Chapter 31 #2
“You cannot talk like this with others,” he warned with a nod out the window to where the Moriarty men and their families filtered inside. “I know your heart is in the right place, but they don’t. Treachery is blood in the water. Mind your cuts.”
Amelia scoped out a spot in the great room where funeral-goers mingled with food and drink. Most kept eyes on her, the questions amassing in their implacable stares.
Alone in a corner with the prayer card, she waited for Emory. He and Jack arrived a half hour later in mismatched moods. Where Jack beamed, a solemn shadow fell over Emory as a few captains urgently occupied him in conversation.
Amelia would find him later when he was in less demand. She slipped away to the parlor where votive flames danced in ruby red glass on a family altar. She lit a match but hesitated over an unburned wick.
Her grandma had always said death came in threes. If true, whose soul would add to Gio’s trine? Or perhaps he was preceded in death.
Helen Havick. Brian Burrows. Richard Dauer.
Death had already exceeded its multiplicity.
A presence entered the room behind her. Amelia shook out the match and turned around. Sinister in a black suit, Jack’s eyes locked on her with severity she’d only heard of in him but never witnessed for herself.
“I didn’t peg you as the religious type,” he said and crept toward her like a predator approaching startled prey.
Amelia gripped the metal candle rack behind her. The fleur-de-lis trim dug into one palm, and the prayer card crumpled in the other.
“I’m not.”
Jack didn’t seem to hear her. It wouldn’t have mattered if he had. He smiled, delighted to crush her beliefs either way. Amelia turned to leave out the pocket door to the foyer, but Jack darted forward. His palm collided with the wall, and his outstretched arm blocked her escape.
“You care about him?” he rasped with liquor on his breath and malice in his eyes.
Amelia’s mind raced for her next move. She didn’t know what hurts Jack drowned in the bottle, so she gave him some grace and pushed past the fear thick in her throat.
“Yes. Very much. Do you?” she asked, quiet but accusatory.
Jack smiled a nearly perfect smile. To think, she’d once thought him kind, an ally in the underworld. She’d gravely misjudged him.
“I’ve known Em most my life. You’ve only been here a minute. He’ll fuck you ‘til he takes you home then forget you ever existed. You’re nothing to him. Nothing.”
Amelia lifted her chin to meet his unfocused gaze.
She wasn’t forged in fire with a steel spine and sharp tongue.
She didn’t command a room with golden laughter and effortless charm.
She went unnoticed in quiet corners and spoke too softly for others to hear, but she wasn’t nothing, never nothing, and stood her ground with a trembling voice and her heart thundering in her chest.
“I’m not nothing to him, and you know that,” she said.
Like a curtain coming down, Jack’s self-possession fell to the floor. It left him red-faced and fuming.
“You’re poisoning him, putting thoughts in his head that don’t belong.”
“Whatever you’re trying to do, I’m not afraid of you.”
Jack freed a folding knife from his back pocket and held the blade to her throat. His eyes roved Amelia’s body and settled between her legs as if he contemplated fucking her hard just to make a point. It wasn’t about desire, just control.
“You should be,” he said and leaned forward until his lips brushed her cheek. “I’m not like Em. I don’t worry if I’m a good man. I know that I’m not. Stay away from the people I love. I won’t tell you again.”
Jack eased off and put his knife away. After he left out the pocket door, Amelia collected herself with deep breaths and burning cheeks. On the ledge of a built-in hutch, she smoothed out the prayer card with trembling hands. The Blessed Mother looked on placidly but offered no solace.
Behind her, Emory’s footsteps stirred in the hall of photographs. She’d know his cadence anywhere, had committed it to heart. Amelia held her breath and released it as a comforted sigh when his chest met her back.
Wedged between the hutch and him, she gripped his forearms that snaked around her middle. One of his hands slid up her stomach to cup her breast, and the other grasped her waist.
“I feel like I haven’t seen you all day,” he muttered in her ear and melted against her, his body warm and loose hair brushing her cheek. “I wish these people would leave.”
Amelia craned her neck until her lips met his in a soft kiss. “They need you.”
“No, they don’t, but I need you.”
