CHAPTER 19
THE BLOOD
POV: MAE
I hear him on the stairs before I see him.
Not his step. I know his step: heavy and even and unhurried, a man who has never once in his life had to run. This is different. Slower. A pause on the landing. Then the sound of a hand on the banister, dragging.
I’m in his bed. Rule five.
I’ve been sitting up against the headboard for an hour in the black nightgown with my knees under the sheet and the Augustine open face down on the covers, and I haven’t read a word.
Rosa came to the chapel at six and said, Mr. Draven asks that you go upstairs, ma’am.
I went. She followed me all the way to his door, and I understood she’d been told to.
Nobody said Declan’s name.
I didn’t ask.
The door opens.
He stands in it.
His shirt is red on the left side from the collar to the belt, soaked through, clinging to him.
There’s more on his neck. Under his jaw.
A smear across the scar, as if someone tried to claw it open.
His hands hang at his sides, and the white gauze Rosa put on this morning is gone, and his knuckles are raw and wet and dark.
He doesn’t come in.
He stands in the doorway and looks at me, and he waits.
I know what he’s waiting for. I watched him wait for it on Wednesday night, across my room, with Liam Kavanagh’s blood on his cuffs. He’s waiting to see if I’ll pull the sheet up.
I put the Augustine on the nightstand.
I get out of bed.
I cross the room to him on bare feet and stop close enough to smell it. Copper. Sweat. Under it, cedar, faint, fighting through.
“Is any of it yours?” I ask.
“Some.”
“Where?”
He lifts one hand and looks at it like it belongs to someone else.
I take it.
I take his wrist, the way he takes mine, with my thumb over the pulse, and I pull, and he comes. Into the room. Across it. Through the other door, into the bathroom, which is black marble and brass and big enough to hold my whole cell twice.
I turn on the shower.
I don’t wait for it to warm. I turn back to him and start on his buttons.
His shirt is stiff with it. The buttons are slippery.
My fingers don’t shake. I’m aware of that as if I’m watching someone else’s fingers, someone calmer, someone who’s done this before.
I work the shirt open and peel it off his shoulders, and it sticks, and comes away with a sound like tape, and I drop it on the marble floor.
The blood has gone through to his skin. His chest. His stomach. The long pale scar under his ribs has a red line drawn along it, like someone was tracing it.
“Did he say anything?” I ask.
“A name.”
I look up at him.
“Crewe,” I say.
He doesn’t answer. He doesn’t need to.
I think of the soft voice across the tablecloth. My office is always open to you. I think of his eyes on my throat, one second too long.
“He wanted me in his office,” I say. “Albright wanted me in his office. Everybody with a collar in this city wants me in an office.”
“Crewe wanted you annulled,” Ronan says. His voice is low and rough and very flat. “Declan was going to walk you out of midnight Mass for air. A car on Washington Street. Crewe does the paper. Then you’re nobody’s.”
The shower hisses. Steam starts rolling up behind the glass.
Nobody’s.
I’ve been nobody’s my whole life. My father’s, on paper, until he sold me. The Church’s, on paper, until Mother Clare closed a door on a chain.
“I’m not nobody’s,” I say.
“No.”
“Say it.”
He looks down at me. His eyes are black. There’s blood in one eyebrow.
“You’re mine, dove,” he says.
I unbuckle his belt.
The water is hot now. I step into it in my nightgown and pull him in after me, and the silk goes transparent and plasters to my skin, and I don’t care.
The water runs pink.
It runs off his shoulders, down his chest, over my hands where I’m holding onto him, and down between our feet into the drain. Pink, then paler pink, then clear, then pink again when I lift his hands and turn them up under the spray and the knuckles open fresh.
I wash him.
I take the soap and I wash his neck, his jaw, the scar. I wash his chest and the pale line under his ribs. I stand on my toes and reach around him and wash his back, the heart and the fire and the thorns, and the ink comes up dark and clean under the water.
He stands still and lets me. His head is bowed. His hands are braced on the marble wall on either side of me, the way they were on the arms of the chair in his office the day I met him.
Only now I’m not in the chair.
“You killed him,” I say to his chest.
“Yes.”
“With your hands.”
“Yes.”
“Because of what he was going to do on Christmas Eve.”
“Because of what he said about you.”
I look up.
“What did he say?”
He doesn’t answer.
I think I know. I think I’ve heard it before, in kitchens, on bridges, in soup lines.
“Was it true?” I ask.
