The universe must take perverse delight in my life. Case in point: Francesca sits naked in my bathtub at 11pm, a stake-sacrificed witch plucked right out of Salem, my personal heresy. Long dark hair drifts around her exposed breasts as water beads across her skin, and steam dances around the tips of her fingers. Look fast enough, and you’d swear she’s casting a spell. She’s mindlessly playing with the bubbles, completely unaware that she’s a portrait from an era that burned.
There has to be a million other realities where this very sight I’m blessed with would be erotic, but not in this one.
Not when I can’t look away from the bruises that ring her throat. A coward’s hands touched her there. She let me catalogue those bruises formysanity, let me undress her, let me help her into the tub, and now my ribs cinch around my lungs at what that trust means. I shouldn’t have said it. Shouldn’t have said that word, that illogically beautiful word. Shouldn’t have given her that opening.
Baby. The least sentimental bastard in Marzod, and yet I let that slip free. Never said it to a woman in my life, but here Iam, silently mouthing it again like I’m testing a new language. And maybe I am, because fuck alone knows such sentimentality isn’t in my register. The more I try, the more obvious it becomes that it’s hers because it has her shape. Itfits, and that realisation alone makes my soul feel as bruised as her throat.
The scene shifts from the Early Renaissance to autopsy, and I sit there on the tiles like an ascetic, jaw in hand as I stare at how the deeper purples pool in the hollow and feather out into an ugly blue. My free hand drifts towards my leg as though pulled on a string, spelling the same four letters I have been since I was nine. It’s easy to stay, but it also takes everything in me to remain unmoving because I’m worried that standing would make her feel caged in, and to kneel beside the tub feels too much like worship.
Icouldkneel there. Maybe. I could lean my hands on the edge of it, listening to her quiet voice as she mumbles anything and everything. Sounds doable, physically, but the problem would be getting up after. It doesn’t even have anything to do with the tiles doing my knees in or exhaustion begging me to rest a little longer. No, she’ll turn her attention to me, and I won’t be able to move.
I won’t want to.
That brittleness to her gaze strikes a single cut across my consciousness, reminding me that her bruised nakedness isn’t the only sick joke doled out by the universe. It’s the conversation that took place exactly nine minutes and twenty-eight seconds ago.Twenty-nine.Thirty. Even as time crawls by, it can’t erase her admission that my ancestor—one she’s encountered in Redford’s purgatory—petitions her death.
Though I lack the advantage of perfect memory, each sentence that breathlessly fell from Francesca’s lips will have a space in my brain for as long as I’m permitted breath. I’ll remember the swallow that followed every fourth word, theway her voice cracked onghost, and the humiliation hiding in her apology as she waited for me to laugh. The shame of that expectation has me letting out a long sigh, the first proper sound within the room since she handed me the detonator-shaped confession.
Regrettably, I’m a logical man, so I don’t blame her for the apprehension.
“Francesca…” I try to buy some time; the words are stalling, and I don’t know how to tell her what’s going through my head right now. Her stare shatters. “I’m not saying Idon’tbelieve you. It’s just—” I shake my head. “You’re asking me to dismantle the entire cognitive structure through which I interpret the world.”
Her words scrape on the way up her throat, and I internally cringe at the sound. After three hours, the candle’s poison has slowly been seeping from her, but not as fast as I’d like.
“Weren’t you the one forcing me to acknowledge the song coming from the trees? Not exactly a logical train of thought, now is it?”
Alright, fair enough.
She snorts softly and goes back to her bubbles, giving me a chance to check my phone for any responses from Henrik. The last thing in our chat is still the requested image of the candle, alongside information on how long she had it burning for, the slight disorientation it caused and how it stole her voice.
“Perhaps that was based on the hope that a logical explanation will dig its way up from this mess,” I say, silently imploring her to look at me again so she can see that I mean every word.
“It’s easier to indulge in the impossible when there’s nothing at stake. But you wereattacked, Francesca, and abstraction isn’t so funny anymore now that there are bruises on your throat. Forgive me, but you have to see why that doesn’t sit too well with me. I need a culprit with skin, not a legend with my surname?—”
“Not your surname,” she cuts in smoothly.
It takes me a moment to regain my footing in the conversation. “Pardon?”
She looks up from the bubbles, seemingly staring right through me. “He doesn’t share your surname.” I frown, wondering how this relates to the near lecture I was voicing. “He was a Hildebrand. Lancaster Hildebrand—your forefather—renamed your line after his brother’s murder. My duchess left him no choice, not when she cursed the Hildebrand name. Atherbourne came from its ashes.”
I run a tired hand over my face. The entire concept of curses and the test baffles me. It reads like something some violent fuck created to excuse their sins, and as the centuries bled away, it got pinned to legend. It’s too perfect of a setup for a predator: isolate the target, forbid help and weaponise history. Too convenient and irritatingly clever.
“The man who attacked you was real.”
“I never claimed otherwise,” she says around a hoarse cough.
“No.” My jaw ticks. “Just that he’s possessed by the Atherbournes’ most illustrious ancestor. The thing is, I couldn’t give a fuck whether he’s possessed or perfectly lucid. What Iwantis the human man. Because humans exist, and things that exist can be traced. If Godwyn’s offended?—”
“Stopsaying his name,” she reminds me. Oh, right. The forbidden syllables. Say it three times, and monsters apparently crawl out of the shadows. Except she’s not laughing, and her logic becomes mine.
“Well, ifHildebrand’soffended, he’s welcome to join the ever-expanding queue of people wanting to fuck me sideways for something I said.”
She draws her bruised knees to her chest, some of the apprehension peeling away to reveal a hesitant trust. “You’re asking for the real man, and I don’t even have any suspects,” shemutters scratchily, then clears her throat against dust that isn’t there.
I toss my phone from hand to hand, narrowing my eyes. My mind jumps to the obvious, to Edmund. “Not even a single candidate?” A lazy smile lifts one corner of my mouth. “Humour me, duchess. First entry: your annoying cousin.”
Anger flashes in her eyes, so quickly I almost miss it. “Have you been listening to a word I’ve said? He picks somebody who already resents me, somebody who wants me dead.”
“So by that logic, you’re already excluding Cousin Edmund. Interesting.”
