Chapter 16 Lena #2
It went on forever. Endless pulses of pleasure that wrung sounds from my throat I’d never made before. He worked me through it, gentling his touch as the tremors faded, until I was boneless and gasping and utterly destroyed.
When I finally opened my eyes, he was standing again, his mouth wet with me, his expression coldly satisfied.
“Don’t forget this,” he said. “Don’t forget who gave you this. Don’t forget who you belong to.”
He turned and walked away, leaving me exposed and shaking against the wall, my dress bunched around my waist and my underwear tangled at my knees.
I slid to the floor.
The tears came then, hot and furious. Not from pain.
From something worse. From the way my body had betrayed me so completely, responding to a man I hated, begging for release from someone who saw me as nothing but a possession.
I could still smell him on my skin, could still feel the ghost of his mouth between my thighs, and I wanted to scrub myself raw until every trace of him was gone.
I’d felt so strong yesterday. So capable. And he’d just proven, beyond any argument, exactly how little that mattered.
I was his. My body was his. And now we both knew it.
Eventually, the tears stopped. I tugged my underwear back into place and smoothed my dress down with shaking hands, then pushed myself to standing. The hallway was empty. I could hear him moving somewhere in the manor, but I couldn’t face him. Not yet. Maybe not ever.
The back stairs led to a part of the house I rarely visited.
I climbed them without a destination in mind, just needing to be somewhere he wasn’t.
Somewhere I could think about what had just happened without his scent in my nose and the ghost of his touch making me ache in ways I refused to examine.
The second floor was mostly guest rooms, all of them empty and perfect, like a museum no one ever visited. But at the end of the hallway, a door stood slightly ajar, and warm light spilled from inside.
I should have turned around. Should have retreated to my own room and tried to piece together what was left of my dignity. Instead, I pushed the door open.
Alice sat in a worn armchair by the window, a cup of tea cradled in her weathered hands.
The room was different from the rest of the manor.
Smaller. Warmer. Full of photographs and books and the accumulated evidence of a life actually lived.
It smelled like lavender and old paper and warm cookies, so different from the cold marble and leather of the rest of this place.
“Miss Hughes.” Her voice was surprised but not unwelcoming. “Are you lost?”
I must have looked terrible. Face blotchy from crying, hair disheveled, eyes wild. But Alice didn’t comment on any of it.
“May I sit?”
“Of course.”
I sank into the chair across from her, and for a long moment, neither of us spoke. She simply waited, her hands wrapped around her teacup, while I tried to remember how to breathe.
“He’s a complicated man,” Alice said finally. “Raphael.”
A broken laugh escaped me. “That’s one word for it.”
“I’ve known him since he was born.” Her voice softened, going somewhere far away. “Held him in my arms when he was just a few hours old. He was such a beautiful baby. Dark eyes, like his father. His mother’s smile.”
The shift in topic caught me off guard. I hadn’t thought of Raphael as someone who’d been a baby once, who’d had parents who held him and smiled at him. He seemed like he’d sprung fully formed from some dark corner of the universe, already hardened and dangerous.
“You knew his mother?”
“I raised her.” Alice’s voice carried old grief, heavy and worn smooth by years. “From the time she was just a girl. She was the kindest person I’ve ever known. An artist. A dreamer. She saw beauty everywhere, even in dark places.”
“What happened to her?”
Alice was quiet for a long moment, her gaze drifting to the window where snow had begun to fall again, fat white flakes drifting past the glass.
“She died when Raphael was three.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It was a tragedy. A terrible, violent tragedy.” Alice’s hands tightened on her teacup, knuckles going white. “His father killed her.”
The words dropped into the silence like stones into still water. I felt the ripples move through me, disturbing everything I thought I knew.
“What?”
“His father was… unstable. There were moments of violence before, but nothing like that night. He lost control completely. By the time anyone reached them, she was already gone.”
I couldn’t breathe. Raphael’s father had killed his mother. Murdered her. And Raphael had been there, a child of three, when it happened.
