by Saber Vale
“Wow,” I said, fanning myself a little.
I never got used to her writing, it always turned me on more than I expected it could.
“…what surprised me then was a jealousy so intense that I felt like it was going to burn through my belly, like a hot iron that someone had forced through me… He had promised he wouldn’t come inside of her, and had done it more than once, had seeded her, knowing that his promises meant nothing at the end of the day, that I wouldn’t really leave, that I was never going to go back…”
“Wow,” I said.
“Is that why it was torn out of the journal?”
“It doesn’t do anything except… make her seem human, not just some kind of sexy, sultry vixen…”
“I imagine her that way, too,” Cormac said.
“That was… so sexy,” Darleen said, and we all looked at each other.
“Oh you think that was sexy?” Cormac said, feigning surprise.
I shook my head at him and smiled right before he kissed me, and then, as we pulled apart, I wrapped and arm around Darleen. We climbed together into the bed and Darleen and I made out, I unbuttoned her top and peeled it off of her. She was wearing a denim skirt and I shuffled it down off of her hips.
“You guys are so hot together,” Cormac said, and I smiled at him, then kissed Darleen down her trembling belly, her anticipation rising, before I pulled off her panties and pressed my mouth to her pussy, lapping up her uniquely feminine taste.
Cormac sighed as he watched us, then positioned himself behind me, undressing, and, as though acting out the vignette from the journal pages, sank his thick, beautiful cock inside of me while I licked Darleen.
“Mmmm,” I moaned, my eyes shut tight, my body saturated in sensation.
Darleen came hard, her voice echoing off of the stone walls of the chamber as she cried out, and Cormac rolled me over onto my back beside her and fucked me hard, our face close together, Darleen watching us dreamily. I pulled him close, wrapping my legs around him, feeling heat rise inside of me like a crescendo of pleasure.
“Oh my god,” I groaned, seizing beneath him as I came.
After he came inside of me, we collapsed in the bed. For a while, we rested, our hands and legs intertwining, kissing each other, hands stroking my breasts, mouths on my mouth, slow and easy, taking our time. I felt like I was a trance like state by the time Cormac rolled over and, as I watched, kissed Darleen.
“Mmm,” she sighed, as he rolled on top of her, kissing her as I watched.
He reached down and stroked her pussy, the two of them looking into each other’s eyes.
I felt it, then, a hot flash of jealousy as sudden and painful as hot poker through my belly. I couldn’t help but thinking about the passage, about Caroline, about her fury and powerlessness. I was just as powerless as she was.
“No,” I whispered, and Cormac looked at me in an instant and rolled back towards me, pulling me close and kissing me hard, reassuring me. He sat up and slipped his hands over us both, slipping fingers inside of each of us, leaning down and licking us one at a time, like we were a delectable buffet and he couldn’t decide what tasted better.
“I love watching you two,” Darleen whispered, and Cormac leaned down to kiss me. He slipped his fingers in and out of her, stroking her clit, while he fucked me again, his body on top of mine, our eyes locked. Darleen whimpered and whined while I gasped and sighed, and Cormac shut his eyes and immersed himself in the little song of our pleasure.
After he came inside of me again, he dropped between us in the enormous bed, and we all, after laying together dreamily for who knows how long, fell asleep.
Chapter 18
I found myself in the catacomb below the castle, wandering dreamily as I searched for a tomb, or for a keyhole, I wasn’t sure which. I looked up and down, searching for names, but the letters swam together, and I couldn’t recognize any of them.
“Who are you looking for?” asked a disembodied voice, unrecognizable, neither male nor female.
“I don’t know,” I said.
I turned, and a figure slipped through the black door leading towards Caroline’s dark chamber, where we’d found her tomb only a day before.
“Hold on,” I called, chasing it.
I couldn’t see Caroline there, but I could feel her. The Ruby hung between my breasts, warm and urgent.
“What happened to you?” I asked.
I heard a soft laugh.
“Did he kill you?” I asked.
The laugh turned to a soft sigh.
“What do you think?” the voice whispered.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Because you don’t want to know,” the voice said, laughing again, “you’re refusing to see…”
I woke, gasping, and Cormac’s hand shot up and pulled me towards him reflexively.
“What is it?” he asked groggily.
“I… I…” I muttered, groping for a light that wasn’t there.
We were in the East wing, there was no electric lighting. I felt terrified and certain.
“Caroline killed Sophie,” I gasped.
“What?” Cormac gasped.
Darleen stirred beside us.
I lowered my voice to an excited whisper.
“Caroline killed Sophie because she was pregnant, that’s why she tore those pages out of the journal and hid them, because she didn’t want someone to find a motive…”
“Wow,” Cormac said, “how did you…”
“I had a dream and I suddenly just knew it…”
“But then, how about Caroline…”
“I don’t know, I don’t know what happened to Caroline, but I just knew that…”
“In the morning we’ll keep looking…” Cormac said, kissing me, pulling me close.
