Chapter 43
It was my bedroom.
I knew before I had opened my eyes that it was my silk pillow I was sleeping upon. The air also tasted of Cauliflower’s shedding coat and the goat milk moisturiser I kept on my nightstand.
When I awoke in my own bed with an IV in the back of my hand and a migraine knocking on the doors of my head like angry wind, I yawned through the pain.
Oh. Pain.
It was all over me, uncaring and nasty. I had been dressed in my pyjamas and bundled in gauze from a heaping of wounds along my body.
“What the…”
“Careful!” Arms came around me, helping me to sit.
I looked up to my brother.
Magnus De Astor. He smelled like mint, like shoe polish. The sunlight trickled in through the window highlighting the glossy oil over his perfect slicked hair. “Go slow darling, the stitches are still fresh. Would you like some water?”
Once I had looked upon my brother with adoration.
Now, things had changed.
“Get away from me!” I kicked at him and dove into the headboard.
Stabbing pain pricked all over my torso, tears dribbled from my eyes from the unbearable hurt. There were so many wounds on my body, I felt like a pincushion.
“Duckie!” Magnus snapped, concern knotting him.
“When you senselessly walked through the crowd of criminals you were stabbed eleven times.” He punched his fingers into his forehead.
“I watched the whole thing. It was ridiculous. You walked right through a hundred people trying to kill you like it was a sunny spring day. You currently have more stitches in you than an embellished cushion, please, be careful.”
The memory of Battle came itching in my head. I had to push away the drill of pain and forced myself to focus.
“I’m out of prison?” I looked around, my mouth dry.
“Yes.” Magnus fixed the quilt, straightening it.
“And do not worry, darling, I brought out the boy you wanted. Tommy. It’s done well for the papers, made me look like some sort of saviour, you know?
Helping an innocent young man. Good thinking.
” He poured a pitcher of water into a glass.
“Also, you being innocent has assisted in this. The entire world saw it darling, you, finding your soulmate.” The usual polish in his voice cracked a little and he cleared his throat.
“Mm. At least you are out, that is all that is important.”
I grabbed at my chest, pulling down my pyjama shirt.
Oh. My. God.
There across my chest, embedded over my heart, a Soulmates insignia bloomed from my blood.
Pure and real and intoxicatingly beautiful.
A single line, it curved up and around like half a love heart.
I touched it carefully, as if it would wipe away under my fingertips.
Underneath it, my heart lulled steady. The organ beat deeper, at least it felt that way.
It beat as if there were a purpose to each beat, not to keep me alive, but to keep something else alive. A connection.
“Where…” My throat clogged and I breathed out my emotion. “Where is he?”
Magnus twitched his nose and repositioned the pitcher that did not need repositioning. “I’d like to speak to you first about your Soulmate.”
“Where is he!” The fury in my eyes was enough to cause Magnus to flinch.
I had never twisted my voice to be so bestial. But I had just survived a death battle for ten full days without wearing pants, I had picked up a few traits from pure endurance.
“Duckie,” Magnus said softly.
“Where the fuck is she?” A voice broadcasted outside.
A voice deep as the ocean’s floor, ragged from years of hard living. My heart lulled softly at the sound of it.
The door to my bedroom kicked open so harsh it flung back, and the handle hit into the wall, denting the plaster.
Dig Graves.
He had cleaned up well. Donning a crisp white button up collared shirt and suit pants. The attire made a statement out of his athletic figure. His black messy hair had been trimmed and combed back neatly. His scent of blood and leather was replaced with cologne.
My heart fluttered faster than a hummingbird’s wings, all tension knotted in my shoulders dripped away.
My Soulmate.
He intruded into my bedroom just as he had done all those years ago, shoving my brother away and lunged at me, bringing me into the home of his arms. I clasped him back, sinking myself into him like teeth to a candy apple.
Our heartbeats rushed against our skin as if they were crossing a finishing line.
I squeezed him hard. “You’re alive.”
“I’m not fucking dying.” Everything he spoke was poetry.
I wanted to strangle him with my embrace. “You smell so good.”
“They dressed me up like a nerdy accountant for the cameras, it’s ridiculous.”
“It’s turning me on.”
“I’ll keep the clothes.”
“I was so worried.”
“We’re Soulmates,” he said, full of breath, as if he were getting a weight off his chest. “We’re finally Soulmates.”
“Are you also turned on?”
“We’re free now,” he said. “Now that we aren’t Soulless, we’re allowed out. It’s so bullshit, but I’m not arguing.”
I dug my nose into his neck, I debated biting him, licking him, tasting the skin of my Soulmate. I wanted to open his chest like a storybook and plant myself inside his heart. “I’m so glad it’s you.”
“I told you I’d get us out of prison.”
“I got us out of prison.”
“I fucked you enough to jumpstart your heart, I’m pretty sure it was me.”
“I don’t think that’s how it works.”
“I’ve been trying to make this shit work for a long time now. My heart has been beating for you for years, Princess, while you were off in fucking clode la la land, feeling fuck all.”
“What?” I pulled away and looked up into those dark eyes. “You’ve known this whole time that we were Soulmates?”
“I had a pretty strong feeling.” His eyelids half closed; a softness submerged. “I’m sorry I didn’t explain everything to you. Part of me wasn’t sure… part of me wanted you to like me first.”
I pursed my lips.
