Sixtine- The Complete Trilogy Box Set

by Caroline Vermalle

  A wave of disgust overwhelmed Sixtine. So many deaths, so many murders. She surprised herself by thinking that at least Seth was innocent of these crimes.

  They sat quietly for a few minutes, glancing at the city below. Sixtine curled up her legs and rested her chin on her knees, as a light wind made the hairs on her arms stand on end.

  “I think Seth had it all planned before he met me. All he needed was the woman. I was an orphan, so no one would really miss me. I was naive and absolutely blinded by the luxury in which he lived. Like Félicie. I believed so much in fairy tales,” she sighed and glanced at the scar on her thumb.

  After an elongated moment of silence, Max said, “I can’t imagine he chose you just for that. He committed this crime out of love, not hate.”

  “What’s the difference, Max?” Sixtine remained perfectly calm, but her eyes pierced Max’s. “Whether he did it out of cruelty, revenge, fear of loneliness or because he really believed that dying with him was what I wanted or deserved, it doesn’t matter. The result was the same. Every day, men and women fall in love, no one should benefit from the crime of passion. No one gets to say who lives and who dies.”

  “That’s not what I meant,” he muttered.

  “I know,” she said softly.

  Thaddeus’s face appeared for a moment in the sky between the stars, and the cold caress of sadness passed through her insides.

  “What are you going to do now, Max?”

  He looked straight ahead and answered, “Spend some time with my parents in Germany, then go home to London. Forget the pyramids and decide what I want to do with my life. Hopefully, something useful.”

  “You haven’t considered carrying on from where you left off?”

  Max turned to her and his smile was both sad and tender. “No. And you?”

  She smiled in return. No answer was necessary, as they understood each other. The pyramid had changed the course of their lives forever. It changed them forever and they had to learn to live with the people they had become.

  Their future was wide open, and yet so empty.

  Everything was calm, except for dogs barking in the distance, motorcycles driving through the streets, most of it was carried away by the breeze.

  The night had enveloped Cairo, but the fog had lifted.

  Above them, the entire Milky Way.

  “I think it’s time to go,” Max said and straightened his legs.

  “I think I’ll stay a little longer.”

  He looked at her for a moment, then stood up reluctantly.

  “It’s okay, Max. You can go. I don’t need to be protected,” Sixtine said gently.

  A resigned smile passed over the young man’s face and they parted ways.

  A farewell which was too fast, too hopeless, so badly matched to the events that had brought them together.

  There was no after in this goodbye.

  Half an hour later, Max was just a tiny shadow that crossed the blue-gray soil of the Giza Plateau.

  Sixtine remained alone at the top of the pyramid until the night faded. Little by little, the sky warmed up with orange, then pink as the dawn colored the city.

  Tears formed in her green eyes and ran down her pale cheeks. She realized she still did not have an explanation for the change of her eye color.

  Although she still had many questions, some of which would most probably never be answered, she knew one thing.

  This was her story, and she had to accept it, and cherish it. The future was terrifying, her heart was broken, and Seth’s betrayal was tattooed on her stomach.

  But she had to make it her own, and this time, she had to be sincere.

  She was Sixtine, here and now. The jurors at the weighing had sent her back to the living. She didn’t know what fate awaited her, she didn’t know what to do with these visions and specters in her head, but she was alive.

  As the sun rose over Cairo, she made a promise to herself that she would never ever allow her heart to betray itself, or her.

  Never again.

  40

  Sixtine took Gigi’s cold hand in hers and gently placed the small brooch on the old woman’s palm.

  “Oh, my darling, you have found it,” Gigi said with a wonderful wrinkled smile. “You know, I was looking everywhere for it. Where did I put it?”

  “Under the bench, in front of the cliffs,” Sixtine lied in a broken voice.

  “Oh, I’m so distracted, I must have dropped it on my walk. Would you like a cup of hot tea?”

