Door of Bruises (Thornchapel Book 4)

by Sierra Simone

But there’s more—we both want more. So I press in, hard, harder, watching her face carefully as I do. I wait for her sharp intake of breath, the quick wince—I want the edge of the table to bite into her hips enough that she feels it, but I don’t actually want to bruise her like that—and right there, there it is. The breath, the wince, the furrow in her forehead: the crest of the pain curling in over itself like a wave.

  I ease up a little with my hips, keeping my hand firmly on her back, and then I fuck in earnest, I fuck her like I haven’t fucked in ten years instead of almost ten days. I fuck and feel the moment her brain starts to unload endorphins into her bloodstream, the moment she starts sliding into a bliss beyond the usual gratification of sex, going loose and shivery with a small smile curved against the scarred wood of the old table.

  And I follow her in.

  I let the slick pleasure thrum along every nerve ending, run down the backs of my thighs and up my spine and down to the very fingertips that hold my little bride in place. I let every part of her overwhelm and conquer every part of me—her hair spilled onto the table like a Pre-Raphaelite muse’s, her soft, needy moans, the hot heaven of her cunt. Those eyes—framed by dark lashes so long they rest against her cheek when she shuts them.

  And when she opens them, gazing back at me with eyes like the color of life itself, I’m sawn wide open, like nothing of me will ever be held apart from her. How could it, when she is who she is? When it was always meant to be her? Even when we were children and playing children’s games, somehow I knew. Proserpina Markham, the dreamer, the believer. Proserpina who kissed two boys as lightning cracked across the sky.

  My feet have always been sunk deeper in the earth than I would like, even before I made it my job to think about footings and foundations. I used to blame this place for that, I used to blame my family, stuck as they were in a backwards-looking way of life, in what it meant to be a Guest. But now I know it’s me, that I was somehow this way from the beginning, all on my own and apart from swollen bank accounts and ancient properties. And the problem with being so thoroughly planted in the ground is that it’s almost impossible to drift or to dream, it’s almost impossible to remember that sometimes the questions are more important than the answers. Which is why she is everything to me. I need her questions, her buoyancy and dreams and smiles.

  Those smiles. Wide and dimpled and with that creased lower lip I love so much. She’s smiling up at me now, her eyes bright and her pupils blown, as if she’s drunk, drunk, drunk from me.

  From only a handful of minutes with me.

  Oh, that’s a dangerous feeling indeed.

  And it’s that feeling that pushes me over the edge—more than the actual fucking. It’s the warmth of her back under my hand, it’s her shoulder blades moving like a bird’s wings under my spread fingers. It’s the sight of her lace-covered breasts pressed against the table, her unbuttoned shirt open and the plastic buttons shivering on the wood. It’s the giddy dent of her dimple as she smiles in subspacey bliss.

  My thighs tighten and my belly clenches, and then I’m flooding her, pulse after jerking pulse, emptying myself into her body and already knowing it won’t be enough, it’s never enough with her or St. Sebastian. Like I could make it my job and my vocation to fuck them every day for the rest of my life and I’d still never be satisfied.

  I finish with a soft exhale, reluctant to stop, deciding not to stop. I pull free—and with a final glance at the entrance to the old wing—tuck myself still hard and wet inside my trousers.

  I scoop Proserpina into my arms. She’s limp and loose and she nestles right into my arms like it’s the only place in the world she belongs. I don’t disagree.

  “Where are we going?” she asks, in the hazy voice of the well-endorphined.

  “Our room.”

  “For more?”

  I kiss her hair as we walk to the stairs of the south wing, smelling flowers and leaves and sun. Her hand is toying with the hair at the nape of my neck, and with her blouse open and her skirt still around her hips, she looks like a debauched schoolgirl.

  “For more,” I confirm.

