’ve spoken aloud in this room, or because of the feral, fractured quality my voice has taken on.
“Yes. I never wanted you to know.” She’s whispering again. Like even saying this is too much.
“Why?” I demand. “Look at me. Angel, Aurora, please.”
My hands move to touch her. But they’re soaked in Messina’s blood, and I can’t. I fucking can’t get that blood on her now. I remain on my knees before her, bloodied fists shaking with the force it takes not to hold her.
She finally meets my gaze again, and she looks younger. Scared. Scared of what?
Of me?
“Tell me you’re not afraid of me now,” I beg her, my throat working.
She shakes her head, a tiny movement. She looks so small right now. It makes me want to break something. Someone. Anything to make this better for her.
“I was only afraid of you not loving me.”
Fresh tears spill from her eyes, gleaming rivers on her skin.
“But that fear’s already come true, hasn’t it?” she asks. “You told me when I was sixteen that you could never be what I needed. When all I’ve ever needed was for you to love me.”
I didn’t think I could do it. That I could love her, love anyone.
I’ve never been able to name the knotty cord that seems to bind us, stretching over years and oceans.
I know I loved her as a child. But that feeling is so different to the one that beats dark wings inside me now.
Things were so easy back then. Pure. Simple.
There’s nothing simple about this. About us.
It’s lust and devotion. Suffering and desire. The holy gleam of moonlight on hair and spilled blood in the night. It’s sacrifice, resentment, rage. Potent as an opioid. A sacred blessing. A fucking curse.
Maybe I can’t have that simple, childhood love anymore.
But maybe I can have something else.
And I have to make her understand. Because I’m suddenly certain, with a clarity that chills me to the bone, that if I don’t make her see it here, now, in this bedroom that represents all the things she thinks have broken her, then I will truly fucking lose her.
“I got this tattoo in Montreal,” I say. “Right after I saw you twelve years ago.”
Lifting my left fist, I unfurl the fingers. Beneath the dried blood, beneath the remnants of this night, the letter A remains.
She goes entirely still.
“You want to know what this A stands for?” I ask, bringing my palm closer to her face. “It’s for alive, because I finally feel that way when I am with you.”
Her lips part.
“It’s for addiction, because I’ll never escape your withdrawal.”
More tears in the silence between words.
“It’s for angel, because that is what you are to me.”
She tries to look away, but I don’t let her. I keep my hand, that letter A, directly in her view.
“It’s for Aurora. Your name. You,” I rasp. “Because it’s always fucking been you, Aurora. It’s always, only been you.”
“What are you saying?” Her question is barely a wisp of sound.
“I’m saying that I love you. I’ve loved you for fucking years.
I just never had a name for it until now.
” I shake my head at myself, my own goddamn stupidity.
“I should have fucking known. Nobody else sent me to New York on your wedding night. I sent myself. It wasn’t for Elio.
It wasn’t about Buffalo. I didn’t even know about the provision in your papà’s will until after I’d taken you. ”
“You…You came entirely on your own for me?”
“Yes. Because I couldn’t bear the thought of another man having you. I thought it would fucking kill me.”
Tension wracks her body, then suddenly releases. She collapses onto her side on the bed, shaking, crying. I loathe myself, seeing her like this, thinking that I’ve somehow managed to make this night even worse for her.
But then, she reaches for me. Her hand a white dove. A wing.
“Will you hold me? Please?”
My body begs me to do it.
“You said you don’t like men touching you,” I say instead, locking my muscles in stillness. “Now that I know why…”
“That doesn’t include you,” she says, firm with certainty. Then, softer, “Because it’s the same for me, Curse. It’s always been you. Only you.”
“Even now?”
“Even now. Accursio Giordano. Curse Titone. Maybe you’re different people. But, somehow, you’ve made me love you both.”
Something cracks in me. I don’t think it will mend until I put my arms around her.
“Touch me,” she whispers.
“My hands are covered in blood.”
Her lips curve into the tiniest, saddest smile.
“I know.”
I curl myself around her on the little bed. She sighs, buries her face in my chest, and like I’ve cast some kind of spell upon her, or maybe relieved her of something, broken a fucking curse, she instantly falls asleep.
I lie there for a long time. Just holding her.
Just loving her.