Prologue
Five months before the end of Revenge, Slay Three: Celia
Edward wrapped his arms around me from behind, complicating my attempt to tie the belt of my robe.
“For someone who’s spent the better part of a week on a pleasure island, you’re awfully handsy.” I tilted my neck, encouraging him to nuzzle in.
He nibbled along the skin I’d exposed. “A week with sex happening all around me while I slept alone in my cabin. You better believe I came home greedy.”
“Hurry up with your shower then so you can have your way with me.”
“You sure you won’t join me?” He was already undressed except for his boxer briefs, and the heat of his skin at my back as well as the hardness of his body made my belly curl low with desire.
But there was a buzz in my head, and I needed a few minutes to sort my thoughts before abandoning them entirely to wanton ways. “If I join you, you’ll never get clean,” I said, nudging him to the task with the promise of what would come after.
“That’s very likely true, bird.” He turned me into him and kissed me deeply, making his own promises before pulling away abruptly. “I’ll hurry.”
“I’ll be here.”
I wandered over to the sink to begin my nighttime routine of makeup removal and moisturizing, eyeing my husband in the mirror as he stripped from his underwear and stepped into the glass walk-in shower. He was magnificent to look at, and I admired the view with full attention until the whir of my thoughts grew too distracting, and I gave myself into them instead.
Edward had said he’d come home greedy. Considering how highly he prized honesty, it was almost strange to hear the lie cased in the statement. Not that it was a bold-faced falsehood, and not that I didn’t understand his reasons. It was for me. He was romanticizing the trip on my account. He didn’t want me to have to think too hard about why he’d really been there, about the perversions he’d had to interact with. Didn’t want me to think about my uncle Ron and the sick things men like him were into.
Grateful as I was for Edward’s desire to protect me, the shield only worked on the surface. It allowed me not to have to talk about it. I could avoid the questions that pressed like a heated iron at the edges of my mind, wanting to straighten the wrinkles of my imagination that were surely as terrible as the truth.
But not talking about it meant the acrid thoughts remained inside me, seeds of poison ivy that would grow if given the right soil.
Old habits dying hard, my instinct was to make that ground infertile, to close off. To become numb. I’d been working through the things my uncle had done to me, but as much as I trimmed and hacked at the memories, I could never cut them away completely. The pips remained inside me, sprouting unexpectedly in the sun, and the urge to withdraw would shiver through me.
It was a funny thing, the fight or flight response. Most people who knew me would probably say hands down that I was a fighter in every instance. I would have said the same before Edward. It was ironic that he showed me the error in that presumption considering how often he drew me to fight with him. I certainly did deal with many threats with a bulled head and sharp tongue.
The truth, though, was that when the threat was severe, when it brought on intense levels of emotional pain, I didn’t fight at all. I flew. Like the bird that he’d always seen me to be, I abandoned feeling and took flight to a sky of gray and numb. It had been a practiced skill, one I hadn’t been very good at on my own. I could still clearly remember the day I’d begged my friend to be my mentor, when the baby boy inside me had decided to make a much too early appearance to the world. I’d been nearly twenty weeks along, one day later and his death would have been called a stillbirth instead of a miscarriage. Whatever the appropriate term, the result had been the same—my womb had once been full of life and with that life gone, it was full of pain.
“Teach me, Hudson,” I’d said when I’d woken from sorrowful dreaming to find him at my hospital bedside. Even the burn of the IV at the back of my hand was intolerable, and his games—experiments, as he called them—beckoned to me like the whispered praise of a magic healing elixir. “Experiment with me.”
“What? Why would you want me to…? I’m not experimenting on people I know anymore.”
“Not on me,” I’d corrected. “With me. I want to learn how you do it. Teach me.”
“No. That’s absurd.”
“Please.” It wasn’t just in the wording that I begged. My entire body leaned forward in supplication, as though he were my messiah. The only one who could release me from my heartache.
“No.” But his features had furrowed as if he was thinking about it. “Why?”
“Because I want to be like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like someone who doesn’t feel.”
He’d had mercy on me then, and he’d taught me. He’d taught me so well that not feeling had become second nature. And even after Edward had tethered me with an invisible collar, forcing me to stay grounded when the pain grew too great, the impulse still niggled inside me, and I had to take deep breaths and center myself so that I wouldn’t thrash against my leash, longing for the gray, numb sky.
Tonight, the urge was especially strong, a driving beat pulsing in my blood, increasing in volume as if to drown out the myriad of memories accompanied with Ron’s grooming. The swing, the baths, the first orgasms. The attention from strangers, their eyes, their hands, their mouths. The look of disgust and disbelief when I tried to tell my father. My wings fluttered. The wind called.
Deep breath in.
Deep breath out.
Feel the feeling, find the anchor, stay on the ground.
I dropped the dirty wet wipe and my hands went instinctively to my belly, ensuring my breaths were full and from my diaphragm. The pain washed in like the tide overtaking a dry stretch of land, but then it slowly began to pull out again, and a newly familiar desire was left on the shore. The desire to replace emotion with emotion. To relieve the fullness of anguish with the fullness of joy.
I wanted a baby.
And Edward would allow it, but only on his terms, terms that I was unable to concede to. He believed too deeply that unburdening my sorrow required balancing karma. I supposed I did too, in a way, we just had different ideas of how to go about that balancing. He wanted to make the people who’d hurt me in the past suffer for their sins. I wanted to look forward and replace the pains of the past with happiness in the future.
We’d fight about it again, he’d promised me that. After Ron was taken care of, which would happen soon if all went right. But Edward fought dirty. He fought dirty, and he always won, so this time I promised myself to fight just as dirty in return. I thought of it as an act of love, really. He needed the challenge from me, and I wanted to be able to deliver.
So when he got out of the shower and wrapped a towel around himself, I set the trap. “You have the nurse practitioner on the schedule to come by Tuesday for my birth control, but I have a meeting with a vendor at the same time that can’t be changed.”
Edward had been arranging my shots for me since I’d been living on Amelie, when I’d been his prisoner. He took care of me in many ways now as he did then, because he liked it and because I liked it, so I didn’t automatically believe that he continued this particular arrangement because he didn’t trust me.