God, those colours. So many hues I used to worship. Ochres and oxblood. Azure and burnt sienna. Crimson that reminded me of bleeding knees and berry-stained summers. Viridian which once mimicked Adrian’s laugh in a garden. I used to know these colours intimately. I knew how they breathed on canvas, how they bled into one another, how they told stories my mouth never dared to speak.
But now?
Now they stared back at me like strangers I had once danced with, but no longer remembered the rhythm.
I sat on the stool; it creaked beneath my weight.
My hands shook as I picked up the brush. The bristles felt too soft. My skin felt too raw. I touched the palette, dipped it in blue, watched it pool into the well of white like it was trying to become something truer. But it didn’t matter.
I was colourless.
I was muted.
A ghost of a girl who used to feel too much and now begged to feel nothing at all.
What was happening to me?
God, what had I become?
I kissed him.
I kissed him.
I kissed the man who killed Adrian.
Tell me again, lord. Remind me why I hated him. Please.
Because somewhere between the sea air and the weight of his hands and the tremble he chased down my spine, I forgot. Somewhere between the gunshot and the way his mouth devoured mine, I lost the thread of rage I had been weaving for weeks into a noose around my own hope.
He murdered Adrian.
There. That’s the truth.
He shot him. Took his life. Erased him from every day I was meant to live with him. Zagreus Vitale rewrote the entire second half of my life, his violence, and handed it to me as a forced marriage.
So what, then? What reason, what possible reason, could outshine that fact?
The fact that he ruined me?
The fact that I never chose this?
The fact that every breath I took under this roof tasted like my own funeral?
The fact that I was his wife, not by love, not by faith or accident, but by force?
There was no reason. There couldn’t be.
And yet… when his lips found mine, something ancient inside me stirred. Something that should’ve stayed dead.
It wasn’t love.
It wasn’t forgiveness.
It wasn’t even desire in the way women often understood it.
It was recognition.
Of pain.