“He said you were a good liar.”
The water beats down. I blink it out of my eyes.
“I am,” I say.
“I know.”
“He said something else.”
“Yes.”
“What?”
His jaw moves. “He said you’d be good at other things.”
I look at him for a long moment through the steam.
Then I go down on my knees.
The marble is hard and hot under them. My wet nightgown drags on the floor of the shower. He goes still above me. All of him. His hands on the wall turn to fists.
“Mae—”
“You said I’d learn the rest by breaking them.”
I’ve never done this. I’ve never even seen it done. I’ve read about it in the confessional handbook, in the list of sins against the sixth commandment, in Latin, underlined in pencil by somebody before me.
He’s hard. He’s been hard since the doorway. I take him in my hand, and he’s heavy and hot and slick with water, and his breath goes out of him in a sound I’ve never heard.
I put my mouth on him.
I don’t know what I’m doing. I do it anyway. I do it the way he did it to me on our wedding night, slow and thorough, like I have all night and plan to use it. I taste soap, and water, and him, and under all of it, faint and metallic, the last of Declan Byrne.
I don’t stop.
His hand comes off the wall and into my wet hair. Not pushing. Holding. Shaking.
“Jesus,” he says, somewhere above me. “Jesus Christ, Mae.”
Not Him, I think. Me.
I take him deeper. I choke, and pull back, and do it again. His hips jerk, and he pulls my hair, and I look up at him through the water, and his face is something I want to keep. Undone. Open. Terrible.
“Stop,” he says. “Stop—I want—”
He pulls me up.
He lifts me off my knees by the arms and puts my back against the black marble, and the cold of it shocks the breath out of me. He drags the wet silk up to my waist and gets his hands under my thighs and lifts me, and I wrap my legs around him, and he pushes into me in one long stroke.
I’m still sore from Friday. It burns. I want it to.
“Look at me,” he says.
I look at him. There’s still blood in his eyebrow. The water hasn’t found it.
He takes me against the wall. It isn’t slow this time.
It isn’t careful. It’s the way I asked for it at the end on Friday, hard and deep, and every thrust puts my shoulders into the marble and pulls a sound out of me that echoes off the brass and the glass.
His raw knuckles are wet on my thighs. His mouth is on my throat, on the bite, on the second mark, making a third.
I reach up and put my thumb on the blood in his eyebrow and smear it away.
It comes off on my thumb.
I look at it, red in the steam.
I put my thumb in my mouth.
He sees me do it. He makes a sound like I’ve cut him. His rhythm breaks. He drives into me so hard my head knocks the marble, and his hand comes down between us and finds my clit, and he rubs it rough and fast, and I come apart against the wall with his name in my mouth and his blood on my tongue.
He follows me down. He holds me there, shaking, buried to the hilt, with his forehead against the wall beside my head and the water pouring over us both.
The drain gurgles.
The water running into it is clear now.
***
Later, we lie in his bed with the lamp off.
My hair is wet on his pillow. He’s on his back with his arm under me and his wrapped hands on his chest. I did the gauze myself this time. Rosa’s box, on the edge of the bath. My hands didn’t shake then, either.
“Declan had a daughter,” I say.
“Yes.”
“She plays hockey.”
“She’ll keep playing.”
I turn my head on his shoulder. “You’re paying for it.”
“Through college.”
“Why?”
He’s quiet a while.
“Because she didn’t sell anyone,” he says.
I lie there and think about that. The house is silent. Somewhere below us, very far down, under the pantry and the steel door, the servers are humming, and I wonder if they’ve cleaned the screens yet.
“Crewe knows something,” Ronan says to the ceiling.
“What?”
“I don’t know. That’s what Declan said. Crewe knows.” His chest rises and falls under my cheek. “And then he looked at me like he felt sorry for me.”
“Does that happen often?”
“Never.”
I put my hand on his chest, over his heart.
I think about the dates. The funeral, and a week later the kitchen table, and a week after that the steps of St. Agnes with one suitcase.
I think about Mother Clare’s face through the chain.
He pays for the heat. I think about a line at the bottom of a ledger I kept for two years. Anonymous. Designated gift.
I don’t say any of it.
I’m not ready to count that high.
His breathing slows. His arm goes heavy under me. For the first time since I came into this house, he falls asleep before I do.
I lie awake in the dark with my hand on his heart and my lips still tasting of copper and soap.
I don’t say a prayer.
I don’t want to.