Emory’s tongue traced her bottom lip before slipping into her mouth. Amelia spun in his arms, and he lifted her to the hutch’s ledge. The time apart, so laughably brief, dropped a match to their desire.
The prayer card tumbled to the floor as the kiss turned feverish.
Emory pushed her dress to her waist, and Amelia straddled his hips with her bare thighs.
His fingers grazed the swell of her breasts in a touch that laid goosebumps against her skin.
One finger slipped beneath her bra and teased her nipple until it was hard.
The other hand cupped her ass and guided her movements.
With his hard cock nestled between her legs, each languid roll of Amelia’s hips mimicked how she might ride him.
“Let me take you upstairs,” Emory panted against her open mouth. “I wanna taste you, feel you.”
He pushed her underwear aside and stroked between her legs before sinking a finger inside. His thumb swiped her clit with delicate pressure. Amelia closed her eyes and surrendered to the sensations.
“That’s my good girl,” she heard Emory say somewhere along the way to her climax.
How was it he knew precisely how to touch her, hold her, make her come undone?
She cracked open her eyes as Emory dropped to his knees.
With one leg hitched over his shoulder, he went to work with his mouth, and Amelia lifted her arms to steady herself against the bookshelf at her back. A thin book tumbled to the floor.
She meant to protest, to tell him someone might find them that way. It didn’t matter. None of it did. Her hesitation was fleeting and swiftly dissolved as his tongue swirled her opening. Emory gripped the back of her thigh, and she relied on his strength to hold her steady.
“I missed you,” she sighed and combed her fingers through his hair. He stared up at her and, by the light in his eyes, she knew he smiled between her legs.
No man had ever lavished that much attention on her that way.
With his mouth between her legs, he seemed to thoroughly lose himself as much as she did.
Amelia’s head fell back hard against a shelf, but the sting was lost amongst the pleasure surging through her.
The music in the great room disguised another climax that came in one loud, shuddering breath.
“I missed you too,” Emory chuckled as he stood. “I swear I’m gonna do that every day.”
Eyes heavy-lidded with lust, he kissed her hard, but something in the promise troubled her. They couldn’t go on like that in perpetuity. Mind your cuts. Warm tears brimmed as Amelia slackened in his arms and slumped against the bookshelf.
“What’s the matter?” he asked.
Amelia gripped his dress shirt and buried her face against his chest. She hated how swiftly the tears came, that they even came at all.
“Look at me.”
She shook her head. “I don’t like when people see me cry.”
“I’m not people.” Emory tipped her chin, and his gaze softened as it ran a circuit between her eyes, down to her lips, and back again. “It’s just me.”
Meant to soothe, it only hurt more. It was just him and her like it had been for days, and where the Queen of Heaven couldn’t comfort, the King of the Underworld could.
Since when was he the only thing that brought her peace?
It must’ve happened when she wasn’t looking.
She was losing herself there. Bits and pieces fell off, replaced with things that confused and scared her.
“Why are you crying?” he asked not unkindly, but Amelia still felt called to the carpet to explain.
And she had a perfectly good explanation.
Jack had brandished a knife and threatened things he conveniently didn’t speak.
Some men were clever that way, creating loopholes for their awful behavior, but Jack was also a liar and a better one than she.
He’d lie through his teeth to cast her out.
Over Emory’s shoulder, Amelia glimpsed the hall of photographs and his world built on belonging but only for the chosen ones.
“I don’t know where I belong,” she said.
Emory kissed the tears off her cheeks. “You belong with me. We belong together.”
“Like we have been?”
He stiffened and pulled away enough to look at her. “You mean just us, without all this?”
Emory motioned to the heavenly strum of “Malafemmena” warbling from the great room. When Amelia nodded, he took her hands and hesitated before speaking.
“We can dream about it, a normal life where it’s just us two,” he said, a bit of tenderness before the fall, “but this is who I am and what I have to offer. I’ll give you everything, but I can’t give you that. It’s not how this works.”
“Then how does this work?” Amelia asked in what was clearly a bridge too far.
