I am washing them away.
Washing away both her sins and mine.
I move to her arm, wiping away the smudges of grime, tracing the delicate blue veins beneath her pale skin. I move the basin to the other side of the bed and repeat the process with her left hand, her left arm. I am an archaeologist of her pain, meticulously brushing away the layers of evidence, trying to find the woman I know is buried beneath.
I dampen a fresh corner of the towel and lean over her. I begin to clean her face, the unbruised part first. I stroke her forehead, smooth and pale as marble, wiping away the sweat and tears of her ordeal. I clean her eyelid, so still and peaceful in its forced slumber. I trace one side of her nose, the curve of her unharmed cheek. I am painfully careful around the bandages, a territory I cannot enter, a wound I cannot heal.
The helplessness is still there, a vast, dark ocean around this tiny island of action.
I cannot wake her, I cannot take away the physical pain she will feel when the drugs wear off.
I cannot erase the memory of whatever horrors she saw, whatever depths of hopelessness she felt.
I, Antonio Macrae, who moves markets and topples governments, am powerless against the storm inside her fractured mind.
But Icando this. I can ensure that when she wakes, the first thing she feels is clean. That the touch she knows is one of care, not just possession. That she understands, on some deep, subconscious level that I am washing the world away for her, protecting her the only way I can.
The water in the basin grows cloudy, tinged with brown and pink. I empty it, refill it with fresh, clean water, and begin again.
I am not just cleaning her; I am anointing her.
This is my penance and my prayer.
The Kingmaker, brought to his knees not by an enemy, but by a woman.
Two Weeks Later
The world is made of bleached white and sterile silver, a landscape painted in pain.
Every breath is a conscious effort, a sharp, stabbing reminder in my ribs that I am, against all my fervent wishes, still fucking here.
My face is a prison of gauze and tape, a heavy, muffling mask. One eye is shrouded in darkness while the other offers a blurred, narrow window to this literal hell.
I couldn’t bear the four walls of my room, the ghost of my own failure clinging to the sheets. The nurses, with their syrupy, pitying voices helped me into this wheelchair. They thought they were giving me a gift, a reason to fight. They have no idea they’ve delivered me to the heart of my torment.
And there it is.
Him. It.My baby.
It’s not an it. I know that, somewhere in the shattered ruins of what used to be my soul, I know that. But thinking of it as a person, as achild, is an agony I can’t yet afford.
The baby lies in a plastic box, an incubator that hums with a low, mechanical life. So small. So impossibly, heartbreakingly vulnerable. I thought I knew what small was, but this? This is a sketch of a person, a bird with fragile bones barely veiled by translucent, reddish skin. Tubes and wires sprout from its tiny body like a tangle of plastic vines snaking from its nose, its mouth, taped to its miniature chest. A monitor beeps a steady, monotonous rhythm, a sound that seems to sayalive, alive, alive, like it’s taunting me for my failure.
My hands are clenched into fists on the blanket covering my lap. I can’t feel my nails digging into my palms through the fog of medication, but I know they are.
And I want to feel that pain.
I need an anchor to this reality, a sensation that is mine alone, not provided by a drip in my arm.
I try to hate it.
I try to summon the black, corrosive fury that seemed to sustain me until now. I try to see it only as a product of him, of Antonio, a permanent brand of his ownership. And I can see him there, in the faint, determined line of the jaw, in the dark sweep of lashes against the tiny, swollen cheeks. The features are undeniably his. A part of him, ripped from me and now fighting for its own existence separate from my body, separate from my will.
But the hatred won’t come. Not for this tiny, struggling thing.
Instead, a feeling so vast and terrifying it threatens to swallow me whole rises up in my throat, choking me. It’s a primal, ferocious, and utterly devastating wave of love. It’s involuntary, a biological trap sprung deep from within my DNA.
After everything, after the violation, the captivity, the despair so profound I sought the sweet mercy of a bullet. My body, my treacherous fucking heart, still looks at this piece of him and sees only a piece ofme. A piece that needs protecting.
