At first she took the long, white-skirted slab as another such, before noticing the icon above the altar. Breathing shallowly, quietly, Aria stepped into the chapel. She hadn’t been near one since her wedding day. God might know she was innocent, but she didn’t feel He cared for her all the same.
The cloth was neatly ironed and laundered, the icon clean of dust. She knelt before the altar for a moment, unable to say what brought her to it, and then rose. As she did, she spotted the door.
Low to the ground and small, with streaks of dust clinging to the age-polished oak boards, at first it appeared to be a servant’s door—yet what need was there for a chapel to be unobtrusively cleaned and serviced? It was in use mere hours a week.
Something else, then, meant to be unobtrusive.
She approached the strange door, keeping her steps light, as if someone might be listening. She reached out and at her touch it moved inward on its hinges, but not all the way. Holding her breath, Aria grasped the handle and pushed it.
The door swung open onto gray twilight.
High, dusty windows were spaced evenly in the thick stone walls, by which dim illumination she could make out the contents of the room—what little there was. Boxes lined a narrow aisle down the center of the chamber. The wood was sanded smooth but plain, the whole at odds with the elegance of the rest of the house. Perhaps left behind by the place’s last owner?
Curious, Aria went to one and, with some straining, lifted its lid.
At first she could make out nothing from the darkness inside, but a smell arose: like dust, but stickier in her nose and throat. Coughing to clear it away, she looked down—into a face that was no longer a face.
Gray and withered, flesh like old leather pulled tight across a framework of bones, lying crumbled in the box as if dropped there. The rags, remnants of a gown in the style of fifteen years ago, hung off one skeletal shoulder and with the skirt flipped high, revealing the bones of calves and long feet. A slipper had fallen away, revealing long yellow nails.
Aria fell back, and a sound escaped her throat that was in its way as frightful as the discovery. She viewed the scene as if outside herself—poor woman, what a shock. And, from this outside vantage, she was seized with awful curiosity.
She rose and went to another box. Opened it. This one was fresher than the first—more horrible. And another. She stumbled between the two rows, revealing their burdens as if hoping the next would prove her wrong. Finding the dead near a chapel was not unusual after all. But these, in their disarray, were too clearly unburied, unhallowed dead.
The last she opened was still recognizable: a young woman in a blue gown, with fair hair falling out of its braids. A bright length crossed her breast—a knife, laid carefully between her hands. Aria didn’t dare look to see if its mark was on her flesh.
Stumbling back, she nearly tripped over the plank resting beside the final box in the line. The lid of the coffin, waiting to seal it—whenever the empty thing was filled.
Aria went to her knees, then, and remained there a long time.
Surely this was the work, the terrible secret, of the last master of this house… Perhaps there was even some innocent, obvious explanation, which she had misread in her fright. She would rise from the floor and laugh at herself in a few minutes.
Footsteps intruded on her silence, and brought a rush of instinctive terror. She leapt up, ready to flee. But a figure’s bulk blocked the door. To fight, then—a cooler, wiser aspect of Berengaria reached for the blade on the dead woman’s chest. She held it before her, mirrored steel casting trembling spots of light across the walls.
One struck the face of Andrew Cobalt.
He blinked against it as he stepped into the room. Aria told herself to put down the knife; this was her husband, danger was past. Cooler, wiser instinct kept the blade between them.
My dear, she expected his parted lips to say. Oh, my dear, what an awful thing you’ve found! Speaking gently, soothingly.
He spoke gently, but the words he said were, “You poor fool.”
“Fool?” she asked, voice soaring high into the eaves of the hall. “How?”
Let him tell her she misunderstood.
“You shouldn’t have come here. It might have waited a while longer.”
“This—surely this belonged to the last owner of this house, the man you bought it from.”
Cobalt laughed. “I bought it from myself.”
Aria stared at him, and dazedly shook her head.
He came closer. Changed from traveling clothes, he was dressed in a linen shirt, half unlaced, and tight trousers. The simple outfit revealed the muscles of his legs and forearms, below his rolled-up cuffs. His dark hair seemed to drink in the gray light; its gray strands became gilded. He was a stranger, and terrible, and beautiful, too.
“I bought it from a recluse. And he from a merchant who traveled long abroad. Before that, the lucky heir of an unknown uncle. Somewhere among the list, a lord with nothing left of his inheritance but these useless halls.” His expression turned thoughtful. “Perhaps not useless…and somewhere, a madman.”
“Who were these women?” Aria asked.
“Wives,” Cobalt said. “Bad ones.”
Hot blood rushed in Aria’s cheeks. In contrast, the knife’s hilt felt cold and slick. She kept from dropping it with an effort. “Your wives?”
“Not at first.”
Oh, thank God. It was all nothing, then.
“It’s true they all came to marry me, for the reasons women come to marry men: protection, a need for money or goods—for some, this house—and because of loneliness. When any was lonely, it was her own fault. I was always her second husband.”
“Widows.” The word squeaked past her tight throat.
“Self-made, each one.” He stopped before her, an empty coffin between them. The empty coffin. “Murderers, who would have gone unpunished if not for me.”
