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“Oh, I want her.” Marcus released his hold upon Montgomery, freeing the man to rub one hand to his tender throat. “I want her miserable. Crawling, begging, pleading for a crumb of mercy.”
There had been such a lot of shouting—mostly his—on the very public street that he had thrown her out into. Had he been thinking clearly at the time, he might have exercised a bit more discretion in it, but that had not been possible for him then.
“How very like a man to make a woman his mistress and then to hold her in contempt for it. I am what you made me.”
‘Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves.’”
“Do you think I favored your mother when I wed her? I did my damned duty!”
“You are going to return to the stage feeling me between your thighs,” he said. “You’ll hardly notice your hair.”
“The truth is, my lord, that I don’t think she cared enough to tell you. It doesn’t matter what you think of her any longer. If she chooses to amuse herself with you, then that is her affair. But you won’t keep her.”
“It’s not enough to have been forgiven for the past. You must always have more.”
“You will never know how generous. For your own sake—” Her voice faltered, breaking across the syllables with a sort of quiet anguish. “For your own sake, I hope you never learn.”
“She was the foolish one, to ask for things she knows well enough I cannot give her. She knows why I will not marry her.”
Because he had withheld from her his trust, his love, and she would have needed both of them if their relationship were to survive the Sword of Damocles his father had hung above it.
Only now, watching himself savage her honor, demean her and humiliate her, could he understand the rage she had carried with her onto the stage when she had acted Paulina. Only now could he understand how little Leontes deserved the happy ending he would, after all was said and done, receive.
“For so long—years—I believed her to be untrustworthy, when all along I was the one who could not be trusted.”
“The last words you spoke to me five years ago,” she said stiffly. “Do you remember them?” “Yes,” he said, pressing his fingers to his eyes. As clearly as if they had just been spoken. Leave London. Should you ever return, I will make you regret it. “Yes.” “I do regret it,” she said, and her shoulders sank, defeated. “I do regret it. So I suppose you’ve won after all.” His head dropped back against the door as his eyes burned with helpless tears. He’d won nothing—nothing at all. They had both lost.
“I love you,” he said. “I have always loved you. And that is yours without expectation or obligation. Even if you don’t want it. Even if you throw me away.”
Just let me love you. Because I—I could spent the next fifty years of my life paying for my transgressions in whichever way you deem appropriate, and still I would be happier than I have ever been without you.”
I became a victim of Chekhov’s Gun (which is a narrative principle that says that if a gun is introduced in act one, it should, at some point, be fired).
