Page 105 of The Madman and his broken Princess

She rushed past me, casting a glance over her shoulder before she began to run, dropping the flowers in the process. I smiled to myself as I started the chase. When I reached the winding staircase to our turret, I was already rock hard. I couldn’t wait to bury myself in Amelia.

I found Amelia where I almost always did, since we’d installed the swing in one of the rose archways a couple of weeks after Rodolfo had dumped five unruly kittens in our garden.

Amelia perched sideways on the wooden board, one leg curled up, the other dangling down, while she swung gently back and forth, reading a big tome. Five cats sunbathed on the grass and pathway around her, but their heads lifted at my approach.

Amelia beamed when she spotted me.

But she wasn’t the first to greet me. The biggest of the five cats, a stubborn but gentle-minded ginger, raced toward me and began to purr and press itself against my legs. I bent down and gave its head the pet it demanded, before I walked over to my wife, where she sat on the swing.

I bent down and kissed her. “How was your day?” she asked.

“Brutal, but successful,” I said. Niccolo and I had killed two drug dealers who’d kept part of our money.

“Do you want to talk about it?”

I shook my head. “Not now.” I usually spilled the bloody details of my daily work to Amelia after I woke from a nightmare. They still came on occasion, but not as often as they used to.

Every cat except for the black male that favored Amelia sauntered up to me for a greeting. I had grown used to their furry presence and to my surprise, their warm purring body on my lap after a particularly rough day, and before I dared to go up to Amelia, always calmed me.

Amelia chuckled when the black beast rolled over on its back, presenting its belly. “He’s jealous. That’s why he doesn’t like you.”

“I’d be jealous too if I had to watch someone else do what I do with your beautiful body every day.”

She smiled coyly up at me. “We could eat outside today. I asked the maid to set up the table beside the lake. Dinner will be ready in thirty minutes.” She patted the spot beside her on the swing. “Why don’t you join me?”

I had knelt before her while I’d eaten her out on that swing, but I’d never swung on it. “I haven’t been on a swing…since I was four or five.”

She raised her eyebrows, and I grabbed her hips and hoisted her to her feet, then sat on the swing and pulled her onto my lap. I pushed us back with my feet, then let the swing fall into a slow rhythm.

Amelia drew in a deep breath and leaned her head back against my shoulder. “Sometimes I forget the past. It’s strange and catches me by surprise every time it happens, but I love those moments.”

“I learned to focus on the moments from the past that I cherish, like when you first read The Tale of Peter Rabbitto me, or when we held hands through the bars, or when you smiled at me. That makes the past seem not quite as dark.”

She nodded. “That’s true. There are moments of beauty even in our past. I wished there was a way for me to travel back in time and tell young Nestore that this would be his future, then he’d never want to give up.”

I chuckled. “But, dove, young Nestore had a vision of that future, and that’s why he survived. You embodied that vision, which was why I couldn’t let you go.”

Her eyes filled with tears, and a soft smile curled her lips. “I’m so glad you kidnapped me and made me your wife.”

I cupped her cheek and kissed her. It was one of my many sins that I regretted the least.

Amelia was my wife.

My love.

My life.

The woman who saved me every day.

The End