CHAPTER FORTY-ONE Memory
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
Memory
“Your mother wasn’t what she seemed,” Isadora said.
“You don’t get to say that,” I snapped, voice rising slightly. “You don’t know her.”
Isadora’s gaze didn’t shift, her hands remained folded in her lap, as calm as a nun before execution. “Don’t I?”
“Don’t talk about her like that,” I hissed. “You show up after decades, after abandoning her, and now you want to play oracle?”
“I didn’t abandon anyone. She abandoned you. She exiled me.”
“I don’t care! She raised me! She fed me, loved me, protected me…”
“From what?”
My mouth opened, but the answer never came.
What had she protected me from? I remembered scraped knees and soup when I had a fever.
I remembered her cold hands brushing my hair.
But I didn’t remember why we were always moving.
Why did we never stay anywhere longer than a season?
Why I never had friends. Why birthdays often felt like funerals until she remarried my father.
I remembered her love in fragments.
I remembered her fear in full.
“That’s enough,” Zagreus said.
Isadora turned to me slowly, expression unchanged. “You can’t control what’s coming, Celestine. You can’t change the outcomes of your mother’s doings.”
“No,” he said on my behalf. “But I can.”
And that… sent a shiver down my spine.
She looked at me one last time. Her expression haunted, defeated, urgent.
“Remember our deal,” Zagreus added.
Isadora nodded once. The lawyer stood, gesturing politely for her and Leona to follow. They did. The door closed behind them with a quiet finality, as if the truth itself had just been escorted out of the room along with them.
And I was left with him.
Breathing heavily. In disbelief and desperation.
“You are going to tell me what that meant,” I said with broken voice. Because he was the only man who knew everything. He knew more about me than he knew about himself.
When he didn’t say anything, I added with desperation. “Right now, please.”
Zagreus leaned against the edge of his desk, the slow poise of a man who’d walked through centuries of storms and come out dry. “No.”
My fingernails bit into my palms.
“Why not?” I demanded, stepping toward him. “Why do you always get to play god with my life? Why am I the only one left blind?”
His eyes flickered toward me, glinting steel and unreadable tempests.
“You’re asking the wrong questions, Dolcezza.”
I wanted to scream.
“What the fuck does that even mean?!”
He only smiled. That infuriating half-curve of a smile that always arrived before some cryptic truth, or kiss I didn’t ask for.
So I threw something. A paperweight from the table. It shattered near his feet with a beautiful, delicate crash. But it didn’t affect him one bit.
“Tell me what she meant,” I growled. “What did Isadora mean about my mother? About me?”
“She was the shadow of your mother’s sun. What do shadows know but the secrets the light hides?”
“You speak in riddles again. Tell me, please, Zagreus. I can’t… I can’t live like this… It’s too much for me… It’s messing with my head and I…”
“I speak in riddles because the truth would tear you limb from limb.”
“I’d rather be torn than fed lies!”
Another object flew, this time a glass tumbler. He dodged it with an ease that made my rage burn hotter. My chest heaved faster and heavier.
In two swift strides, he was in front of me. Grabbing me by the wrists and pulling me to his hard chest.
“Enough,” he growled. And I struggled. Writhed against his grip, chest heaving and breath shallow with fury and despair and need. The pressure on my chest grew unbearable, like my body didn’t know how to contain the grief spiralling through it.
“Let go of me!” I spat, venom curling on my tongue. “You smug, sick, manipulative bastard, let go or I swear I’ll…”
“You’ll what?” he hissed, stepping closer, eyes dark with something perilous. “Curse me again? Bite the only hands keeping you from falling into the abyss? Go ahead, Celestine. Prove to me you still have fire.”
“I hate you.”
He slammed me against the table. Books toppled, and my back met the cold wood. His hands braced beside my head, caging me in. The space between us disappeared.
“You don’t get to hate me,” he growled. “Not when you’re still wearing my name on your finger. Not when you crave me more than you claim.”
I opened my mouth to curse him, to tell him he didn’t mean anything to me, but was quickly silenced by his mouth.
Fierce, brutal, and desperate. Teeth clashed, lips bled.
I bit him hard enough to taste the copper on my tongue, and he groaned into my mouth like I gave him pleasure.
His hands gripped my waist, then my throat, then slid down to my hips.
I kissed him back because I didn’t know how else to scream.
I let him kiss me because everything else had already been taken.
But when he pulled back to look at me, his breath ragged, eyes blown wide with want, I whispered the only thing I still knew to beg for. Vision blurry with tears, and chest heavy.
“Don’t just fuck me,” I choked. “Please… make love to me.”
His jaw tensed. Something shifted in his eyes. “Dolcezza…”
“I need to forget,” I whispered, trembling now. My hands gripped his shirt, anchoring myself to him like the edge of a cliff. “Please… make me forget everything… I can’t take it… I can’t…”
A sob broke loose. I hadn’t meant for it. I hadn’t meant to fall apart like that, not beneath him. But my body betrayed me, and so did my heart. Tears slid silently down my cheeks as I stared up at him.
“Make me forget,” I repeated. “Even if it’s just for tonight… please…”
His mouth met mine again, but slower this time. Less rage, more ruin. More reverence.
He kissed me as if he hated himself for needing me too deeply like someone who’d buried his love in a tomb and found it clawing its way back out.
“Say it again,” he whispered against my lips.
“Make love to me.”
His hands were slow and almost trembling when they slipped beneath my dress. His mouth left a trail down my neck, my collarbone, pausing at each place where pain had lived in silence. He didn’t speak, he simply touched me.
I arched into him.
To feel something real when everything else felt like smoke and mirrors and half-buried lies.
My fingers tangled in his hair. My tears wet his shoulder. He kissed them on my cheeks like absolution.
And I prayed to the lord to let me find salvation, if I was considered eligible for it.