Chapter 36

CHAPTER 36

ROSE

I didn’t recognize the woman looking back at me in the mirror. I didn’t think I had ever really known her, but this was the first time I didn’t even recognize her. My hair was a mess. Wild rat’s nest curls everywhere.

I was standing completely naked, not worried about anybody walking into my room or hiding my body from my own eyes in some vain attempt at chastity because nice girls didn’t look at themselves like that. For the first time, I was really looking at myself.

Still, I just didn’t recognize the woman in front of me. I looked like a woman who was well loved, who had experienced the best the world offered and came back demanding more. My lips were redder than normal, kiss-bruised, and there were a few dark marks on my throat where Thomas kissed and sucked the delicate skin as he ravaged my body.

Even my breasts were still covered with the hard wax he had dripped on them. Seeing the pale waxy droplets dotting my skin, feeling them pull and tighten with every movement, made my core burn almost as much as seeing the fingerprint bruises on my thighs from where he held onto me while he fucked me on the altar.

He fucked me on an altar. Could there be anything in this world more blasphemous?

Was this who I really was? A woman who had fallen for the worst possible man imaginable, then allowed him to desecrate her body in a house of God?

Is that who I wanted to be with?

Just because I refused to tell Thomas that I loved him, refused to admit I was his, didn’t mean it wasn’t true. I didn’t know when it happened, but all the same, it happened.

I fell for the priest who forced me to do things I didn’t think I ever would, the man who showed me what it meant to be a woman. He demonstrated to me how my body could respond to the right person, how my body craved things that were so forbidden, so taboo, they were unmentionable.

It was more than that. He did more than just show me what I needed to feel true bliss; he freed me from the gilded shackles I had gotten so used to, I didn’t even realize I was wearing any.

A good girl would be disgusted by him. A good girl would have never fallen into his trap, let alone run into it willingly. If I were a good girl, I would tell people what I know about the things that he did. Not just the things to me, but I would tell people I knew he was part of my mother’s death. I would tell people he was there the night Raul died.

But I didn’t want to.

I should hate him for it.

A good girl would hate him, she would blame him and make sure everyone knew what he did. But I knew the truth. He did it all for me.

If someone wanted to look where I told them to—in his phone, through his records in his room—I was sure they would find everything they needed in order to put him away. Even with Lucian Manwarring paying for the finest lawyers in the world, I didn’t think even he could buy his way out of manslaughter charges.

My brother was the DA, for Christ’s sake. I could have just called him.

I looked back into the mirror, and I knew a good girl would turn him in. But the woman I saw in that mirror was not a good girl. She was a woman who had been fucked on an altar, whose breasts were covered in candle wax from a memorial candle, and who was intimately familiar with the feeling of one of those candles in her behind. Good girls would never know what that felt like. They would never even know to think it.

I didn’t think it, but I missed it.

Who was I? That was the question that had been running over and over in my head for the last several hours. Thomas, for better or worse, had broken the gilded shackles off my wrists and I was now free to do whatever I wanted. But what was that?

Part of me screamed to go back to him. Whatever that looked like, be the mistress of a priest. It wasn’t like I didn’t love him, or that my body didn’t already belong to him. When we met, he had mentioned keeping me chained to his bed naked and ready for his use, and I’d be lying if I said my knees didn’t weaken at the thought. That was what he wanted from me. But was that what I wanted for myself?

No. I didn’t want to hide in the shadows.

I didn’t want to have to live some double life protecting these dark secrets. Mother had forced me to do that my entire life, even as a child using concealer to cover bruises or making up stories about me being clumsy, to hide her rage.

I could have stayed there, in the house I grew up in. Never going back to church but socializing in the same circles. Finding a nice husband who would take care of me and keep me in the lifestyle I wanted. But then I would be subject to his rules. Much the same as I would be subject to Thomas’s rules.

Finding a good husband, a good match that would support my father’s business, would be what my mother expected. That would have made her happy. Well, as close to happy as she ever got.

I wondered if that was what I owed her to do. No matter how poorly she’d treated me and abused me all my life, part of the blame for her death was on my head, so maybe that was how I redeemed myself. By doing what my mother would have wanted me to do. Being the daughter she tried to raise.

One glance back at the mirror and I knew that wasn’t possible, either. I could never bind myself to a man who couldn’t do the things to my body that Thomas did. Knowing what I knew now, knowing how amazing sex could be, how much I desired a man who could control me sexually the way he did, who could bend my will to his and take away the responsibility of deciding in the bedroom, the guilt, the ramifications… everything.

How did I go back?

How did I settle for a man who couldn’t take enough control that I could shut off my brain and just feel? The few friends I had who were in contract marriages have murmured about what it was like on the wedding night. What they told me in giggled whispers was nothing compared to what Thomas had done to me.

So what did I do? What did I want?

Tears burned from my eyes as I clawed at the dried wax on my chest, chipping it off bit by bit. I couldn’t have him unless it was in secret. I refused to hide behind lies. Just like I refused to be with any man who didn’t make me feel the way he did.

Maybe that was my answer.

Maybe for the first time in my life, I had a genuine opportunity to live it on my terms. I just had to figure out what those were.

More and more tears poured from my eyes as I ripped the wax from my body. It felt transformative, like I was removing the layers of other people’s expectations for my life. With each bit that was peeled off, there went another mask that had been shoved onto me by someone else. Another role I didn’t want to play, stripped from my skin.

I wouldn’t be an Upper East Side socialite.

I wouldn’t be the dirty secret of a sinful priest, hiding in the basement of a church.

No one was going to tell me who, or even if, I was going to marry. No one was going to dictate how I lived the rest of my life.

No one was going to decide for me anymore.

Finally, when my body was free from the wax, I stepped into a shower, running the water as hot as I could and scrubbed every inch of my skin. Picturing more and more of the expectations other people put on me, the assumptions they made about my future and my life—washed off. I scrubbed it all away.

My mother’s training, to be a well-behaved doormat that took a beating without complaint and then went to do whatever it was my mother wanted me to do. Gone.

I scrubbed off the training Father Manwarring gave me. The expectations for me not to make a sound while he punished me with his cock. The demands for me to be his good girl, his whore, to swallow whatever he gave me and take what little kernels of attention and affection he deigned to give me at any moment and never expecting more than that. Gone.

I scrubbed it all away until my skin was stinging and raw. Only then did I step out of the shower, feeling like I was nothing but limitless potential.

Mother was gone. Father Manwarring only had the control while I was in his presence. Clearly, the answer was to get out of his presence and find out who I was with no one else’s influence.

Before I got dressed, I grabbed my phone and quickly Googled the Royal Academy of Art.

It was four a.m. my time, which meant it was nine a.m. in London.

I dialed the admissions number and held my breath, ignoring the burn of my lungs, and waited for someone to answer.

“Hello, Royal Academy of Art. How may I direct your call,” a bright British voice sounded on the other end of the line.

“Hello, yes, this is Rose Astrid. I just received a letter that was dated a few months ago. Apparently, I was accepted into the program, but I did not know. Is there someone I can talk to in order to see if this offer is still valid for the next term?”