“We’re sleeping in her room,” I reminded him, “she was a murderer and…”
“Do you want to leave?”
“We don’t have to…” I felt ridiculous.
“Is everything ok?” Darleen asked.
“Yeah, yeah, Astrid just… had a thought…”
“How would we ever know for sure?” I asked.
“Maybe we won’t,” Cormac said, “we’ll talk about it in the morning.”
I was restless to look for clues that my theory, my premonition, was right. Darleen was already gone when I woke up, and Cormac was breathing softly, undisturbed by the thought of sleeping on in Caroline’s bed.
I grabbed the box full of letters and quietly scoured the room, feeling under the armoire, looking in coat pockets, rifling through drawers, slipping on another chunky diamond ring, no less than two karats, from her jewelry box.
I wore at least one or two pieces of her jewelry almost constantly, and I wasn’t sure why I felt such a strong urge to, but I didn’t care to try to stop myself anymore. I was embracing the weirdness of it all, I guess.
I found an envelope full of money, a bundle of German bills, marks, that were certainly rendered worthless by World War II.
I went back to the East Wing to take a shower, and after I came out of the bathroom wrapped in a towel, I ran into Darleen at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee.
“Hey,” I said, heading to grab some clothes.
“Hey,” she said, “last night, what happened… did you have a nightmare?”
“Let me get dressed,” I said, “and then we can talk, is there any coffee yet?”
“Yeah,” she said with an expectant smile, as I slipped into the bedroom.
Sitting across from her at the table, in jeans and a t-shirt, I explained my premonition, admitting that it could be meaningless.
“That sounds like it could be completely plausible,” she said, “but then what happened to her?”
I shrugged.
“I’m going to be sad to leave,” she said, “I want to know what happens now.”
“We’ll probably never figure it out,” I said, “when do you go?”
“I actually need to leave today,�
�� she said, “I just got a call this morning, I went halfway down the hill to get phone service and check my messages… someone from the firm should be at a meeting in Paris tomorrow, it makes sense it should be me since I’m already in Europe.”
“So you’re not going to do the project?” I asked.
“Oh, I have enough photographs and measurements to make a lot of plans, that’s what I came for, photos, enough measurements to make some blueprints, I could draft a first proposal in the next six weeks.”
“After that,” I asked sadly, “how long until construction begins?”
“It depends on how long it takes for me and Cormac to find a contractor and crew,” she said with a shrug, “but not long.”
I nodded.
“I really liked meeting you, Astrid,” Darleen said, “and I really like you and Cormac together.”
“We’re not together,” I said.
“Oh, well, you should be,” she said with a laugh, “you guys are perfect for each other.”
I rolled my eyes and laughed.
“I’m serious,” she said, “I think he really cares about you, about doing this the right way for you. No one else is going to.”
“He could just leave it alone,” I sighed.
“I don’t think he can,” Darleen said, “he talked the board of his company into buying the debt, he can’t walk away or he’ll be ousted as CEO in about three minutes, and it’s his mother’s family’s company. It’s the last connection he has to her.”
I had never realized that, or even thought about it. I blinked, my thoughts racing. I’d thought Cormac could do anything he wanted, but he was just as motivated as I was and had a lot more resources.
“This place, this is all I have left of everything I thought I was,” I said.
“So imagine how freeing it will be when you can walk away, when you can be whoever you want to be,” she said.
“I don’t know if I have the energy for that,” I admitted.
“You’ll figure it out,” Darleen said, “but first I think you should figure out what happened to Caroline.”
Later that day, Cormac and I drove Darleen back into town in the Aston Martin, and then, as she stepped onto the bus that would take her to the airport outside of Austria, we were suddenly alone again.
“Cormac, would you lose your position as CEO if you walked away from the castle?” I asked as we drove over the countryside, taking a long way back to the castle.
He shrugged.
“I probably would,” he said, “but if I’d told you that you would have just said I’m a billionaire anyway, what difference does it make?”
“It’s your mom’s company, isn’t it? The Opal Hotels were her family…”
“Yep,” he said, smiling and nodding, staring straight ahead.
“You could have told me that,” I said.
“And what, be just as irrationally sentimental as you? No thanks.”
I shook my head and laughed, looking out over a golden field, stalks of wheat swaying in the afternoon breeze. I was so happy to have him beside me in spite of everything.
It was, in that moment, I think, that I realized I was really in love with him.
“What are we going to do?” I asked.
“What do you want to do?”
“I don’t know anymore,” I admitted, “I was so certain, but now I don’t know. I don’t want to leave the castle yet.”
“I don’t want you to,” he said, “you don’t have to, you can stay forever for all I care.”
“Will you stay forever?”
“No,” he said, “I’ll be back, but no, I need to go surfing, need to see my other properties… I haven’t stayed in one place this long in a really long time.”
“Well I’m glad you did,” I said, “I’ll be sad to see you go.”
“We’ve had a pretty wild time, haven’t we?”
