CHAPTER FORTY-THREE Purple Morning
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
Purple Morning
I had started wearing silence. It was comforting, and something I could control.
It had been three days since Zagreus refused me the truth, and three days since I left my voice to rot quietly in my throat. It felt better that way. My words had curled up like dead petals of a dead flower. Littering the floor of a mind I no longer wanted to clean.
The morning unfolded with the same rituals.
I awoke. Elena arrived without knocking; she never did, and swept into the room with a dress draped over her arms, a deep, rich purple today.
Colours of mourning veils and royal coffins.
I sat there obediently and vacantly, while she fused with zippers and fabrics, humming something light as though my life was not a mausoleum she visited daily.
I did not speak to Zagreus. Zagreus did not speak to me. He was less at home now, a phantom with a name only, spending his hours elsewhere, in a room I would never see. In a world I was not a part of with people who would never know my face.
I thought my silence did not touch him. It had all the weight of a moth’s wing against his armour. I had stopped trying to measure my worth against his attention. I knew the answer already. I was a shadow painted on a wall he had long since stopped looking at.
He did care for me in his own twisted way. But it was not enough for me.
But the nightmares remained. They came and went. Clung to my damp clothes, dripping into my mornings, choking the air I breathed. I still woke screaming, still feeling the phantom cold of my mother’s hand in my dreams. I no longer asked him for comfort, for answers, for anything.
I also tried to paint. Every day. Every hour and every second, I was alone.
I desperately gripped the brushes, but all I birthed were corpses on canvases.
Lifeless shade. Lines that trembled with my unsteady hands.
Paint spilling like blood onto the floor.
The sound of my sobbing mingling with the wet slap of ruined art.
My heart tore a little more with each failed attempt.
I wanted salvation. I reached for it, clawed at it, prayed to it in the language of colours, but my hands came back empty every time. Eventually, I stopped reaching.
I was dead, both inside and out.
When the rage finally came, it was not volcanic.
I slammed the edge of a canvas against the floor.
Wanting to hurt the world in the way it had hurt me.
The sharp thud rattled into the air. My fists followed, punching the marble until the sting burned my arms. I slammed my hand again, and a muted creak filled the air.
I froze, tears streaking my face in salty rivers, my breath shuddering. I pressed my palm flat to the spot. What was that sound? Marble did not creak.
That small, almost shy groan of movement beneath the surface. I tested the other tiles around it; they were cold and hard. But this one… this one creaked.
My pulse began to pound with a rhythm that did not feel my own.
I staggered to my feet, wiping the mess from my cheeks with the back of my paint-stained hand. My gaze darted to the door. Elena could return any moment.
I found my painting spatula and wedged the metal bit into the hairline seam of the tile. My hands shook so violently that I almost dropped it. Ten minutes bled away in grunts and gasps, in fingernails scraping stone, until finally, the tile lifted.
Beneath it was darkness. And in that darkness, a small wooden box laced with dust. It looked like something meant to be forgotten.
I pulled it out. My hands were coated in powder, my lungs drinking in the musty scent of things that had not seen light in a decade. My heart rattled in its cage. What was this? Why would anyone put it here? Did Zagreus put it here?
The box was warm where my fingers gripped it.
I carried it to my vanity, locked the bedroom door, and sat.
It opened without a whisper of resistance. Inside were photographs. A smaller jewellery box. And the shock could choke a woman before she’d even drawn her next breath.
It did to me.
The first photograph was Zagreus. Younger by four, maybe five years.
Black tuxedo, no scar cutting across his features.
The scar I traced in the dark so many times was absent.
He was… lighter, not smiling, but there was a curve at the corner of his lips that suggested something dangerously close to joy.
His arm was wrapped around a woman in a white wedding dress.
Her face had been scratched out; not blurred, not torn but violently erased.
I turned the picture over in my hands, the dust smearing across my fingertips.
Two more photographs. The first was an ultrasound of a foetus. And the second was Zagreus again. Shirtless, laughing at the camera, his head thrown back, the picture catching him in that fleeting, dangerous moment where men forget they are men and become simply human.
My hands trembled so violently that the images almost slipped from my grasp. I set them down before I could damage them, my breath slicing the air in uneven shards.
The jewellery box was velvety, and my fingers brushed over its surface as though I were touching something sacred and forbidden.
Inside lay a diamond ring.
The initial engraved inside was C.
The truth fell on me like a world collapsing.
Zagreus had been married.
Before me, before the day he forced ne into vows I had never chosen. He had loved… or at least bound himself… to another woman. A woman who had worn white beside him. A woman who had carried his child, or the possibility of it.
I could not move. My breath was gone.
My world was not mine. Perhaps it never had been.
And for the first time, I wondered if I was not a wife at all, but simply the ghost who had been stitched into the dress of another woman’s life.