  “Yes, that would be lovely.” Sixtine nodded and sat at the kitchen table to watch the old blind woman in her tea making. Around her, nothing had changed in twenty years. Even Gigi’s movements were the same.

  If she concentrated enough on the cast-iron stove, the boxes on the shelves, the clock, the wallpaper, the cups in the dresser, all those details that had been the decor of her childhood, she could pretend things hadn’t changed at all.

  That there had never been a pyramid.

  Pretend she was still Jessica, innocent, carefree. And ignorant of the world between life and death.

  As the hot cup of tea warmed her cold hands, a strange sensation ran under the tattooed skin on her stomach. A reminder of the present. She reminded herself if she were still Jessica, she would not have known Thaddeus’s love, which would have been a crying shame.

  She breathed in the sweet and soothing aroma of her tea and for a fleeting moment, she felt an unexpected emotion.

  Gratitude.

  Sixtine had found the room she used to sleep in as a child, and it had not been used since she had left. It was now the realm of broken things and spiders. She cleaned it up, put the old things away, dusted off the surfaces and cleaned the glass from the skylight overlooking the sea. She had found the trunks that contained the books her mother used to read to her. Cinderella, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Beauty and the Beast.

  In Sixtine’s story there was also a stabbed heart, a pierced finger, gold and misery. There were knights on their knees in churches, poets who played dominoes with Death and imposters who smelled of rotting stone and broken idols. There were Aztec goddesses and Egyptian monkeys, murderous ancestors and skeleton women, nights when people ate with the dead and days when they married executioners.

  Orphaned, she had become the princess who Prince Charming had tried to take with him in his forever after. She was the princess who came back from the dead, and became a warrior. When the fight was over, she was back in her kingdom of misery, where she was once again no more than an orphan.

  She spent several nights in her room in the attic. During the day, she cut the brambles that invaded the garden, ate her meals with Han and Gigi on the old oak table, helped her great-aunt with cleaning and laundry, and guided her on the small winding path along the cliffs.

  Beyond the pungent November wind, the Atlantic Ocean bubbled with white foam.

  Sixtine and Gigi always followed the same route. They walked to the end of the pier, to the red house with its closed shutters. They strolled alongside a small deserted beach, past abandoned huts, a rusty mailbox. Gigi was happy, voluble, and so content to have Sixtine with her again.

  So much so that she didn’t ask any questions.

  Until the fourth day.

  “What are you going to do, Sixtine?”

  “Stay there, with you.”

  “You’re not going to waste your youth staying with an old woman like me,” Gigi scoffed. “The world still belongs to you, sweetheart.”

  “I’ve already seen the world. And I’m fine here.”

  “If you ever wanted to leave, I wouldn’t be unhappy.”

  “I don’t want to leave. I promise you. I’m fine here.”

  Gigi wanted to say something, then changed her mind. She then cleared her throat and said with a hint of a flush in her cheeks, “I asked Han to take me to see Edith, my friend in town, do you mind?”

  “Of course not.”

  “I’ll stay there for a few days. And Han can stay
too.” She giggled with a little laugh that delighted Sixtine.

  Later that afternoon, she waved at Gigi and Han whose car finally disappeared down the road. She felt inspired somehow as she looked around her, the silent hamlet, the infinity of the ocean, this raw beauty, just for her.

  Perhaps Oxan Aslanian was right.

  Finally, she was here, her happy ending.

  She dug her hands into her pockets and continued walking along the cliffs. Gigi had asked her to post a letter and she rushed down the path to the rusty mailbox. Her rubber boots disturbed the puddles where the anthracite-colored clouds reflected in. She crossed the deserted road, the air filled only with the sound of gulls. Then she stopped abruptly, and squinted.

  On the cliffs, she saw a lonely man staring at the sea.

  It was no secret that tourists sometimes came to this melancholic piece of land, lovers of poetry and off-season, sensitive souls. She dropped the envelope into the mailbox and, feeling the wind in her hair, she glanced up to the sky.

