Without hesitation or thought, I stared up at him and answered, “Yes.”
He leaned down toward me, bringing his face to only inches from mine. “Are you sure?”
I looked back at him, unflinching. “Yes.”
One of his bushy, salt-and-pepper eyebrows lifted. “It could cost you your title or even your life, Malachi.”
I set my jaw. “I couldn’t care less about my title. And Isla is the only thing that has ever made my life worth living.”
Ernesto lingered next to my face for several beats before standing up straight and stalking across the room toward his desk. Opening a drawer, he lifted a wooden box and carried it back to the large armchair, where he sat and set the box on the coffee table in front of me.
Leaning back, he gestured with one finger at me. “Go ahead.”
I glanced at him before lifting the lid. Inside was a chrome pistol, identical to the one he’d been polishing, complete with the same elaborate, jeweled grip.
My gut was suddenly heavy with the severity of the entire meeting, but at the same time, my palm was itching to hold the weapon. I cut my eyes back up to him in a look of requesting permission.
He nodded. “Pick it up.”
So, I did.
It was cold, heavy, and solid. I’d handled plenty of firearms while participating in various hunts according to the traditions of Corwick. I would also be required to do a compulsory stint in Corwick’s small Royal Navy, so firearms were never a taboo or forbidden thing in my life. But this one was different. This one felt like holding not only the weight of the entire world, but also the entirety of my love and loyalty to Isla in the palm of my hand.
“It is, of course, a ceremonial item,” Ernesto explained. “I know that your family has security measures in spades. However, understand that if it comes down to it, I expect you to use that without hesitation.”
I clasped my fingers around the grip and turned the pistol over in my hand before looking back up at him. “You have my word.”
He nodded again. “See to it that I always do.”
MALACHI
Present
IT’S NOW PUSHING ELEVEN p.m., and I’ve polished off nearly half the decanter of scotch, and I feel like shit. Not shit in a way that has a damn thing to do with drunkenness, rather more like the feeling of shit that results from being a glutton for punishment.
I spent the majority of the evening sipping the scotch from the comfort of the balcony in my room, really fucking irritated that my wing of the palace doesn’t have the spectacular view of the sunset over the ocean. Isla’s does. Because I gave her the nicer wing. Because I’m not a monster and wanted her to have the better view from the better balcony. So instead of watching the sunset while slowly getting drunk, I stared at the steadily darkening maze of rose bushes and the staff completing their final tasks of the day and got drunk anyway.
And now that everything has been black for hours, I finally push myself off the cushy chaise lounge and carry my empty glass back inside. I pause long enough to refill it one more time, and then meander aimlessly out of the room. Although, after a moment, it’s not entirely aimless, as my uninhibited brain has decided I’m going to the vault in my study.
Once there, I scan my gaze across the many leather boxes of my allocation of the crown jewels, and then begin randomly opening them if for no other reason than boredom.
Well… boredom and to keep me from going for the one wooden box in here that’s not jewelry, and that I haven’t opened in about ten years.
It’s only when I open the box encasing the ruby-and-diamond-encrusted, lasso-style wrap necklace that the temptation to open that wooden box becomes more than I can resist. The long rope of alternating red and white crystalline jewels and two fat, pear-shaped rubies dangling from the ends is an original piece that I had commissioned for Isla on my eighteenth birthday. As a legal adult, I obtained my title, my inheritance, my allocation of property, and all the jewelry in this vault, and the first thing I did was have this necklace made for her. My plan all along had been to propose to her on the day she graduated from college, and the necklace was to be her graduation gift. Given that marrying me meant largely conforming to a life that neither of us had much control over, I wanted to give her something that captured the unique essence of who she was and her lively personality. She would’ve loved it. But she betrayed me before I ever had a chance to give it to her.
With alcohol potent in my bloodstream, my give-a-fucks about a lot of things seem to be dissolving at a rapid rate, and I pull the ruby-and-diamond rope necklace out of its box and drape it over my neck as I go straight for the wooden box.
Lifting the lid exactly how I did eleven years ago when Ernesto presented it to me, I’m suddenly catapulted back in time to that moment when I was gripped with not only an intoxicating sense of purpose, but also the feeling blue balls that desperately needed to be dealt with.
Isla and I have been married for a week now. That’s seven days’ worth of hard-ons I can’t relieve. Seven days’ worth of seeing the woman who had possessed my very soul and flippantly tossed it into a proverbial woodchipper. Seven days’ worth of being tortured by lust driven by hate so intense that it’s rivaled only by the intensity of the love we once shared.
And right now, I’m drunk enough to do whatever the fuck I want with no thought given to the aftermath.
With the necklace still draped around my neck, and the glass of scotch in one hand, I close my fist around the cold, heavy, ornate grip of the Desert Eagle and lift it out of the box. I set down the scotch only long enough to pull back the slide and check the chamber.
Fully loaded.
I release the slide, and it snaps back into place with that distinctive sound of metal scraping metal.
Then I pick up the scotch and go search for my wife.
SIX
ISLA
Present
Joaquin Reyes: I won’t hesitate to kill him, chica
Joaquin Reyes: Idc if I’ve known him my whole life
Joaquin Reyes: I can make it look like an accident
Isla Reyes: I’m fine, manito.
Joaquin Reyes: u sure?
Joaquin Reyes: I really can make it look like an accident :D
Isla Reyes: I know. Te quiero.
I stare at the thread of messages from my brother for about thirty minutes before setting the phone on the nightstand and give up on sleep for a little while. I haven’t had a lot of moments of homesickness, mostly because I’ve been too angry and resentful to be sad, but the messages definitely make me miss home right now.
It’s a little after eleven p.m., and there’s a batch of polvorones down in the kitchen, and I kind of need one right now. The recipe Mrs. Maisely and I used is the same one Mamá taught me when I was little, so a small taste of home will be enough to help me feel better.
The palace is cavernous and dark at this late hour, with only low-glowing sconces at intermittent places on the wall of the long hallway leading to the grand staircase. It’s barely enough light for me to get down the stairs and across the first floor. With pale moonlight spilling through the windows, the estate is reduced to a collection of shadows that stretch long and forebodingly across my path to the kitchen.
It’s also eerily quiet. I’ve never ventured out of my room at such a late hour, and Mrs. Maisely and the staff retired to their respective quarters hours ago. I don’t know where Malachi is, but I’m sure he’s brooding in the east wing like he always seems to do. The Beast to my Belle in this twisted version of what could’ve been a Disney fairytale had he not transformed into a living, breathing nightmare.