CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT Wounds That Don’t Bleed
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Wounds That Don’t Bleed
He stared at me.
There was nothing pure in his eyes. He never stared at me like a man staring at a woman, but like a god staring at something he created in a fit of rage and then couldn’t stop worshipping—that kind of stillness, that kind of thunderous silence.
The air around us stiffened, coiled like a predator in waiting. I shifted my weight, unsure whether to speak or scream. But Zagreus didn’t blink or breathe. His eyes did the talking.
His gaze held me hostage in ways the gilded mansion never could.
There was no kindness in that stare. Just possession and certainty. That unbearable intimacy of a man memorised every inch of my weakness, and was now quietly daring me to try and run.
I turned slightly, as if to walk away. As if to escape that unbearable stillness burning through my skin.
But I felt it.
That slow step forward. That low hum of power. Several thunderbolts ran down my spine as his two fingers traced the edge of my wrist with such devastating gentleness, as if I were made of silk he didn’t yet deserve to tear.
“You tremble,” he murmured, voice dipped in warmth that should’ve been outlawed.
I didn’t reply. I didn’t trust my voice. My throat had sealed itself in shame and something far more dangerous… its desire.
His hand slid up my arm, leaving behind heat and holy dread. Stopping at the crook of my elbow, where the pulse betrayed me the loudest.
“Stay with me.”
My heart thudded.
“I didn’t run,” I whispered.
He leaned in, forehead almost brushing mine. ‘But you want to.”
My silence was confirmation enough.
“Then don’t,” he said. “Don’t run. Don’t try. Don’t even think of leaving me, Dolcezza.”
“And if I say no?” I asked, chin tilting in defiance that barely masked my shiver.
A long pause, then a cruel, slow smile graced his lips. “Then I’ll have to make you say yes.”
My breath caught.
“But,” he added, tone light as velvet yet tight like rope, “if you promise not to run, I’ll let you paint again… I’ll reward you.”
My eyes snapped to him. “With what?”
“Anything.”
He released me then. Wiped his hands and chest with a linen towel. Methodically and unhurried, as if time bent to his will.
I watched as he lifted the gun he had been cleaning earlier and held it toward me.
“Do you know how to use it?”
I blinked. The steel looked colder than the sea.
“No,” I whispered, throat dry, fingers curling slightly.
He stepped behind me, heat radiating off his body, licking at my frozen skin. His palm found my waist, and the breath knocked out of me as he pulled me back against his chest.
“You’ll learn,” he murmured.
I shuddered.
His hands wrapped around mine, positioning my fingers along the barrel, the stock, the trigger. Every touch was a symphony of restraint, instructive but laced with obscenity.
“Relax your shoulders,” he said into the shell of my ear, breath hot. “It’s not going to bite you.”
“I’m not good with… weapons.”
He chuckled lowly. “You’ve been living with one, little wife.”
My heart stumbled. My body remembered every time he touched me like prayer and punishment.
“Hold it steady,” he said, adjusting my grip against. My fingers twitched on the trigger the moment his lips found the back of my neck, a single, searing kiss that made my knees falter and breath abandon me.
“Now,” he whispered. “Shoot.”
I did.
The bullet kissed the sea with a scream, and I felt the recoil jolt through me; or maybe it was just him, the gravity of his body at my back, the hands still wrapped around mine, mouth dragging down to the base of my neck as if the echo of the gunshot had awakened something primal in him.
My breathing was ragged.
The heat of his naked chest against my back did something to me.
It was something hidden and buried that suddenly needed to be unleashed.
I dropped the gun.
It clattered against the wood.
I turned, my hands found his chest, still bare and warm. I looked up at him, lips parted in a gasp I hadn’t fully taken yet. And I kissed him. It was instinctive and sudden. It shocked me too.
I felt like I’d implode if I didn’t kiss him.
At first, he didn’t move.
As if shocked or unsure or resisting something monstrous inside him.
Then I reached higher, tiptoed to deepen the kiss, fisting his hair, and that’s when I felt him growl. From his chest. From his gut. From hell.