  A storm was approaching. She lifted her hood over her head and walked up the path as she briefly glanced at the man on the cliffs.

  Yes, men used to come here, but they weren’t that immobile.

  For a moment she stopped with her eyes fixed on him, her cheeks flushed by the wind, her silver hair mingled with the cumulus clouds that were pressing over the horizon.

  Not daring to move, not daring to hope.

  Then the great wind rose with its evil air, and the man turned his face towards Sixtine.

  Her eyes widened, her heart pounded in her chest and she began to run towards him, ignoring the emptiness of the rocks and the salt waves that licked the cliffs.

  Their bodies fused into a dazzling shock, to which all their painful muscles felt like a long-awaited deliverance. The kiss they offered each other tasted like foam and storm, as it always had.

  Thaddeus had returned.

  They stayed this way, wrapped in one another’s embrace, silent, in the midst of the nature that surrounded them with its great fingers of infinity, and there was, in their two bodies that became one, absolute and free, the sublime order of things.

  Later that evening, Thaddeus finally spoke, opening himself up to Sixtine.

  First, he expressed the anger he felt when Seth told him about his plans, their tremendous battle. It was their engagement day and Thaddeus had initially refused to come to the party. Then he decided that he was the only one who could change her mind. During the months before the wedding, he had tried everything, rationality, threats, denunciation to the police, but what arguments could convince a man who knew he was going to die? What earthly compensations could rival eternity?

  Thaddeus may have persevered, but Seth’s determination grew as the date approached. Until the day Thaddeus found Seth and Jessica at Manzanillo airport. He then discovered that his best friend, the man he considered his brother, would not hesitate to kill him if he opposed this ultimate project.

  Seth realized that day Thaddeus too had crossed the point of no return. When he saw Jessica in the airport lobby, her faded light and her mind fogged up by the barbiturates her husband had given to her, he knew what her heart had not wanted to admit before. He could never let her go either, even if he had to let her die.

  From that moment on, he knew it was her or Seth.

  He had no idea she would be the one who would save his life.

  He managed to kidnap her, and once her mind was free of the drugs she had been given, she had listened to him.

  Their escape lasted a day and a night.

  A day to discover they had little chance of getting away with it. One night to acknowledge they had loved each other since the first day. When Seth’s men found them, Sixtine had made them run after her to keep them away from Thaddeus.

  The girl he came to save, in turn, had saved him.

  By the time he arrived in Cairo, it was already too late. At the hospital, on the day of the meeting with Gigi, he had prayed for her to live. He had desperately clung to the hope there could be a happy ending for both of them. Seth was dead, and they could be together.

  However, the amnesia had taken everything.

  Thaddeus had become a helpless witness of Sixtine’s quest, who found a reason to live by avenging the death of her husband whom she believed she loved and believed to be a victim, like her. She no longer remembered her heart beat for someone else who had sworn to protect her.

  How many nights had Thaddeus spent wanting to reveal everything to her, so he could finally be with her? So they could finally bring this love born of horror to life?

  He almost told her on Halloween night, in the Church of Madeleine, but the promise he had made, a cruel irony, forbade him to tell her the truth. He knew she would destroy him more than the lie would.

  Killing De Bok to prevent him from killing her had been less painful than keeping it a secret.

  Sixtine asked questions, Thaddeus answered, choosing his words, sometimes leaving long pauses between his sentences.

  When night fell, there was only silence, as Sixtine’s lips were on Thaddeus’s, and they could finally make up for lost time.

  They went back to the house and climbed the stairs to the miserable attic with the white sheets, but as soon as he stepped inside the room changed. Thaddeus’s iridescent presence filled every nook and cranny. Intoxicated by the desire that was digging tunnels in her body, standing in front of the skylight overlooking the sea, Sixtine motioned him over to her without as much as a single word.

  They had waited, these lovers, before discovering each other and their movements were feverish. When their breaths mixed with the night, the whole universe trembled from these vibrations of desire, even in a tunnel under the pyramid of Giza.