“Delphine, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. It’s me.” He stripped his emotion back like shelling nuts. His maddening rush of words came undone. “I wish it could have been someone else. Someone better.”
“I don’t care.”
His moment vanished. “You don’t?”
“When you first went to prison, I paid off a group of inmates to beat you and film it so I could pleasure myself to you being horribly beaten. It’s alright, we’re even now.”
“You what?”
Magnus looked down his nose at us like a God brewing in storm clouds about to enact judgement. His perpetual glare was cemented on Dig, throwing daggers with his eyes into the back of my Soulmate.
I clutched Dig’s hand. He felt the message of my touch and twisted on the bed to view my brother.
“He knew,” Dig said.
Magnus’s nostrils flared. “Dig—”
“You put clode in me!” I flung at my brother.
His brows sprung up so high they almost reached the ceiling.
It seemed he needed a moment to recalibrate himself.
Magnus rolled back his shoulders and rooted on one of his fake smiles he used when giving speeches.
“That clode was for your own protection. Dig Graves, he cannot be your Soulmate. Absolutely not. Do you know who his father was?”
Anger bubbled up inside of me and my gut turned into a cauldron. I ripped off the quilt and got out of bed. Dig was about to protest, but he knew better than to stop my endeavours.
“Duckie.” Magnus chastised me. “Lie down before you open up your stiches.”
“You’re trying to get my inheritance!” I got on my own feet. The wounds in my body ached, but the pain in my heart was far crueller.
Confusion slapped Magnus into a frown at first, then hilarity. “No, Duckie.” He laughed with faint relief. “I don’t want your inheritance. You’ve spent so much on charities. I’ve even given you some of my own money to inflate your accounts. Don’t be ridiculous.”
“You tried to turn me Soulless.” My step forward made my nerves scream.
“No,” Magnus said. A tinge of worry coasted through his features. “You don’t understand.”
“I thought you were my brother!”
“Duckie—”
“I thought you loved me!”
“I do love you!”
“You don’t love me!”
“You have no idea the depth of which I love you!”
“You asshole!”
“I am Soulless!”
I quietened. A tear dripped down my cheek and splattered on the floor. It took a long moment before I was able to move my lips again. “Wh—”
“I am Soulless,” he said it again. He dipped his fingers in his perfectly slicked hair, messing up the strands.
“I’ve always known that I would be Soulless and so I ensured to cultivate my image as best I could over time.
It was evident you were going to be Soulless too, but you couldn’t hide it well enough.
Our parents were going to take you away…
so I took them away first. I killed them, for you. ”
My mouth hung open as he robbed me from my anger and exchanged it for confusion. The pressure of his words hit into my skull like spikes.
“So we could be Soulless, together. But then damn Dig Graves came along, saying he had a connection to you. Yes, I gave you clode, to sever the connection. You are better off being Soulless than us having that monster in our family.”
Magnus stared back at me with pale desperation, waiting.
He did not wear a mask. He stripped it from himself and stood in front of me bare and vulnerable, bleeding emotion.
“You killed our parents?” I asked. My blood hurried in my veins. I had so many questions bumbling around in my head, itching to get out. “You’re Soulless? But… you have a Soulmate.”
“I offered a deal to Cynthia to be my Soulmate in exchange for a lavish lifestyle. I was going to organise a fake connection for yourself after Dig’s death. It's not safe to put on a fake insignia when your Soulmate is still alive.”
I looked at the floor, eyes wide, trying to catalogue all of what he was saying, trying to comprehend.
“But Duckie,” Magnus said, his voice smoothed into a whisper. “I do not love her, I never have. It’s only you Duckie. Only you that I can ever love.”
I looked back at him, throwing a verbal dagger, “What?”
Magnus smiled, his arms opened. “I love you.”
I stared at him for a long moment. The rich pause between us savoured in the air and grew louder.
“Delphine,” my older brother said. “I have told you every day since you could hear my voice that I loved you, and every day I did not lie. Everyone else in the world, they have another person just the same as them, a Soulmate. Everyone, but you and I. We were made the same. We are our own Soulmates.”
I held my stomach, the pulsing ache of acid rising. “Oh.”
He leaned forward, bringing his face close to mine, his hands coming to clasp my cheeks. His lips pursed to kiss and he dropped his eyes to my mouth. “I love you.”
I was about to smack him away from me, when he collapsed onto the floor, under duress of Dig Graves’s fist. Magnus gasped and squirmed over my antique rug as Dig pulled himself on top of my brother.
He punched. Dig Graves summoned his easy fury, the one sated only on the battlefield, and balled his hands into fists and pummelled them into Magnus’s face.
I stayed frozen, stuck to watch the perversity of this performance, my heart trouncing against my chest while Dig’s fists nailed into my brother’s face.
As Magnus cried out, Dig punched. As Magnus begged, Dig punched.
Dig punched Magnus until skin turned into bone and cartilage, until my brother no longer had eyes and teeth, until his chest stopped sucking in air and deflated like an old birthday balloon.
“Dig!” I screamed, but it turned into a choke. I decked to the ground, my hands slapping the floor. I shuddered out breath. “What… what are you doing? What… what did you do?”
Blood freckled over his face, his shining dark eyes locked onto me and then back down to Magnus. He held up both of his hands, twitched with mild alarm. “Self-defence?”
“No!” I cried, tears weeping from my eyes as I felt over the fibres. “My antique rug. You ruined it!”