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“I’m devoted.”
He sighs. “Ten Hail Marys, and I want you to donate ten percent of your income to a women’s shelter for the next six months. If you can’t be truly penitent for what you did, you can at least find a more acceptable form of helping.”
I agree to these terms and he says the prayer of absolution.
Just before I leave the booth he says, “Do you think you’ll be back here again?”
I’m not sure if he’s asking if I’m planning to make him my regular confessor or if he’s asking if I’m intending to do a lot more things that require my confession.
“Until I decide Catholicism isn’t for me, yes.”
I leave the booth and approach the table with all the candles. The tealights are all beeswax. It’s more expensive, but it reflects the affluent nature of this parish as well as my own. Beeswax candles are more pure and more appropriate for these holy matters than cheap paraffin. I strike one of the long matches and realize they’re Frankincense and Myrrh incense matches. Nice touch. I light the candle and say a prayer for my mother.
By the time I get home, Maddie is already in bed. I strip down and get under the blankets with her, pulling her body against me. She stirs beside me, and I trail kisses along her neck, down to her shoulder. She came to bed naked. And she came to my bed.
I half-expected her to be in her own room despite my rules, and that I’d have to wake her up to move her in here. She makes a small contented sound and snuggles into me. I’m not sure if she’s awake enough to know what she’s doing and to know who she’s cuddling up with. I could wake her and finally consummate this, but I’m not sure she’s truly ready yet… besides… she hasn’t begged me, and I believe those were my terms.
I move her hair out of my way and press a kiss to her shoulder. I pull her against me and fall into an easy, untroubled sleep for the first time this week.
Twenty-Seven
Maddie
Two weeks later.
* * *
It’s bright and sunny outside as we slide into July. Claude just made me breakfast in the kitchen. Aidan got up much earlier and ate in the formal dining room. He had a meeting with a business associate. It’s so hot today that I’m not willing to wear shoes even in the house. The cold kitchen floor is soothing under my feet, and I consider going out to the garden maze to read. I’m almost through the entire Jane Austen catalog with only Emma remaining.
I leave my plate in the sink and have just left the kitchen when I hear a crash in the formal dining room. I should ignore it. It’s not my business. I’ve spent the last three weeks since the wedding carefully navigating around who and what Aidan is. Trying not to think about it. I know he’s killed people—or so he says. But even if he hasn’t directly killed them by his own hands, he’s had them killed. And isn’t that the same thing?
I’ve allowed him to charm me and woo me—to make me forget. I’ve looked at who he is with a soft focus lens. No sharp angles or edges.
He’s an enigma I don’t understand. I should hate him. No self-respecting woman just falls into the arms of the man who has terrorized her since they were children. I don’t want him to win, but when he loses, don’t I also lose? My body wants him even if my mind sometimes puts up a weak fight.
Impossibly I’m still technically a virgin. I thought our wedding night was just a stay of execution, and that surely the next day he would deflower me and take what he believes to be his. Or maybe when he returned from “business”. But the past two weeks he’s continued to only tease me. His mouth on my pussy has been a constant. Fingers. Toys. In nearly every room of the house and quite a few places outside.
He never demands anything from me. Not once has he pushed me to my knees to make me suck his cock. He’s treated me… reverently, as though he doesn’t have the power to take what he wants without my order. And now it’s getting weird. He told me he’d make me beg for it, but I didn’t believe him.
Maybe I should have.
I hear the shatter of glass, and even though every instinct in my body says to just keep on walking, the curious part of me with no self-preservation instinct opens the door to the dining room.
“I control the air you breathe,” Aidan says, cold and dark. But he isn’t speaking to me.
It takes me a moment to fully comprehend the scene in front of me. There’s a man in a suit on his back on the long cleared-off dining room table. Aidan’s hand is around his throat as he glares menacingly down at him. Bodyguards stand like sentries lined against the wall, making no sound, staring straight ahead as if they have no idea what’s going on here or simply don’t care. Aidan looks up, and his wild eyes lock on mine.
And now I know without any doubt. Yes, he did kill those men in the alley. I’ve denied it as long as I could, but the mask has come off. He never lied about what he was. He told me from the beginning. I just didn’t want to hear it. I was too afraid of what it might mean for me.
The past few weeks haven’t helped me interface with reality any better. Aidan swept me up in his Beauty and the Beast montage, seducing me away from my common sense and self-preservation instincts.
But now I can see it. Death may very well be his closest friend and ally. They are at the very least poker buddies.
I’m struck in this moment by just how much of his darkness he’s chosen not to aim at me. How much of it he’s actively hidden from me. And I can’t decide if it’s been a mercy or cruelty.
Finally I listen to my instincts, turn, and run. I hear Aidan’s roar behind me. “Bring her back here!”
Yes, the polite mask of civility is definitely gone.