  Chapter Four

  Auden

  An hour later, and Proserpina Markham is stretched sideways across my bed on her stomach, her head pillowed on her arms and her eyes closed. I’m rubbing arnica gel onto my sub’s bare bottom and thighs, admiring the geometric welts the crop has left on her skin and also keeping an eye on the usual things—her breathing, the goose bumps on her arms and legs, the expression on her face. I can still taste her on my lips from when I rewarded her for taking the cropping so well, and I consider tasting more straight from the source . . . but her contented sighs as I massage the soothing gel into her skin are almost as delicious.

  I love those sighs. I love feeling like the whole world could be this. Us.

  Sighs and welts and cum.

  If only he were here too.

  I finish with the gel and go to the en suite to wash my hands. When I’m finished and changed in a fresh pair of cotton drawstring pants, I come to lay next to her, propped on my side and toying with her hair. Her eyes are still closed, but she makes a purring sound as I sand my fingertips lightly over her scalp.

  “You should have stayed with him.”

  I’m not angry. But I don’t want St. Sebastian alone either.

  “I told you I thought that promise was bullshit,” she murmurs. “You’re not your father.”

  I don’t have the heart to argue with her. Not now, at least, when she’s back in my bed and allowing me to run my fingers along the gel-slick welts I’ve just given her. Instead, I ask what I really want to know. “How is he?”

  Poe sighs. “Sad. Stubborn.”

  My raw, moody Saint. “So he’s St. Sebastian then.”

  “He misses you.”

  Bitter, defensive words press at the back of my lips. Words I would have said just a couple weeks ago, accusations I would have flung back at her, as if she were some kind of Saint lawyer, as if she were our messenger, our meditator.

  How dare he miss me when he’s the one who left? How dare he leave again when I was willing to do anything—anything—even if it killed me inside to do it?

  She’s not our mediator. She never wanted this separation, she never wanted to be caught between. She wanted all of us together, and it would be careless and cruel of me to press her into the role of referee.

  Anyway, as soon as the words take shape, they dissolve right back onto my tongue. I’m not sure why—because it’s not out of forgiveness, or not exactly—and I still feel as selfish and greedy as ever. But something’s shifted inside of my selfishness, inside of the greed.

  Or not shifted, but grown inside it.

  “I miss him too,” I finally say, and it’s funny how ten days of misery can be flattened into a mere four words. Four dry and lifeless words, one prosaic phrase, and there you are, a torn and empty Auden.

  Proserpina doesn’t say anything, but not in a way like she’s not paying attention or like she’s slipping into sleep, but like she’s waiting for me to say more, like she knows I miss him too isn’t what I really want to say.

  “I feel like half my heart is gone,” I admit.

  “And the other half?”

  I roll her over. The bedspread has left lines and creases on her breasts and stomach like the veins of a leaf. I want to follow them with my tongue before they disappear.

  But for now, I press my hand to her chest. “You carry it for me. You have for a long time.” And it’s the truth. The physical truth. When St. Sebastian left, I felt the incision on my chest, I felt my rib cage crack open. I felt it as one ventricle was excised away, then one atrium, the superior vena cava. I felt it as my body struggled to pump blood to the tips of my fingers and the ends of my toes, I felt it as my thoughts grew sluggish and muddy from lack of oxygen, as my organs began to shut down one by one.

  And then when Proserpina left?

  I was dead altogether.

  My little lib
rarian covers my hand with hers. Her eyes are wet when she looks up at me. “It wasn’t supposed to be like this.”

  “I know.”

  “I don’t know what happens next.”

  Ten days ago, I wouldn’t have known how to say what I say next. I’ve gone from knowing everything to knowing nothing at all. “Neither do I.”

  Is that what heartbreak does? Is that what love does? Or is it only here at Thornchapel—

  is it only us, only the fucked-up rich boy and the fucked-up poor boy and the reckless dreamer who loves them both?

  I used to have every answer to any question I cared to ask; the answer was always what I wanted it to be. I should have learned my lesson the day I wrenched a midwinter rose from the chapel wall.

  Real answers bite back.

  Poe’s hand tightens on mine. “Auden . . . I had a dream,” she says softly. “Last night.”