Her coffin.
“I’m not a murderer!” Mixed with Aria’s terror burned a blaze of indignation. “It was an accident!”
He began to walk around to her. She dodged, keeping the coffin between them.
“Anyway,” she continued, “that vile man deserved to die.”
“So you also believe some deaths must happen?” Cobalt smiled. “At least we agree on so much.”
He drew too close; she feinted with the knife.
“Sarah’s,” he said, looking at it with not a little affection mixed with wariness. “Ah, she put up a glorious fight. I still bear the mark of it.”
Aria remembered the scar she had traced so sensuously in his bed. A wave—of something that ought to be revulsion, but wasn’t—overtook her, and she lowered the blade.
“Some fight,” he said, with undeniable fondness now. “Yet others…offer money, the inheritance from slaughtered men. As if that could dissuade me, either.”
“No,” she said, realizing. “You’ve devoted your life to this.”
He nodded, pleased they again understood each other. In his intention he was pure, and the austerity that ruled him drew at something within Aria. Standing before her in the tomb he had made, Andrew Cobalt seemed made of equal parts simplicity, strength and inhuman beauty. Like an avenging angel, or a monstrous ancient god.
Aria had never thought herself the sort to bring down angels, and never expected to confront a god. But she remembered her husband’s cool decorum, which she had made to melt from him for a night. When he had awakened something more than mortal in her, too.
She stood before what might be her death, and felt life throughout every inch of her body. Passion ached, pulsing with each beat of her heart, through blushing face, along her trembling arms, and at the gate of her womb. She almost staggered with it.
“Others have tried to run,” he said. In this he misunderstood her.
Aria didn’t flee. Instead she let him come near—which he did, so slowly she must have taken a hundred breaths while waiting—and she let the knife fall. Its clat
ter against the stones echoed, tones filling the air like music. She let Andrew’s hand clasp her by the throat. The instant he did, she stepped closer, into his arms. His heat surrounded her, and her hungry body opened to it, as if her flesh were made of unfolding leaves before his sun. And she kissed him.
He tried to draw away, but she wouldn’t let him. He’d left her hands free; she closed one tight on his shoulder, keeping them together, and reached the other down between his legs. He was not like her, charged by facing death; neither was he some crude beast to be excited at the thought of dealing it. But his lips opened to her kiss, at first tolerating it, but quickly revealing more interest. He growled against her mouth, but she felt the surge of arousal through him as she stroked the hard line of his cock through the tight canvas trousers.
His hold slackened enough that she could speak through it, her voice breathless, husky with fear and desire. “We can have this, husband, one last time. At least bid me a good farewell.”
Andrew forced her to her knees, and doing so by necessity brought himself down. He had a wiry strength, but not irresistible, not to a woman fighting for her life and whose form of resistance he could not anticipate. And perhaps he did not want to resist, either. She got atop him, straddling his thighs, and unlaced his trousers. Her fingers slipped inside to fondle him, found him hot and hard as an iron blade. Aria flexed her legs to kick her skirts back out of the way and took him into her. He drove home with one sharp thrust—willing, then. Wetness welled from her flesh surrounding him; hope and terror both proved strong aphrodisiacs.
But his grip was closing tight on her throat again. Not tight enough to cut off her life, at least not yet, but the promise was there—once they finished, and completion already rushed toward them. His thrusts came fast, slicked by her arousal. His length spread her open, and caressed every inch exposed to him with overwhelmingly sweet friction. It was bliss, sheer bliss, and she could almost have let it be as she said. A fond farewell, a final rapture before the end.
But Aria wasn’t ready for it to end yet. She rose and fell against him, throwing off the rhythm of his thrusts, reshaping the sensations laying siege to her. Distracting him, so that his hold slackened. She gasped in air, as much and as deeply as possible.
Andrew ripped the high collar from around her neck, tore open the front of her gown. He palmed her breast, caressing until the nipple was pinched hard against his warm skin. Pleasure drove the breath from her, and even the grip of his single hand was dangerously firm. Yet pleasure came from that, too, from the sting of her empty lungs. There seemed to be a great distance between the parts of her body—head and throat, teased breast and full, wet quim—but joy, physical joy, danced between and among all of them. Perhaps he felt it, too.
He let her know what he did feel with another hard thrust, and then, perhaps to coax more of the easing dew from her, Andrew bent his head and suckled at her breast. Aria arched back, rising to his attentions. And farther, until he had to shift his hips in longer, higher strokes to remain deep within her. She felt herself flying…then falling, as he came back to himself, tried to take control. She closed her hands behind his back and pulled him down with her, until she lay with only her pooled skirts cushioning her hips from the flagstones and with Cobalt rising over her. He had a better angle now to grip tight on her throat. But she had the advantage of surprise and his distraction. Cobalt moved from instinct, in the age-old pattern—with perhaps a bit of calculation, keeping them both from the edge, keeping his hands on her light enough to keep from making love to a corpse. He plainly found the living woman much preferable—and in his surrender to what she offered, Aria pursued her advantage.
