CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN Being Unable to Love
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Being Unable to Love
“What is hell? I maintain it is the suffering of being unable to love.” - Fyodor Dostoevsky
There are prisons built from stone, and then there are the ones you wear like skin.
Those ones taste like your own fucking name on someone else’s tongue. That ache like bruises between your thighs and whispered lullabies while tearing your ribs apart to see what’s inside them. Was it the heart? Or just an organ that had no right to feel.
I didn’t know what I was anymore. A victim or a wife, or even a woman. I was something in between. A half-burned psalm, trying to remember which god she used to belong to.
Or was there any god at all for ones like me?
The hallways were too quiet as I walked, and the mansion itself was holding its breath, waiting to see what I’d become. The vaster it was, the scarier it was.
I wasn’t sure I could face myself in a mirror again if I passed by one. But I could face him even if I had to swallow glass to do it.
The kitchen smelled of rosemary and heat when I entered. Elena stood at the counter, slicing ripe figs with her usual calm, that unsettling grace of a woman who had long since accepted the monstrous as mundane. I wondered what her story was, or if she had one to begin with.
She looked up when I entered, but didn’t smile. Nothing like I was expecting her to.
“Where is he?” I asked, barely holding back the storm.
Elena wiped her hands on a linen cloth, unbothered, and didn’t spare me a glance. “Outside.”
I blinked. “Outside?”
Outside made no sense. The mansion was encased in sea from the south and hills with forest from the north.
What the hell was he doing outside?
She didn’t offer more, and that maddening silence dared me.
I walked out of the kitchen to the main doors I often stared at. Elena didn’t stop or follow me. I walked a bit more, and no guards stopped me. No locked doors clicked shut, and no shadows whispered warnings.
I stepped out barefoot, taking off my heels because outside was a bit stony and I didn’t want to fall face-first. The skirt of the co-ord set I wore brushed against the floor as I walked.
Wind slapped against my face, and for the first time since I’d arrived, or been kidnapped, here, I breathed, not like a survivor but like a woman remembering what air used to taste like before it was filtered through someone else’s lungs.
Freedom is not the absence of walls. But is the moment your body forgets it was ever caged.
I stood at the edge of the Cliffside, wind screaming and the sea below roared.
And for a moment, I was infinite.
Before I felt the last digit of infinity on my waist.
I jumped, startled, heart lurching into my throat, and eyes wild. I turned with a jumpy squeal only to find my destroyer.
Zagreus Vitale.
Bare-chested, hair ruffled as if he’d just woken up from war.
My eyes lowered to find him wearing slippers instead of the leather boots he normally wore.
Slouching grey joggers hanging sinfully low, giving a lewd view of the V-line that disappeared into his joggers.
There were some scars on his torso and chest, yet they beautifully enhanced his allure.
A lazy trail of hair disappeared below, mocking gravity with the way it begged the eyes to trace further.
I’d never seen him like this. His abs were sharp and toned, sculpted like a sin he never had stone for.
Broad shoulders and a hard chest. I couldn’t decide where to look because every part of him demanded attention.
Veins curled down his arms like lightning frozen mid-strike; long, strong, and calloused fingers dug lightly into the dip of my waist, possessive without permission.
And his stormy grey eyes, glinting with shattered ice, scanned me as if I was a prey he was too tired to chase, but still wouldn’t let escape.
Zagreus Vitale didn’t need armour to look like a weapon. He just needed to wake up.
And the fucking scar on his face, a clean, brutal gash across his cheek, just below the eye. He always hid it with his tailored perfection. Now, it made him look less like the devil in thousand-dollar suits and more like an angel punished for loving too recklessly.
I looked away. God, I looked away because his gaze was too much to hold.
My cheeks flushed with memory of last night.
“Don’t act shy now, Dolcezza,” he murmured with that familiar venom-sweet drawl. “You’ve had me inside you more times than I can count. And I’ve heard you beg for it, remember?”
