57. Black and Blue Bride

Black and Blue Bride

Rose

I know nothing but pain.

Agony.

Betrayal.

Each breath fractures inside my chest as bones and blood seize my lungs. Don’t you dare take a breath, they say. You should obey your pain, they reprimand.

But I can’t obey, my mind too stunned and my heart more broken than my body. My eyes are swollen, making it nearly impossible to see past the blood and the flowing tears. A haze of red fills my vision, as if my wedding veil is sutured over my eyes, taunting me.

My throat is raw from screaming, but the rest is worse.

Lash marks. Bruises. Brands.

The memory is already fading, distant against the agony of the present.

Tristan had asked for things that I couldn’t comprehend, couldn’t stomach. After the garden, he’d brought me to his rooms.

And he’d made me scream.

There’s a goat lying next to me, it’s throat slit and dried blood coating its fur.

“We match,” I tell him sagely. We’re at the bottom of the trash chute, to be dumped outside of Divus when it’s full. Tristan would have his wife die in a trash heap, without even the courtesy to dump me here himself. I can’t remember who did. His friend?

I have always been destined for this, I remember. For the life of a goat: To be sold to The Sabines, or Tristan, or anyone else. I’d always have ended up here.

But I don’t care. I can’t die. I have to find Daisy and run. She’ll come looking for me, she’ll ask questions in a few days when I don’t visit her.

I don’t want her anywhere near the Evanders.

Blood smears as I try to push a lock of hair out of my face. It’s matted and stiff with blood and semen, patchy from where he ripped pieces out at the root. Distantly, I wonder if the sobs are coming from me or the goat.

If crying doesn’t hurt, I won’t feel it.

All I am is pain.

“Thank me,” Tristan had screamed when he’d first snapped, slapping me for my stunned silence in the face of his brutality. I drag myself out of the trash bin, a small cry echoing against the cobblestones when my body hits. A wave of dizziness threatens to overwhelm me, but I take a deep breath through my mouth, spitting the blood away when it pools in my throat.

“Call me princeps ,” Tristan had said as he whipped me with the flagrum, flogged me like a criminal. I shake my head. I can’t think of this now. I have to escape.

I have to get away.

Away.

I stick to the alley, empty at this late hour, but between the darkness, my blurred vision, and the dizziness threatening to topple me, it’s not long before I’m well and truly lost. I step down a new street and hear a man and his friend urinating behind a row of shops. I jerk back, the male voices and the smell of urine in my hair sending fear coursing through me.

I stumble away, down a different path, until the sound of the city becomes muffled. I’m too far out. I’m lost. Alone.

Black and blue on my wedding night, like Pater always knew I would be.

A sob tears through me as I fall onto a step that goes not up, but down. Ah, a tomb. Exactly the place for me.

It’s not a tomb that greets me, though; it’s a temple. A temple with arched doorways and a small pond in the center of the room. At the back of the temple is a statue of a two-headed form morphing between feminine and masculine features, neither man nor woman. Many faces, many lives, many beginnings. A promise that means nothing to me.

I fall onto the altar, thoughts sluggish.

“I should have brought an offering,” I whisper, naked and shivering on the stone floor. Then I laugh, remembering that I’m a goat anyways.

“Do you like goats?” I ask the shifting statue, my voice like gravel beneath a Praetorian's boots. I close my eyes.

“She just screams so pretty,” Tristan says, but to whom I’m not sure.

I bolt upright, gasping in pain. Is he here? He sounds so close. So real. The edges of my vision swim in black and the puddle around me is all wrong. Why did I sit in the pond?

It’s not water. It’s blood.

“I’m sorry Daisy,” I whisper, sacrificing myself on the altar of a god I’ve never prayed to. Perhaps he’ll take pity on me when I die, and bless Daisy in this life or the next.

Maybe he’ll protect her.

“I’m sorry Daisy,” I say again. I know it’s no longer if I die.

It’s when. Because Daisy forgot one of the options before. One I’d seen firsthand when the Vestal priestess suffocated in a box before my eyes.

We can be virgins or whores.

Or corpses.