CHAPTER FORTY-NINE First Wife
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
First Wife
Threats usually come with a sound, but Zagreus had learned to make them without any sound, taught by nights when silence had been the only currency that mattered.
He did not raise his voice. He moved a fraction, the smallest correction of his posture, and the room tightened as though someone had turned the key on an invisible lock.
“Temper your curiosity,” he said, and the words were not for the man before him so much as a blade sheathed under a velvet glove. He kept his tone even; cruelty had long ago learned the usefulness of ease.
The other man answered with a smile that had nothing of humour in it.
He stepped closer, the press of movement deliberate and the motion of one who relished testing limits.
Up close, his eyes were clever, like a hazard contained in glass.
“Would you risk killing your only family, Zagreus?” he murmured. “You would not.”
My world shuddered.
Only family?
My chest thudded, a frantic beating in there. Zagreus had a family. He had roots. I had thought I lived in a house of one man’s absolutes; instead, there were others, lines of blood I had not seen.
I turned, stupidly certain that my mind would supply proof of error, some explanation that would stitch the quicksand beneath my feet. The man who had spoken loosened his suit cuff.
I looked between him and Zagreus. There was a resemblance between them, but it was a subtler inheritance of expression, a mirror altered by time.
All the questions in my head, all the emotions I felt, were very strange. As if reading my confused expressions, the man chuckled and nodded.
“Yes,” he answered before Zagreus could.
“We have no parents to call. No cousins or extended family who come with casseroles and small talk. We buried what remained of that world and learned how to be the only thing left.” He watched me as if measuring whether my face would crack from the truth. “They… did not survive her.”
“Enough, Corvin,” Zagreus warned. But Corvin only stepped closer.
“Why? She’s your wife. She deserves to know your past. That’s how you make your relationship strong, isn’t it? By living in the past.”
“Corvin.”
Corvin scoffed. “I don’t listen to you, big brother. You left the family four years ago, so don’t pretend you have any right over me.”
I swallowed hard, feeling Zagreus's hold tightening on my waist. He was pissed.
But he had done excellently in masking his anger.
Instead, he took a deep breath. “You will stop,” he grumbled.
“You will step back and hold your tongue where it belongs. I will not have my home turned into a theatre for your entertainment.”
Corvin shrugged, more insolent than fearful. “And if I don’t?” he asked, curious as if the world had been made to display provocation. And strangely it did.
I looked between them, aware of the tension and wanting to escape it anyhow.
Zagreus’s hand slid from my waist to his side; for a second, his face softened with an emotion I could not name – pity would be the wrong word, anger would be insufficient. There was a danger in him now that had edges I did not want to be near.
“We do not speak in riddles here,” Corvin said quietly. He looked to his brother. “You have always guarded what is yours. We know why. I remember the days before ash. Very clearly. The woman you loved… she took more than a heart, Zagreus. I am not watching the past repeat again.”
I wanted to step forward and squeeze the truth out of their mouths until the bones of my questions showed.
Instead, my limbs obeyed some older, more frightened counsel.
I made a small, ridiculous attempt at composure and spoke where any sane silence would have been wiser.
“I… I have no right to be in your affairs. I apologise for intruding.”
Corvin’s gaze slid to me, and I placed the weight of all my questions against my ribcage and hoped they would not make me cough up what I had found.
Zagreus’s look snapped from Corvin back to me. His brows lowered until they met the top of his nose, and the room contracted again. I felt suffocated.
“You are his wife. You have every right to know, Selene.”
“Enough, Corvin,” Zagreus muttered.
I shook my head. “Why? Why are you telling all this now? It doesn’t make sense. You don’t know me. Why are you calling me Selene? I am not her, I’m Celestine.”
Corvin chuckled. “Maybe I like calling you that.”
“I will kill you,” Zagreus growled while taking a step forward, before I pushed myself in between them and stared wide-eyed at him.
Behind me, Corvin laughed. “You forget,” he whispered, “that there are debts that blood cannot pay. You would not risk destroying your only family. You wouldn’t risk losing a brother. After your first wife killed our parents, I wouldn’t risk losing my brother to others.”
I tried to steady myself. “I should go,” I whispered. Before I could move, Zagreus’s hand slid out to capture me.
“You are not to wander by yourself,” he said softly, and that softness suffocated me more.
There was a rawness in my chest. Zagreus’s first wife killed his parents…
For a moment, I thought he would catch me when I snatched my wrist from his grip. And before he could hold me again, I found myself moving away from the heat of his body and out through the doors, propelled by an animal impulse to breathe.
I ran.
The corridor opened into the porch without deliberation.
There was a need to ransack the night for something that resembled truth.
The sky was a hard blue that was not kind to the eyes.
Below, the ocean drew its long breath and exhaled against the cliff.
The wind took my hair and braided it into panic, and still I couldn’t breathe.
Zagreus had a brother. And his first wife killed his parents.
I stood at the edge where the land gave itself up to the water, and felt my whole life unspool. The sound of the tide was not comforting at all. It was accusatory. I pressed my palms to my face until my heartbeat steadied or until I imagined it might.
What had I touched in that box? The photographs were tender and proof of everlasting love, one that contradicted the cold man who owned this place.
He had mourned someone. He had been bound before I arrived.
Did that binding explain his cruelty? Did his first wife make him this way?
Did it justify his possessiveness and madness?
No. No justification could be scraped across what he had done to Adrian, how he had forced into my life without asking.
And Corvin. He said so many things in riddles. But I was no fool to not understand. He loathed Zagreus’s first wife. And in the process, he was sceptical of me too. I could understand him, I would’ve been too if I was in his shoes.
But if Zagreus had a brother and a history of being bound to remnants of family, where did I stand? In what ledger had I been recorded? Wife? Usurper? Pawn?
The air stung. Salt penetrated my breath. I felt cruelly small and absurd.
I was not a person; I was an accumulation of other people’s consequences.
My ankles ached from the anklet more than the heels, and still I could not remove it.
My dress clung to my skin. My lungs flamed with the need to run further away, to bury myself in movement until the name Selene and the shadows hunting me were blunt from the motion.
I pressed my forehead against the cold railing and tried, for the first time all evening, to count the beats of my heart. Each one uncertain. Each one held a question that would not be soothed by numbers.