Emory removed himself from between her legs and paced to the center of the room. With his back to her, he had the answer, and the hollowness in Amelia’s chest warned it would tear her to pieces. Emory turned around and offered it carefully, quietly.
“It starts with you opening your eyes, Amelia. War’s on our doorstep, and we just buried one of our own. I’m needed here now more than ever. This is where I belong.”
Amelia hopped from the hutch and crossed the room. “Me open my eyes?” she asked incredulously.
With the glacial austerity of a bygone era, Emory folded his arms and clenched his jaw.
“Yes. You see what you want, what we’d be if I made this disappear. What makes you think I can do that?”
It had Jack’s fingerprints all over it. No wonder he’d returned victorious while Emory waved the white flag. He was a man at war with himself, and Amelia was collateral in the crossfire as he sorted out his allegiance.
“I had a plan, a life I wanted to live,” Amelia said with anger leaching into her words.
The tears she’d fought to hide barreled down her cheeks.
“Maybe it wasn’t prestigious or important, but it was the one I chose for myself, and that meant everything to me.
And now here I am; lost again and wondering where I fit in.
But I don’t fit in because this isn’t where I belong, and you know that. ”
Amelia stood before Emory close enough that he could hold her. He didn’t. For all his burning passion, he went cold again.
She pointed to the noise down the hall and said, “Maybe they can’t separate the man you are from the monolith you’ve become, but I can, and I know you don’t belong here either. You can lie to yourself about that, but you can’t lie to me.”
Emory said nothing and refused her stare. It was the double-edge sword of being seen. He rejected the exposure and tended to the gaps in his armor. Amelia reached up and cradled his flushed cheeks.
“I know what I want,” she said. “It’s you. I want you. I want you out and free and mine, but it can’t be like this. You said it yourself. This world tears people apart. It’ll tear us apart.”
Emory relented and drew her close. A defeated smile formed, then promptly faded, but the agony in his eyes was his answer.
“You’re right. It does, and I never want that for you, but I can’t change who I am. I’ve been down this road before, and I know how it ends.”
Eyes glistening, Emory lifted her hand and held it against his chest that rose and fell with a rapid exchange of breath.
“It’s always fallen apart, and I can’t do it again. Not with you. I survived it the other times, but I don’t know if I’d survive it with you.”
In the corner, the parlor clock started its chimes. Emory tensed as he waited for the tolls to end.
“My captains are waiting for me downstairs,” he said and unwound his arm still at the small of her back. “We’ll talk more tomorrow night after everyone’s left. I promise I’ll get you home when it’s safe. That’s where you belong.”
With that, he kissed her forehead and let her go. Rocked with a sudden wave of nauseous heat, Amelia closed her eyes and shook her head.
“You said I belong with you, that we belong together,” she cried, humiliated again at the swiftness of her tears and how childish she must seem.
Emory dropped his eyes as he reached the door, and he too seemed to straddle a divide that was ripping him apart. He glanced at the hall and then Amelia, weighing his options, and she wished he wouldn’t.
She’d done that before too and stitched her heart to her sleeve where it went rejected. Unlike him, though, she’d do it again and again, no matter how much it hurt because some sweet day it’d be worth all the pain.
“We do belong together, sweetheart,” he said with infuriating sterility that gave her nothing. No tears shed. No hurt to share. “We met at the wrong time is all.”
Is that all?
Amelia bit her lip and put on a charade of strength with a hopeless nod. She watched him leave in case he relented. He didn’t, of course. Emory retreated from the room as everything they could’ve been spoiled on the vine.
Heartbroken and reeling, Amelia remained rooted in the middle of the floor. The last few tears stung as they dried on her cheeks. The funeral dress was itchy, and the shoes pinched her feet.
She stood unmoving through the length of another song, frozen in the callousness of it all and uncertain of who to blame. And perhaps that was the worst of it—the blameless efficiency of how it ended. That was the danger of daydreams and the futility of faith.
Amelia stooped to the floor and collected the prayer card and book that’d fallen. She thumbed through its pages and picked a random one.
“It’s only a bruise,” read a line inside. She covered that line with the prayer card, closed the book, and shelved her faith for good.