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 bescraped 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.
CHAPTER FIFTY
Death of Us
Death was not dying. Often times, it was the silence between two people. Secrets between them that destroyed everything revolving around their little world. And at that moment, I felt the same.
It pressed against my ribs harder than the crashing waves, harder than the spray of salt that hung in the air. I stood on the edge of the cliff, trembling, my palms damp, my throat raw with unsaid words, and yet, I could not breathe. I could not breathe with him behind me, his presence so close it might as well have been my shadow, his gaze so heavy it burned through my skin.
I didn’t know how long he had been standing there. But I knew he had been there for some time now. I wondered if he found me pitiable or vulnerable. Was I desirable to him now? When I looked and felt like dying?
I turned slightly, catching him in the corner of my eye. He stood a step away, sculpted in the dusk, his face carrying that scar that seemed to tell more stories than his tongue ever did. But his unyielding, stormy-grey eyes watched me with something I could not name. Pity? Rage? Longing? What was it, Zagreus? No word in my limited mouth could catch it.
I jerked my head away, refusing to drown in that stare.
The waves below roared, wild and untamed. “What am I, Zagreus?” The words slipped from me before I could stop it, like a whisper made of my broken heart, not knowing if I meant him or myself.
There was only silence that greeted me. What was I expecting anyway? He’d rather stay quiet, watch me burn or drown, but would never give me answers.
I laughed bitterly. My chest ached. “I don’t even deserve your words now?”
The air grew heavier. My knees buckled, but I forced myself to stand, to pretend I wasn’t crumbling from the inside out. My mind screamed the words my mouth wouldn’t whisper.
I wanted to die.
Would he care more if I jumped? Would he care if I vanished into the waves, swallowed whole by the ocean? Would his hand reach for me? Would my absence carve a hole in him, or would he fill it with another bride, another woman… anotherbody… to chain beside his heart?
He once had a wife. A wife who killed his parents. A wife he must have loved once, to keep her pictures. Would he keep my pictures too? Would he mourn me?
What was I truly?
“Speak, Zagreus…” I choked, my tears burned down my cheeks. I turned around slowly. His figure blurred through the veil of saltwater that left my eyes swollen red. “Or please… let me go.”
I wanted to run. My body begged to collapse, to disappear, to be erased. “I cannot live in this hell.”
‘This is not hell, Dolcezza.”