He crushed me to him, hands gripped my hips, sliding down and pulling me up, hoisting me slightly so our mouths could crash together with rawer, messier precision. His tongue traced the outline of my lower lip before plunging in like he’d waited centuries.
My hands clutched his shoulder, nails digging in, and he didn’t stop. He only deepened it. Kissing me and devouring me.
I let him.
Because whatever cage this was, it had started to feel like mine too.
There are things a woman should never forgive. But the body, traitorous and trembling, often kneels before the very hands that broke her.
I kissed him.
I kissed Zagreus Vitale like he was mine to kiss, like I hadn’t wept for days in the corner of his mansion, like he hadn’t pulled me from the wreckage of my own life only to reassemble me with shackles. Like he hadn’t murdered Adrian with the same hands that now held me.
I kissed him.
And now I stood alone, barefoot in a room filled with everything I thought I wanted, and none of it made sense anymore.
In less than an hour. He fulfilled my wish.
There they were.
The brushes I had begged for laid out, and the canvases, tall, white, blank like fresh tombstones waiting to be ruined by memory. And the colours.
God, those colours. So many hues I used to worship.
Ochres and oxblood. Azure and burnt sienna.
Crimson that reminded me of bleeding knees and berry-stained summers.
Viridian which once mimicked Adrian’s laugh in a garden.
I used to know these colours intimately.
I knew how they breathed on canvas, how they bled into one another, how they told stories my mouth never dared to speak.
But now?
Now they stared back at me like strangers I had once danced with, but no longer remembered the rhythm.
I sat on the stool; it creaked beneath my weight.
My hands shook as I picked up the brush. The bristles felt too soft. My skin felt too raw. I touched the palette, dipped it in blue, watched it pool into the well of white like it was trying to become something truer. But it didn’t matter.
I was colourless.
I was muted.
A ghost of a girl who used to feel too much and now begged to feel nothing at all.
What was happening to me?
God, what had I become?
I kissed him.
I kissed him.
I kissed the man who killed Adrian.
Tell me again, lord. Remind me why I hated him. Please.
Because somewhere between the sea air and the weight of his hands and the tremble he chased down my spine, I forgot. Somewhere between the gunshot and the way his mouth devoured mine, I lost the thread of rage I had been weaving for weeks into a noose around my own hope.
He murdered Adrian.
There. That’s the truth.
He shot him. Took his life. Erased him from every day I was meant to live with him. Zagreus Vitale rewrote the entire second half of my life, his violence, and handed it to me as a forced marriage.
So what, then? What reason, what possible reason, could outshine that fact?
The fact that he ruined me?
The fact that I never chose this?
The fact that every breath I took under this roof tasted like my own funeral?
The fact that I was his wife, not by love, not by faith or accident, but by force?
There was no reason. There couldn’t be.
And yet… when his lips found mine, something ancient inside me stirred. Something that should’ve stayed dead.
It wasn’t love.
It wasn’t forgiveness.
It wasn’t even desire in the way women often understood it.
It was recognition.
Of pain.
Of loneliness.
Of a mirror I never wanted but now couldn’t look away from.
Maybe it wasn’t that I wanted him.
Maybe it was that I wanted to want anything at all.
Because for days now, I’d been drifting in this house. Eating food I couldn’t taste. Sleeping in sheets that smelt like him but offered no warmth. Staring at the door that never opened. Breathing in a world that no longer had oxygen.
Maybe I kissed him because he was the only thing real in my world.
And that terrified me.
I looked at the canvas again, still blank and waiting and pure.
My fingers hovered above it. The brush was weightless.
Could a woman paint without colour?
Could I speak in this new language of grief?
Could I still make something after everything was taken from me?
I dipped the brush into crimson. It bled like a wound. The first stroke trembled. It didn’t look like anything. But it was there.
A beginning.
Or ending.
I didn’t know.
A monster had given me back the one thing no one else could, the desire to feel something again.
Even if it meant bleeding across every canvas until I remembered who I was before he put a ring on my fingers and a bruise on my soul.