“Ida,” Raphael said, his fingers outstretched to her.
Louka hadn’t even seen her yet. He only had eyes for Raphael. He stared at the man as if he was the light, the life, the essence of existence. He watched him like a mad thing, that wanted to live in his skin, or fall at his feet, kiss them, or all of the above. Ida’s insides had turned to stone and when she tried to breathe the stone ground into gravel and refused. When her heart beat the stone pounded, and it pained her.
She looked at Raphael, and all the hurt, the broken bones, the stabbing knives, the scrapes, the bites, the blood loss, the humiliations, the love-making, it was all washed in a sickening moss green, like the garden and the walls, and the steps in the river.
She stepped back. Shook her head.
Raphael’s look of serene pleasure had passed. His arm tightened around the boy.
Something was making small cracking noises inside of her. Something was shattering. Breaking. Ida turned, walking out of the garden, through the tower, away from the sight of Raphael and Louka. It wasn’t fear. Or pain, or jealousy. It was a lethargy that sank into her bones, into the stone that her insides had turned to. She got so far as the edge of the river, which gushed far below the ornate balustrade behind the tower, and she stared down at the crashing waves.
There was storm building somewhere.
She thought she could still hear them together.
“Where do you think you are going?” Raphael asked behind her.
“Go away,” she said. Her fingers had curled into claws.
If he stayed, she’d scratch his eyes out. She wanted to anyway. There was a part of her now, a small part, the part that remembered her bones breaking. The part that had seen him with someone else. The part that had wanted him to save her, and had been left to the wolves. The wolf. The monster, Louka. And that part hated him.
A hand on her shoulder turned her around forcefully, and she stared into Raphael’s angry eyes and felt defiance run through her veins. Yes, she wanted to fall at his feet. Yes, she wanted to be inside him, for him to be inside her, in every way conceivable. Yes, she wanted nothing more than to hear him swear he’d be with her, only her, forever, for eternity, until not only were they dead, but even their ashes had forgotten how to remember love. But she squashed it. She smeared it on the street under her slipper, and she kept her lips tightly shut, and her eyes squinted angrily, and she envisioned slapping his face, tearing at his hair, pulling his skin from his newly reformed body.
She hadn’t been able to heal him.
“You cannot leave,” he said.
“Yes,” she said, pulling her arm away from him. “Yes, I can. And I am.”
She turned, but his hand was on her arm, and it was tight, and she laughed.
“Going to break my arm again? My love?”
“Ida…”
“Don’t.”
“Don’t what?”
“Don’t pretend anymore.”
“Very well,” he said, taking her arm tighter in his hand, and pulling her back to the tower.
Ida took a moment and then began to fight him, scratching, clawing at him, digging her feet into the ground to keep him from moving her any further. But it was futile. He was strong. And it was like shifting a rock. He’d told her that his blood made her stronger. Apparently not enough.
“Let go of me!” she shrieked.
He refused to turn to look at her or to answer her. He pulled her into the garden, past the roses and the jasmine, and the slow blooming night blossoms, and he yanked her forward, throwing her down on the ground at the foot of the sarcophagus.
Louka was gone.
Ida glared up at Raphael from the soil.
“Some gentleman,” she hissed.
“You wanted me to stop pretending,” he growled, watching her.
Her gaze slid behind him to see a shadow creeping up against the wall.
“Your parlour tricks don’t frighten me,” she said, her voice quavering.
“Don’t they?” he retorted as the thing climbed high up the tower wall. It was long, thin; it had too many arms, its neck extended to a mass of a head, split wide, baring teeth, rows of them. One red eye burned at her with hinted hunger. Ida gaze flickered back to Raphael. She glared at him, swallowing her fury, her fear, down far away as he stepped up to her, bending down, looking her in the eye, obliterating her view of the monster on the wall.
“You wound me, Dolcezza,” he said.
“I,” she sputtered, “Wound you?”
He nodded in silence.
“He’s a monster,” she whispered; the memory of seeing the two men together burning like salt at the back of her throat.
“He’s my child,” Raphael said. His eyes were still, placid, and his face was sincere in its emotionless ambivalence.
“He is, a, monster,” she said, slower, her mind filled with separate memories of Louka, but none as bright as the one of him slathered with blood and gore.
“Then we are monsters together.”
“And I am not,” she whispered, pushing him away from her, disdainful of his attempts to scare her. She only wanted to be away from him.
“Is that what this is about?” he asked. “That I took him through the long night with me instead of you?”
“I don’t know what that means,” Ida snapped, gathering her filthy skirts, bloodied and covered in the sickening smell of death, to walk away from him.
But he was in front of her again, and he blocked her escape from the garden, and he pulled his arms around her, removing the filth-drenched clothing, covering her nude form in his cloak. It smelled of him, it calmed her nerves and infuriated her. She wanted to beat him, scratch at his face, make him feel the pain she was feeling.
“Yes, you do,” he whispered.
“I’m tired,” Ida said, turning her face away.
“I know,” he sighed, turning her back to him.
She was too done to fight. Too angry to care. In too much pain for it to matter much as he pulled her to the stone slab. As he laid her down, as he lay beside her, as his arms enveloped her, and he buried his face into her neck. She felt the sharpest of pains, and then the bottoming out of pleasure, and she closed her eyes, images melting into one another. The memory of Louka in his arms was there, but it faded fast, and sleep embraced her as tightly as did Raphael’s arms.