  Thaddeus’s rough hands caressed her pale skin and with each caress Sixtine gave away a little more. She breathed in the turpentine smell of his kisses. Her clothes fell on the concrete floor. She was naked, fragile, against him. He placed his hand on her stomach, against the tattoo and she shivered.

  Thaddeus laid out a sheet on the floor right underneath the skylight. He laid Sixtine down, as if she had been an antique doll. As he undressed and revealed his tall, slender and muscular body, and the scar on his thigh, Sixtine closed her eyes.

  Nothing happened, only the delicious silence of the present moment. No visions, no fears, just the dream image of Thaddeus’s naked body and exquisite anticipation.

  She felt Thaddeus’s skin cover every inch of hers and his arms brought him closer to her so that they would finally become one.

  Sixtine had surrendered and her surrender was absolute. Her lover’s breath had mixed with hers and so had her entire body, deeply, without hope of return. As if his breath made her wounded heart beat, as if these regular movements gave her the life she had missed for so long.

  As the moon came out from behind the storm clouds, it ignited in a glare of vertigo and he called out her name in eternal prayer.

  Sixtine.

  The dawn surprised Thaddeus, as he had spent the entire night watching Sixtine as she slept. He had stroked her hair to make her fall asleep and had watched over her, over her breathing, over the movements of her sleep, watching for nightmares. Surprisingly, she had seemed perfectly at peace and he had never tired of admiring her in the moonlight.

  He had sensed it from their first meeting, but now he was convinced of it. Sixtine was unlike anyone he had ever met, and he had never loved anyone as much as he loved her.

  But it wasn’t love that kept him awake all night. That’s what he didn’t tell her, and as the moon crossed the sky, his secret grew.

  Yohannes De Bok may have been dead, but Oxan Aslanian was alive and well.

  41

  From the taxi window on its way to the airport, Max watched as Cairo passed by him.

  The city, once marked by these pyramids that had illuminated its early years with their mystery, now had only one image; the face of Sixtine.

  A few nights
earlier, he sat next to her, electrified by her green eyes, by her skin so close to his but never against his, and was mesmerized simply by her presence. He had defended himself from taking, asking, offering, because he had convinced himself of her fragility. Yet he left her with the feeling that she was stronger than all the others.

  He missed her, already.

  He could not help but think everything he had done had been in vain. Sixtine had already discovered everything, or almost everything.

  Max couldn’t save Moswen, and caused Naya’s death. He understood the closing mechanism of chamber X.

  Big deal! Who needed his mechanical theories?

  All the names they had uncovered; they were all dead, anyway, victims and murderers.

  He had dreamt of being a hero, but all he had left in his wake was mourning, destruction and insignificance.

  What about Florence? He sighed as he put all his efforts into not thinking about her.

  Everything was so complicated.

  When he arrived at the airport, his leg hurt horribly, but he pushed his cart through the lobby at the check-in, limping heavily.

  Suddenly, a man pushed him without apologizing. The pain in his leg resumed again, and Max turned around to face the person responsible. A young woman stood in the way and apologized in the place of her companion.

  Max accepted her apology, noted the beauty of the young lady, the visibly rich old man, and the strange couple they were.

  By the time he arrived at the check-in counter, he had already forgotten the incident and concentrated on his boarding ticket to Germany. At the next counter, a man shouted at a hostess in English, but with a heavy French accent.

  It was the rude old man, and Max rolled his eyes.

  Within a radius of thirty feet, everyone was looking at this tall, skinny man and the embarrassed young woman hiding behind three carts loaded with monogrammed Louis Vuitton trunks.

  He required a first-class one-way ticket on the next flight to Da Nang in Vietnam. He saw that it was their fault, and this stupid revolution, if the local airport was no longer working and that his private jet had not been able to take off. It did not surprise him that Egypt was in misery because it was a country of lazy and incapable people.