He tilted his head, mouth twitching like a wolf half-amused. “No need to blush over seeing your husband half-naked.”
I said nothing. My spine stiffened, and my eyes burned and focused on something else entirely. Two shotguns behind him. On a stool. And there were some linen cloth and oil.
He turned and crouched by a wooden bench and began cleaning the guns. Slowly and methodically. Like violence calmed him more than prayer.
To be honest, he was hard to read.
His back arched, muscles flexed, and I swallowed, watching his bruised knuckles, tensed shoulders, and I hated how my eyes drank it all in like a sacrament.
‘Why?” I finally said. “Why are you out here playing with guns while I rot inside your gilded hell?”
He didn’t look up. Didn’t even bother to regard me.
“Peace looks different to everyone, Dolcezza.”
My breath caught. The way he said it. Like he meant it, and I strangely felt it deep in my bones.
“You said I’d see her. My mother.”
That made him pause. The silence was loaded like the gun in his hand. He finally looked up, cold or resigned.
“You will.”
“When?”
He stood abruptly. And I instinctively took a step back. “When you’re ready.”
“I am ready.”
“No, you’re not.” His voice turned steel. “You’re still breakable. I saw it last night and she… won’t be what you expect.”
“You don’t get to decide what I can handle!” I snapped, stepping toward him. The wind howled louder.
“I’m not deciding. I’m protecting you.”
“From what? Yourself? I don’t need your protection, Zagreus. I need the fucking truth.”
He stepped in closer. Shotguns were tossed onto the bench, and now he was inches from me.
“No,” he growled. “You need someone to blame for your tears and ache. And I’ll be that. I’ll be the villain. But I won’t let you meet her until I decide that.”
My hands trembled. “I’m not weak. I can handle her.”
It came out as a whisper rather than a statement.
He looked at me as if I had just proven his point.
And then, like a man undoing centuries of restraint, he grabbed me by the waist and pulled me to his chest. My palms found his naked chest, and I looked up at him wide-eyed.
His hand gripped my jaw, the other buried in my waist, and he was so tall my neck strained.
“Ask me for anything, Dolcezza,” he murmured, so close his breath danced over my lips. “Jewels? I’ll pour oceans of diamonds at your feet. You want silk dresses? I’ll drape you in sin and satin. You want stars? I’ll pluck them from the sky and make them beg to orbit you.”
His thumb dragged across my bottom lip, slow and dirty.
“But don’t ask me for the truth. You’ll choke on it.”
My breath hitched.
He tilted his head, eyes flicking down to my mouth with a hunger that was both reverent and ravenous.
“You think you’re ready to bleed with answers?
You flinch when I breathe too close.” His voice dipped lower, filthier.
“Your body betrays you, little wife. You say you hate me, while your thighs clench when I touch you. You want the truth?” His hand splayed across my spine, dragging me flush against him. I could feel him. All of him.
He leaned closer, lips brushing the shell of my ear.
“The truth is... I dream about ruining you. Slowly. Thoroughly. In every way your precious little soul thinks it can survive.”
My heart stuttered.
His mouth ghosted down my cheek, not kissing but branding.
“I’ll be the villain in every fairy tale you were ever told, if it means I get to keep you breathing. I’ll lie, I’ll cage, I’ll withhold. But I won’t let you break just to satisfy your curiosity.”
I swallowed hard. My legs trembled.
“And until I say you’re ready... You don’t get to see her.” His lips finally pressed to mine. A threat. A promise. A vow sealed in heat and silence.
“Ask for anything else, Dolcezza,” he whispered. “But don’t ask me to let you burn before I’ve even taught you how to rise from ash.”
I panted and shook my head. “Anything, you say?”
His eyes twitched and I realised he regretted saying anything, because what I was about to say would make him regret everything. But for some reason, he licked his lips, bit them, and caressed my cheek. “Anything.”
I took a deep breath, swallowed, and opened my mouth. “Then let me paint again.”