  She’s no longer a limp, leaf-veined woman. She’s tense. Anxious.

  I slide my arms around her and then move us so that I’m sitting against the headboard and she’s curled against my chest. “Is that why you really came back?” I ask.

  “Yes, although I wasn’t lying about needing to get back to work,” she mumbles into my chest.

  I resist the urge to sigh, because I really want to tell her that I don’t care how often she works in my library, because I trust her and also I really just don’t care, but I know keeping our professional relationship separate from our personal one is important to her. “What was the dream about?”

  Her hands find my forearms and wrap around them, as if it’s not enough to be in my arms, she needs to hold on to me too.

  There’s a clammy bloom at the base of my neck as she starts talking.

  “We were in the chapel,” she whispers. “All of us. It was late afternoon, and we didn’t have a fire burning yet, although the light was fading and the lanterns were already lit. Dark red roses were everywhere. Not just near the door, but all over the chapel, all over the standing stones outside. They’d twined through the trees, they covered the front of the house. They were in the village, Auden. Climbing through the gravestones and around people’s doors.

  “Someone had come to the house earlier. I don’t know who. We were arguing about it in the chapel, arguing about what to do. You and St. Sebastian were arguing about who should—” Her voice gets thick, and I can feel the tears against my bare chest before I feel her shudder with them. She’s trying not to cry and failing. “You were arguing about who should die to close the door. You said it had to be you, and Saint was refusing.”

  I remember being in the chapel on my birthday, the Lammas storm threatening overhead, and St. Sebastian’s teeth on the skin over my heart. His fingers around my neck, his drugging kisses. Him sketching the act of sacrifice for me, but making it wonderful, so unbearably wonderful.

  I remember the woman in the chapel, standing in the snow with bright green eyes.

  A true king would never let anyone go in a king’s place.

  I press my lips into Poe’s hair, making a soothing noise as I do. “A very discomposing dream. But I can assure you that I have no plans for self-slaughter, not now or at any point in the future. No matter where some roses are growing.”

  I mean the last part to be dismissive and blithe to allay her fears, but it doesn’t come out blithely at all—in fact, I sound quite uncertain. I think of the chamber Rebecca’s team found near the entrance to the maze, the walls covered in ancient, carved roses, and I think of the rose I once plucked on a midwinter’s day, growing eerie and alone among the ice and rock.

  It’s not as easy to dismiss as it should be. Not the self-slaughter, of course, that I can easily dismiss. But the idea that the roses would do things that roses shouldn’t. That we would be driven to do something, anything, that we would be arguing in the chapel in the long, gray twilight with the door yawning in front of us . . .

  That idea is much harder to dismiss.

  Proserpina is shaking her head, tears still sliding off her face to pool against my chest. “You had changed your mind. Something had changed your mind a long time ago, and you were determined, desperate. We all were desperate, and yelling, and Becket’s eyes were so strange . . . and night was coming and that meant something, I don’t know what. I just know that the door was open and the roses were everywhere and when night came, we had to be ready.”

  I hold her close, but I don’t placate her. I don’t tell her that it was just a dream. I don’t know that I could with any honesty anyway. Proserpina has a connection with Thornchapel, a deep one, and it’s one that defies rational explanation, like so much else here in the Thorne Valley.

  “At least the door isn’t open yet,” Proserpina says, with a sorry attempt at brightness. “So the dream can’t happen any time soon.”

  I haven’t told her about the door. I told myself it was because I didn’t want to trouble her while she was with Saint, I told myself it was because the door could close on its own at any moment, and so there was no sense in making any kind of fuss about it.

  But truthfully, I didn’t tell her because I thought I could mend it before she came back. I thought I could light the right fire or sing the right songs to somehow make it close itself again. It was nonsense to think so, and I felt quite silly night after night burning logs and singing and dancing alone, but given that I’d seen the door after Beltane, it seemed reasonable to assume that the same things that made the door appear might make it disappear.

  None of it worked. Plainly.

