“Good girl,” he says. “Nearly there.” Where? There’s nowhere to go but here. And here doesn’t feel anything. Here exists in the moment. It’s what death feels like. He knows that. My Malachi knows that. He showed me, looked at me with his dead eyes and made me will him back to life. And he came back to me. And now he’s here with me again – hurting me.
Protecting me.
Rescuing me from the bad men.
A smile comes to my face in the madness. It makes me think of his castle and his snow and his smile. “Where are you?” mumbles out of me.
He turns my head, rolls me until I’m on my back and he’s pulling me up to him. “Here.” His hand grabs mine, brings the knife up to his throat as he slides back inside me. We’re just naked and he’s fucking me and this knife is grating at his throat. I like it. It’s mine. This moment isn’t anyone else’s but mine. Maybe his, too. I don’t fucking know, but now I’m enjoying it and he’s looking at me and were one in the middle of it.
The room moves, the feeling changes, and suddenly I’m on the floor.
He’s coming. We’re both coming.
It’s a riot of cum and pain and feelings and something other than what it was before.
The knife drops from my hand, and I put his hand back on my throat, tightens it.
“More,” I mumble.
“Good girl.”
He smiles wickedly, brings his mouth down to mine and kisses me until everything disappears.
Everything but him.
~
Lying on his chest, his spent cum filling me and smeared all over me, I stare in some haze of exhaustion. I’m more bruised than I’ve ever been. Everything hurts. Every bone, every muscle, every joint. The green silk of the dress lies tattered and abandoned out there on the floor, light spilling over it occasionally from the moon outside as it ducks between clouds.
I can’t even think.
Just stare.
He hurt me. He hurt me more than any of them did.
I’ve never felt pain like it on my skin.
And now we’re just here, as he breathes slowly.
His arms are soft around me, his fingers softer, as he draws them through my hair lightly and strokes my jaw. It’s rhythmic like his breathing. In and out, in and out. I’m lost in that, maybe safe in it somehow. It feels like I’m curled up in his lap as he works, but now instead of tired and needing his presence to help me sleep, I’m just plain fucking done.
“You hurt me,” I mumble.
“I know I did.”
I frown, as his fingers caress my jaw again, and turn slowly to look at him. “Why?”
“So you associate it with me and not them.” There shouldn’t be any sense in that. That shouldn’t make it any better, but, in some freaky way, it pulls me closer to him. He smiles softly and pushes my head back to where it was – makes me rest again. “I want you to remember my hands, not theirs. My weight, not theirs.” I don’t know where I am anymore. All of it – this room, the way he got rid of people, the things that just happened to me – seems to be absent from normality. “If anyone’s going to own your fear, Alice, it will be me.”
Senseless.
And yet full of sense.
I get lost in nothingness for a while longer, enjoy the emptiness of no thought and his breathing lulling me towards sleep. But then he moves. I’m left on the floor while he finds his jacket and picks out his phone. He calls someone, orders something, and then comes back to lift me from the floor. We move through the room towards a door, where he puts me on a couch in the corner then tucks a table cloth over me.
“Stay,” he says, disappearing back where we just came from.
As if I’m going anywhere. I can’t move, let alone run. I don’t think I want to anyway. I’m dazed, strangely inconsiderate of all the bruises he just caused. I might even be enjoying them. Another freaky thing that I’m struggling to process in the here and now.
