It’s the most intimate violation.
And I struggle, writhing, but I am a moth against a mountain.
“Let go of me.” I shriek, my voice muffled by his shirt. “I hate you, I hate you! I wish I’d died, I wish we’d both died.”
The words are a torrent, a litany of my despair. I want to wound him. I want to make him feel a fraction of the pain he has caused me.
“I’ll do it again.” I promise, my mouth against the fabric of his suit. “I swear to God, Antonio, I’ll do it again. I’ll find a way, I’ll never stop trying. I won’t live like this. I won’t let him live like this.”
That gets a reaction. His arms tighten around me, becoming iron bands.
One hand releases my wrists and comes up to cradle the back of my head, his fingers tangling in the ends of my hair beneath the bandages. He doesn’t speak. He just holds me, silencing my screams by burying my face deeper into the solid, unyielding reality of his chest.
I can’t breathe, I can’t see.
I am drowning in him. My struggles weaken, replaced by ragged, hysterical sobs that wrack my broken body.
The fight drains out of me, leaving only the hollow, empty shell of my grief.
The water is a tepid ghost against my skin. I feel it, but distantly, as if a layer of thick, cloudy glass separates me from the world.
It’s the drugs, I know it is. Antonio calls it pain medication. I know it’s a lie, so smooth and practiced it almost sounds like concern. The pain is a dull, manageable throb; the drugs are a silencer for my will.
He moves the sponge over my shoulder, down my arm. His touch is meticulous, reverent even. Each slow, sweeping motion is a claim staked.
Mine. Mine. Mine.
The sponge is warm, heavy with water and when he wrings it out above me, the cascade hits my chest like a sigh. I don’t flinch. I am a doll on a porcelain altar, my head lolling against the back of the tub, my good eye fixed on the vaulted ceiling of the space far above me.
Another castle. The thought is a dry, brittle leaf skittering across the barren landscape of my mind. Grey stone walls, taller and thicker than the ones in Portugal. Leaded glass windows that distort the relentless Scottish drizzle into weeping streaks of grey and green. A different cage, a stronger lock.
He told me the highland air would be good for the baby. He always has a reason that sounds like a gift.
He murmurs something. My name, maybe. An endearment, probably. The words dissolve into a low hum before they reach the core of me. I’ve built a wall inside my head, brick by brick, and the drugs are the mortar that keeps it standing.
I try not to speak. Each word given to him is a surrender I don’t want to make. So I save them all, hoarding my silence like a weapon I cannot yet wield.
His fingers, slick and warm, trace the line of my collarbone. I focus on the ceiling again, on the intricate plasterwork of thistles and vines. I count them. I have counted them every day since I was carried into this room, a week ago? Two? Time is as blurred as the world outside the windows, but one countdown is crystalline in my mind, ticking away with the grim certainty of a death knell.
Twenty-eight days.
That’s what the stern-faced doctor, a man who never quite meets my eyes, told Antonio. Six weeks of healing before, before marital relations can resume. Antonio had nodded, his face a mask of solemn understanding, but his hand on my shoulder had tightened possessively.
He can’t fuck me.
He can’t touch me like that.
The physical violation is on hold, a temporary reprieve granted by stitches and the virtue that I gave him an heir.
But he sleeps beside me. Every night, in the vast, canopied bed that smells of him. He pulls my drugged, pliant body against his, wrapping himself around me, his arm a lead weight across my waist, his breath hot on my neck. He is forcing his will upon me in the most intimate of battlegrounds, colonizing my sleep, reminding me that even in unconsciousness, I am not my own.
The baby is in the next room. Caspian. He chose the name. His room was constructed before we even arrived; a state-of-the-art nursery seamlessly integrated into a clinical space that mimics a NICU. There is an army of nurses, women with quiet voices and efficient hands. They tend to his every need, their presence a constant reminder that I am not needed.
My body was the vessel, but its purpose has been served.
Now, I am just the occupant of the main cell.
Antonio’s sponge moves lower, over the swell of my stomach, now soft and empty. He avoids the scar, dancing around it as if it were sacred, but it is not. It is a battlefield wound. A reminder of the night I failed so utterly. The night this new, more profound captivity began.
