60. Husband

Husband

Luella

I don’t struggle anymore. I don’t know how I am still breathing, how my heart could still be so traitorous as to beat. A bag falls over my head and I’m loaded into a litter like a large parcel. Distantly, I wonder why they didn’t wait for me to return to the castle and think they either wanted Mia to confirm my story, or they weren’t ready to take Cassius.

I suppose it doesn’t matter.

I’m nowhere I have been before. Underground again, but in a different place. The damp, stale, earthy scent fills my nostrils, reminding me of that night. I curse my nose for allowing me this return of my senses. I don’t want it, the memory.

They chain my arms above my head and remove the bag so I can see I’m hanging in the center of a circular chamber. The altar is not at the front of the room, but instead right below me. My feet barely reach a circular dais, raised a few footlengths from the floor, but it’s enough to steady myself. My shoulders scream as I twist, taking in the room. Closest to me, the Emperor wears no mask, but beyond him a circle of masked men and women fill the room. I’m surprised by the women, but their shape is obvious beneath some of the robes. Perhaps that is a shortcoming of mine—to judge men more harshly. After all, did Flavia truly betray me or did another flora betray Flavia? Or has it been Cassius all along?

I suppose it doesn’t matter, either.

The domed roof allows water to trickle down along a few of the columns, which calls to mind the fountain. The sound of water seems to follow my suffering as a shadow.

The Bacchus masks are all black except one, which is white and must be the priest. His tall, thin frame steps forward. “Who claims this sacrifice?”

Many step forward at that, but the Emperor speaks before anyone else. “She’s mine.”

The menace in his voice, the need in his eyes, the word sacrifice—all are hints about how this night will go. I should be piecing it together. I should be making a plan.

I should be following my intuition but I don’t, because my soul, my intuition, my heart? It’s lying on the floor in the very back room of Mia’s infirmaria, begging my heart’s sister not to leave me the way my first sister did.

The priest in the white mask claps his hands as protests fill the air. “The Emperor has claimed her; you may make your own sacrifices.”

At that, more people enter the large chamber. A mixture of women and men, some appear to be willing while others are drug by their hair or their clothing. All are in white shifts like the ones I had seen the floras wear before.

I was so conceited to assume I was the only person the Bacchantes might hurt tonight. I’ve been so naive. How many people have died because of me at this point? The women Ledo beat when I angered him or for training. The two sisters the Emperor slaughtered the night I tricked him with my eyes.

Mia.

It was too much. The tide of this broken world with men like Tristan in charge crashes through me, punctuated by the beginning festivities around me. The Bacchanalia is something I wouldn’t wish on anyone. It starts innocently enough, with sapa, but drinks begin to spill, the pleasuring and punishment of the sacrifices commences, and soon the room is a mass of writhing bodies.

It’s chaos. My eyes snag on a young man as a male and female Bacchante degrade him, the way I was just days ago. Tears stream down his face when I meet his eyes across the room, but then the hips of the monster thrusting inside his mouth block us. A flora next to them is enjoying herself, grinding on the masked face of a Bacchante, laughing as his hands roam across her hips and breasts. It’s whiplash. Pain and pleasure, consent and rape, moans and screams and flesh. It breathes its contradictions along my neck and I look up to see the Emperor hasn’t moved. He’s staring at me, one of the few still fully clothed.

My arms are numb, my shoulder pain fading as the weight of my body further stretches the nerves. The revelry blurs around me. Time does not exist. I do not exist.

Until the Emperor comes to stand before me.

Tristan.

No one notices us, too absorbed in their drink or their deviances. His clean skin and hair mock me, dusted in gold powders and perfumed water while I hang in dirty chains. He reaches out a hand and I can’t help but flinch, remembering the last time he touched me, and he smiles. His hand falls before it reaches me, he’s not quite close enough to touch. To spit at.

“I heard you and Cassius had some plans for me? How were you going to get close to me, vidua ?” he says.

“I’ve already been close to you,” I say, infusing as much bolster into my words as I can.

He’s not a stupid man. He is cruel and depraved, but not reckless. As I have been regarding him, he has been doing the same to me. He moves behind me, as if he knows my mouth is only capable of poison. Pulling my hair back he whispers into my ear. “So eager for more, Evandia?”

I swallow hard and for the first time consider what would happen if I simply bit the pearl and drank the poison myself. It might kill me to use it anyways, but to break it open only for that? I’ve never believed that I would welcome death, but with Tristan’s hands on me, Cassius surely locked away or otherwise occupied, and Mia’s blood soaking the hem of my gown…

I don’t bite the pearl.

But I do die.

That’s what it feels like as I draw power from the pebbles I swallowed, as I shift into the form I promised myself I’d never take again.

My old body.

My dead body.

The idea had begun to form since I was last underground with Tristan, since he’d drugged me on my own wedding night. He haunted me, and I think I’d like to haunt him, too.

I shift my hair to a darker, wheat blonde. My eyes to the grayish blue that used to watch my sister in the mirror as we braided each others' hair. My hips widen, my breasts shrink, and my cheeks sweep upward, sharper than they are sweet.

“I’m not a vidua yet, Evander.” My voice is higher and lighter than it’s been in over ten years. Maybe not exactly the same as my youth after the damage, but close.

“The Dominus is of no concern to me,” Tristan scoffs, disdain dripping from each word as if offended by the very idea that anyone would dare to question him.

“I don’t mean the Dominus, Tristan,” I say. Very few know his name and even fewer would use it, now. He freezes and finally notices the subtle changes I have made. The death I just underwent in front of him.

The resurrection.

He moves in front of me and his eyes widen in recognition and shock.

And, most deliciously of all, in fear.

“Husband,” I say, letting my lips turn up in the corners. It’s the shy smile of a 20 year old girl, not the smirk of a woman who has spent the last 10 years murdering men. Men who had no right to marry her, because she was already married. Men just like her husband.

My husband, Emperor Tristan Evander.