In moments, she had her own noose around his throat—a length of her long hair, looped and coiled tight. Not tight enough to kill; perhaps it was only a collar. Yet a collar was a mark of control, and control Andrew Cobalt she did, riding him from beneath, spurring him to madness. Throwing herself into madness, too. She felt him tremble deep within her, and her intimate muscles shivered around him. She felt his climax come as though it tore the world asunder.
He surged within her. She pulled tight the band of her hair, trying to slow him before he pushed her to annihilation. What saved her in the end, though, was the pain as in his orgasm Andrew’s teeth marked the creamy skin of her breast and grazed the areola of her nipple. It was pain less akin to ecstasy than the sweetness of restricted breath had proved, and it was unexpected; the two factors pulled her back from the edge. And then his storm had passed; he lay weakened and helpless in her arms, the last of his release pulsing into her.
She stroked one hand down the length of his slick, well-exercised body; the other kept a firm grip on the end of the collar. Suddenly, she saw it within reach—the knife. The blade that had almost killed him once before.
Andrew’s eyes flickered open; he looked in the same direction, and she knew he saw it, too.
She could have taken the knife. Could have ended it there, could have made what they’d just done a farewell in truth, could have saved herself.
But desire still burned in the place where he rested. Urgently, she chased it, moving her hips and savoring the slide of him within—softening, but still large, still filling her in the way she needed. Her breasts dragged across his firm chest. His grip on her throat was joy as pure as any of the rest; she had never felt her life so keenly. A cry escaped her, despite his best attempt to throttle it—if that was, in fact, his best attempt.
Rapture took hold, far stronger and more irresistible than his tightening hands. Swept away for a clean endless moment she knew nothing, had no concern, and the lingering shadow of fear only gilded the brightness surrounding her.
She lay, then, as helpless as Andrew had been, with his fingers banding her throat and the knife as near. Yet she awakened—she came back, feeling washed from the inside out and filled with sweet lassitude like that following a most pleasant dream.
Slowly, Andrew rose and separated from her. Aria looked up at him, waiting.
“Well?” she said as moments passed, sensuality’s spell began to weaken on her, and he still did nothing.
“You could have done it,” he said. With a booted foot—she had never even tried to unbutton his boots—he kicked the knife. Not away, but nearer to her.
Aria did not reach for it. “I didn’t want to.”
“No? Not even to save your life?” Breathlessly, with strands of her long hair still falling across his shoulders, he asked, “What did you want, then?”
She could only be honest. “You.”
“So I saw.” Andrew laughed with, she thought, genuine amusement. And he offered her a hand up.
She rose, and though there was no help for her torn, gaping bodice she began shaking her skirts into a more proper array. One slippered foot trod on the hilt of the knife, rested there. “You see, then. I’m not a murderer.”
Perhaps she had just tried to become one—but strategy had failed her in the end. As it had failed him.
This time.
Aria frowned at her husband. “Yet you are.”
“Ah.” Softly, with the realization he was at her mercy: “Aren’t we all something less than innocent?”
“So you admit we are all somewhat deserving of clemency?”
She almost couldn’t hear his response. “Perhaps none of us deserve it.”
He seemed to find the thought terrifying and appealing in equal measure.
Well, she could sympathize.
A red band marked his neck, though already fading: the impression of her collar. Aria smiled at the sight. “Some of us less than others.”
“They were truly wicked women, you know.”
Were they? She looked around her. Impossible to judge, now—there could be no trials and no second chances for the dead. But Cobalt had taken her on mere rumors of poison. How many others had been condemned by nothing but rumor?
She looked at his bare chest, the scar cutting across it. It had been wielded with no little
skill. Not unpracticed, she would say.
Perhaps there had been some justice dealt, then.
And if any were innocent? Could there be justice for them?
Andrew Cobalt looked at her, waiting. Aria reached out, pressed him to his knees. It made him less likely to attempt any dangerous motion…and put his mouth at an interesting level.
Aria was not a murderer, although she had knowingly let a man die when he deserved it.
She could not kill this husband of hers, though, not for anything.
Yet…
“I’m something of a wicked woman, myself,” she said. Her hand toyed with the ends of his hair.
Her fingers tightened in the fine strands as he bowed his head, accepting her judgment. Proving a more biddable husband than she’d at first expected. How refreshing.
Aria drew him nearer to her. This had the makings of a quite satisfactory marriage.
“RED HOUSE”
Zander Vyne
Tony Depapas lusted after his brother’s wife. She longed for Tony too, but that made no difference. Both agreed, though neither knew it, never to speak of this attraction. Instead, they offered the required words and left the confessional booth with a penance designed to soothe their troubled minds, though it would do nothing to ease the heat in their loins.
Father Mihalis sighed, eyes closed. The air smelled of dust and sweat. His hands clasped his rosary, drawing smooth black beads over flesh that ached with arthritis, fingers stopping at the cross and working their way back up. His mind had already turned away from the sinners to other, more important, things.
“Frozen lasagna or Benny’s Pizza?” he muttered to himself. He started to stand, stiff knees popping in protest.
“In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. My last confession was…never.” The voice was English, cultured, deep and measured in tone.
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