  “Poe,” I start, as gently as I can. “Staying away on Lammas, staying away from the chapel altogether—it didn’t work. You were right all along. It was going to happen no matter what we did.”

  “What was going to happen?” she whispers, although I think she already knows.

  “It’s open,” I tell her. “I don’t know how, but the door opened during Lammas, and it hasn’t shut itself since.”

  She chews on the inside of her lip. “And the roses?”

  “They’re there too. We can go down and look if you’d like.”

  “I don’t suppose it will do me any good not to look. Oh, Auden, what are we going to do? About the door?”

  I angle her in my arms so I can meet her eyes with my own. “I know what we are not going to do, and that’s act out anything you saw in your dream. Understood? I am not letting anything hurt us, I am not letting anyone hurt themselves. We can get through this without death, without harm.” I almost add it’s just a door, but I don’t. We both know it’s not just a door, we both know it matters in some way that we don’t entirely understand.

  “My mother couldn’t get through this,” Poe says. “Estamond couldn’t. Is it arrogant to think that we can?”

  “Of course it’s not arrogant,” I say.

  Okay, and maybe there is a touch of arrogance to my voice when I answer. But really. How hard can it be not to human-sacrifice myself? I think some confidence is warranted.

  “In the dream, it was so necessary,” she murmurs. “There was no other way.”

  “There’s always another way,” I say, and I may not know anything about myself or my own life anymore, but I do know this. “Always.”

  “But there wasn’t. John Barleycorn is a memory,” Poe says. “That’s what Estamond said in my dream. You remember what I told you about what Dr. Davidson said. It’s a memory of killing the Year King—a memory that keeps coming up when we learn more about Thornchapel.”

  John Barleycorn is a memory. I open my mouth to tell Proserpina about the midwinter in the chapel with the roses, but then I don’t. I’m not sure why—most likely because it won’t materially change anything vis-a-vis whether or not I’ll one day kill myself in the thorn chapel—but also because something about that memory feels intensely troubling. I don’t want to worry Proserpina with it.

  Also—and I recognize this is beyond ridiculous given the circumstances—but I’m almost worried she won’t believe me. That if I tell her
I saw the ghost of Estamond Kernstow in the chapel along with an impossible rose, she’d smile and nod in a patient way, the same way someone might nod at a child’s story of how their cat can secretly speak and read minds, and then tell me not to worry about it. That surely I imagined it or dreamt it up.

  Proserpina wouldn’t do that. Not only because of who she is and what she dreams, but because of the things we’ve seen in this place together. I know this deeply . . . and yet, the words still don’t leave my lips. Instead, like a coward, I steer the subject toward less personal waters. “Rebecca found graves under the maze. Eight of them. They look to be quite old.”

  Proserpina’s eyes widen. She’s practically twitching against me, like a kitten who’s just seen a length of abandoned yarn. “How old?” she asks.

  “Bronze Age. We think.”

  She wriggles out of my arms and walks over to my window to peer out onto the south lawn. The rainy light from outside limns her form in a hazy silver glow, highlighting very faint notes of red in her dark, dark hair.

  Like the roses, I think. Such a dark red they’re nearly black.

  “We had to stop construction,” I continue, getting off the bed too. The whisper of my hands over her skin as I pull her into my arms is drowned out by the spatter of rain against the window. “There will be a team of archaeologists coming in Monday to assess the site and plan an excavation.”

  “Graves,” she echoes, looking out onto the rainy expanse in front of us. The lids of the kistvaens are barely—and I mean just barely—visible at this distance, through the rain and the metal forest of fencing and digging equipment.

  “When you were researching for Imbolc and Beltane, did you ever come across any mention of them?” I ask. “Rebecca thinks Estamond must have known of them when she built the maze, and if that’s the case, then I’d think the medieval Guests who built the labyrinth predating the maze must have known about them too.”

  Proserpina shakes her head, her hair brushing against my shoulder and her eyes still on the graves outside. “No. I don’t recall . . . ” She thinks for a minute, as if to make completely sure. “No. No graves.”