“It’s been… unreal,” I said, “truly.”
Back at the castle, Cormac and I went back to the East Wing, made dinner with food we’d picked up in town, and cracked open a bottle of wine from the cellar.
“When will you leave?” I asked him.
“I don’t know yet,” he said, “have you given up on fighting me about the castle?”
“No,” I said, “maybe I’ll burn it to the ground.”
“That sounds like a real Caroline move, but I don’t think you can burn a stone castle anyway.”
“When I leave, if I leave, I won’t be anybody anymore,” I said.
Cormac shook his head.
“You’re already somebody, Astrid.”
We drank.
We cracked open another bottle of wine.
“Let’s go to the West Wing,” Cormac said, his eyes glittering mischievously, “I can’t leave here without figuring a few more things out. Let’s at least go dig into your great grandfather’s journals, there has to be more in there…”
“I’ve looked through them,” I said, “there’s nothing…”
“What does he say about your great-grandmother? Your grandfather?”
“Nothing,” I said with a shrug, “it’s weird, it’s like, he couldn’t deal with the pain, maybe? He just became this… hedonist, I guess…”
“I couldn’t forget about my wife, my child like that,” he said, “that’s something that doesn’t make sense to me.”
“He didn’t forget about them,” I said, “he supported us, my grandfather, with every last penny he had.”
“Sure,” Cormac said, “I guess your right, it just seems like he was kind of detached.”
“Yeah,” I said, “I’ve thought that too…”
“Let’s go, come on,” Cormac said.
We found ourselves in my great grandfather’s library, which he seemed to have used as an office, flipping through his journals, passing a bottle of port back and fourth as we read out loud to one another.
“…Caroline will beg for my seed like she’s starving for it, and when I come inside of her she trembles gratefully…”
“…the voluptuous gypsies we met on the Champs Elyse promised depravity the likes of which we’d never seen, and they delivered, servicing me and Caroline like sex slaves…”
We fucked, we drank, we read.
“…Caroline’s jealousy is getting uncontrollable…” Cormac and I looked at each other before I continued to read, “she seems to be afraid that Sophie will replace her, which would never happen. Even if what the girl says is true, we will make arrangements, Caroline will always rule my heart…”
Cormac and I looked at each other again.
“What more do you need?” he asked.
“It’s no smoking gun,” I said, “but it’s… something.”
Cormac got up and started looking through the room, pulling books back, lifting furniture.
“What are you looking for?” I asked.
“Journals that are from after Caroline,” I said, “he wrote about everything, there’s no way that there’s nothing here…”
I stood up and walked over to the desk. I pulled on the drawers one by one, opening them, until I got to the bottom shelf. I felt the ruby, warm and heavy, hanging between my breasts, and I felt like I was close to something.
“Cormac,” I said, noticing that the drawer was short, didn’t pull out all the way “look.”
I knelt down and looked beneath the desk. The bottom drawer, sure enough, was divided in half, with a hidden second compartment set behind it.
“There’s a key hole,” I whispered, “to unlock the other half of the drawer…”
I heard the jangle of keys, and Cormac drew the iron skeleton keys from his pocket as quickly as he could.
“Here you go,” he said, handing them off to me.
“Ok, ok,” I said, breathing, trying each key until the third one fit.
We both stopped breathing as I clicked it and slipped the drawer out of the desk, pulling it all the way out, setting it on top of the desk. I breathed, closing my eyes, and op
ened it slowly, lifting the hinged lid and peering inside with a strange, shuddering hesitation.
“I was right,” I said, withdrawing a medical evaluation, written in German, out of the box.
“She was pregnant?”
“Yes, she brought him proof, here it is…”
A doctor’s letter, written in German, congratulating her on her child. Poor girl.
“What else is in there?”
“A few journals,” I said, rushing to open them.
“She was pregnant, and Caroline couldn’t deal with it,” Cormac said. piecing things together, “and then…”
I pulled out a letter, addressed to Caroline.
“It’s from Eddie Lowell…” I gasped, “but why is it up here? Caroline, I’m coming on my furlough from the army… the date, though, Sophie would have been dead for months…”
“…and Caroline?”
“We don’t know when she died,” I said, “but… you haven’t written me back, you haven’t telegrammed, we’re all so worried about you…”
“She was already dead,” Cormac said, “the baron intercepted the letter.”
Cormac retrieved something else from the box.
“What is it?” I asked, craning my neck to see.
“Hold on,” Cormac said, “I can’t read German.”
I snatched the paper from his hand impatiently.
“This is an acknowledgment of paternity of… Audrick Griffen…”
“What?” I asked, looking up at Cormac, “that’s my grandfather’s name!”
“Why would he have to acknowledge the paternity…”
“It’s dated 1942,” I said, shaking my head, “that’s impossible… my grandfather was already an adult…”
“What does it mean?” Cormac said, “why would he have to acknowledge the paternity of his own child? How does that make sense?”