“Tell me, Caroline.” I pace around behind her, letting her hear my footsteps. “Did you go this easy on me?” She starts to shake her head, and I shove the whip in front of her and use it to pull back on her neck. “Tell the truth.”
The Constantine ice queen doesn’t want to admit it, but after a too-long pause, she opens her mouth. “No. I didn’t.”
“I believe in fairness.” I go back to the other side of her. “It wouldn’t be fair to stop now.”
I lay down another stripe across her back. Another. Another. Another. So many times I lose count. The screaming is background noise now. The same as the rush of wind outside. I don’t hear it, and I don’t care about it. The only thing that matters is damaging her. Forever, if possible.
The doctors Eva dragged me to after I came home from Caroline eventually determined that the nerve damage was too extensive to repair, the feedback loop between my brain and the misfiring nerves too deeply carved. They didn’t know why. Permanent torture from a whipping that’s years over is random, according to medical science. Needless to say, the caliber of painkillers that would fix this aren’t compatible with staying alive. Not for a Morelli.
It is unlikely that I can engineer the same outcome for Caroline.
Doesn’t mean I can’t try.
I bring the whip down three more times. She’s hardly making any sound now, and my anger senses weakness. It wants to tear her throat out. It howls at the end of the leash, snapping its jaws. I’m made of aching tension. I want to keep whipping her until she finally crumples, until it’s finally over, until she can never hurt me again. I could do it. I’m close. I’m so fucking close.
But then.
What?
If I kill Haley’s aunt, she can’t come back to me. Not ever. If I kill Caroline Constantine, then it’s mutually assured destruction. The family feud will collapse in on itself and explode. It’ll take Bishop’s Landing and most of New York City with it.
I think of Haley offering her ass up to be strapped, her pussy wet, promising that she would do anything to save her father from me.
I want to kill Caroline.
But I can’t kill this foolish hope that I’ll see Haley again.
The whip flies out of my hand before I’m aware of the decision to throw it. It clatters against the widow and Caroline screams again, a silent, broken thing. “Get the fuck out of my house.”
I stalk back to the desk and lean against it to watch. It takes Caroline several tries to let go of the coat hook. Her fingers are probably stiff and sore. Droplets of blood down her back. When she turns, it’s with gasping, mincing steps. Unlike me, Caroline can’t wander outside with no shirt on. She’ll have to cover her wounds with cloth. It’ll be horrible to take off.
She grits her teeth and muscles through dressing. The last thing to go on is her coat. Caroline folds her arms over her belly, tucking her purse there. She looks like she wants to say something, but I’ve taken her voice.
“If you ever come back here, I’ll kill you.”
Caroline nods. And then she leaves, as fast as her legs will carry her.
23
Leo
The house settles into silence once Caroline is gone.
I feel her leave, terrified and barely upright. Maybe I imagine it. Not long after her malevolent presence leaves the house, Gerard passes by the door of the office. His footsteps move lightly in the hall. I don’t look. Outside, in the courtyard, two robins hop from branch to branch on a gnarled tree. Each time they land, tiny glittering pieces of snow fall to the ground.
I’m watching the birds without leaning back in my chair. One of the simplest things Caroline took from me was the ability to throw myself into any available piece of furniture without thinking, the way my brothers and sisters and other people do. Many times, the pressure of my own body is enough to start a loop, which is how I’ve come to think of the pain. A circle. A breaking wheel. It intensifies and peaks and lets down again, but it’s always, always there. Waiting.
The smaller of the robins hops to the top of the tree. It soars down to the bench nestled near the trunk, then back up.
Hiding the peak of the pain takes up the most time and energy in my life by far. More than arranging extra security for the more trusting of my siblings. More than running my business. More, even, than fucking with the Constantines. Other than Eva, only one person has witnessed it. People have come close. Once, at one of our regular casino nights, Lucian slung his arm around my shoulders so hard I turned the table over. The single convenience, really, is that this particular pain reads as anger. People see what they expect to see.
Make no mistake, I was fucking furious about it for years. Even the Beast of Bishop’s Landing can’t maintain constant rage, however. Giving myself a stroke wouldn’t help the situation unless it killed me.
The bigger bird follows the smaller one up to the high branch, then both of them take flight. They loop around the branch and sail away.
My courtyard is now as empty as I feel. I’ve spent my entire adult life cultivating my reputation as a fanged beast and exacting revenge. Now I have it. I’m not much for high expectations but I thought there would be more. More triumph. More relief. A full circle is supposed to give you a sense of completion. I don’t sense anything, other than a numb dejection.
Haley didn’t shy away from the pain. The initial sight of my skin shocked her. Of course it did. She’s a good girl, and good girls like Haley don’t live in a world where such fucked-up things happen to people. Her whole heart leaped into her eyes. Not pity. She wanted to understand, and I wanted to let her. I couldn’t do it. Not until the night she sat next to me, her hands so careful not to touch anywhere that might hurt me. Haley. Worried about hurting me.
She’s an impossibility. An oxymoron. A good Constantine shouldn’t exist. A good Constantine who looks at me with anything other than terror in her eyes is practically a mythological creature. She begged me not to leave her in that SUV. Tried to follow me out. Tried to stay with me.
In other words, she’s a miracle. Godsent. I don’t know what joke God thinks he's made, sending her to me. Dangling her in front of me, really, and then snatching her away. I can respect it. It's the kind of cruel bastard thing I would do. Let a person worship at the altar of sweetness, then destroy the altar.
I rub both hands over my face and turn back to the desk. In the most enormous oversight of my life, I didn't make any plans for what I would do after I whipped the haughtiness out of Caroline. There's no to-do list for the aftermath.
Well—there's a short one. I open the wide top drawer of my desk and take out the portfolio that's been resting there since the night Phillip Constantine met me with a heartbreaking hope in his eyes. Inside the portfolio, the contract remains untouched. I take the slim bundle of papers from the inside pocket and flip through them. In a sense, I did the same thing to Phillip Constantine as has happened to me. I teased him with the world and then I took it away.
I lived up to my reputation as a heartless bastard. No one was let down on that account.
The paper goes down without a fight. I tear it into pieces, ripping Phillip's signature in half. This paperwork will never be filed in a way that makes it official or enforceable. I don't do it for Caroline. No. It's Haley's tear-bright eyes I think of. The way she sat up so straight and brave in that empty chair across from me. The way she knew how I was, knew what I could do, and came anyway. She was the virgin sacrifice who offered herself up to the devil. Had she been born in any other time, they would have called her a saint.