“He was hiding in the closet when the police found him.” Alice’s voice was barely a whisper. “He’d watched the whole thing.”
My breath caught, something shifting in the center of me that I couldn’t name.
I thought of the man who’d just been on his knees before me, using pleasure as a weapon of control.
I tried to reconcile him with the image of a terrified child, alone in a closet, watching his father destroy everything he loved.
“Raphael saw it?”
Alice nodded, her eyes bright with unshed tears.
“What happened after?”
“His maternal grandparents took custody. Briefly.” Alice’s expression hardened. “His grandfather was a senator. Image was everything. They didn’t want the reminder of what their daughter had married. What she’d died for.”
“They abandoned him?”
“They sent him away. To a boarding school in another state. He was three years old.” Her voice cracked. “I tried to stay in contact, but they made it difficult. They didn’t want anyone who remembered his mother to have access to him. Too messy. Too complicated.”
I thought of my own father, who for all his flaws had at least been present. Had at least tried, in his limited way, to protect me.
Raphael had been three years old. Orphaned by violence. Abandoned by the family who should have sheltered him. Shipped off to a school where no one knew him or cared about him.
“The school,” I heard myself ask. “Was it… good?”
Alice’s silence was answer enough.
“It was not good,” she said finally. “The records I’ve seen, the scars he carries… it was not good. He was there until he was eighteen, when his grandfather cut off funding entirely. After that, he was on his own.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
Alice met my gaze directly. “Because I see how he looks at you. And I see how you look at him when you think no one’s watching. And I need you to understand that the man who hurt you isn’t the whole story.”
My cheeks flamed. Did she know? Could she tell what had happened in that hallway?
“He’s terrified,” Alice continued, her voice gentle but relentless.
“Not of you. Of what you make him feel. The last time he loved someone, he watched them die. The only people who should have protected him threw him away instead. Every time you get close, every time something real starts to form between you, he does something to push you away. Because if he never lets you in, you can never destroy him.”
I thought about what had happened in the hallway. The way he’d made me beg. The cold satisfaction in his eyes when I fell apart. I’d assumed it was about power. About proving his dominance.
But what if it was about fear? What if every cruel word, every possessive touch, every reminder of who owned whom was just a shield against the possibility of loss?
“That doesn’t excuse what he does.”
“No,” Alice agreed. “It doesn’t. I’m not asking you to forgive him. I’m asking you to see him. The whole him. Not just the monster he shows you, but the broken child underneath.”
I stayed with Alice for another hour, listening to stories about Raphael’s mother.
The sculptures she’d made. The garden she’d loved.
The way she’d laughed at terrible jokes and cried at beautiful music.
By the time I left, I had a picture in my mind of the woman who’d created the man downstairs.
A woman who’d been soft and kind and artistic.
A woman who’d been murdered by the man she loved.
I found him in his study.
The door was open, and he sat at his desk, a glass of whiskey in his hand despite the early hour. He didn’t look up when I appeared in the doorway. The room smelled like leather and old paper and expensive liquor, the scent of him concentrated and overwhelming.
“Alice told me about your mother.”
The glass froze halfway to his lips. For one heartbeat, two, he didn’t move. Then he set the whiskey down with a soft click and turned to face me.
His expression was carved from ice.
“Get out.”
“Raphael—”
“I said get out.” He stood, and there was nothing distant or lost about him now.
He was all sharp edges and cold fury, every inch the predator Clara had warned me about.
“Whatever sob story Alice fed you, whatever pathetic tragedy she dredged up to make you feel sorry for me, forget it. It changes nothing.”
“I’m not asking it to change anything.”
“Then why are you here?” He stalked toward me, and I held my ground even though every instinct screamed at me to run. “Come to look at me with those soft eyes? Come to tell me you understand now? That you see the wounded little boy behind the monster?”
The cruelty in his voice should have made me flinch. Instead, I saw it for what it was. A shield. Deflection. A wall thrown up so fast it was almost desperate.
“I came because I wanted you to know that I know.”