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Eventually, even your death becomes its own sort of inevitability.
You coaxed that tenacity out of me and broke it down in your hands, leaving me on your work table like a desiccated doll until you were ready to repair me.
ven loneliness, hollow and cold, becomes so familiar it starts to feel like a friend.
I will make you into nothing more than a man, tender and brutal in equal measure, and perhaps in doing so I will justify myself to you.
This is my last love letter to you, though some would call it a confession. I suppose both are a sort of gentle violence, putting down in ink what scorches the air when spoken aloud.
I wonder if you would have wanted me if you found me like that: vibrant and loved and alive.
It was a purifying kind of fire, like I was being scorched clean from the inside out.
I wanted to break them, even more slowly and painfully than they had broken me, leave them bleeding out and begging for mercy.
“Water your mother’s flowers with their blood.” I nodded, my breath coming shallow and hot. “Yes, my lord.”
But I am not your wife anymore, my lord, and I don’t think you ever truly saw me as a whole woman. I was always a student. A project. An accessory in the legal and decorative sense.
You did not let me keep my name, so I will strip you of yours. In this world, you are what I say you are, and I say you are a ghost, a long night’s fever dream that I have finally woken up from. I say you are the smoke-wisp memory of a flame, thawing ice suffering under an early spring sun, a chalk ledger of debts being wiped clean. I say you do not have a name.
In that moment, my life was not my own any longer. I felt it slipping away from me the way girlhoods must slip from women who are given proper church marriages and cups of communion wine, not bruising kisses and battlefields full of blood.
There are no angels in this world to accompany the dying in their final moments, only pickpockets and carrion birds.
agonized. I knew then I would chase your tiny moments of weakness all the way into hell and back. What is more lovely, after all, than a monster undone with wanting?
think, my lord, that this is when you loved me best. When I was freshly made, and still as malleable as wet clay in your hands.
I lost myself so entirely in charting the contours of my love for you that there wasn’t any room for tracking time.
“Power, of course. To know oneself, one’s limits and abilities, is its own power. To know how one may best subdue another with similar abilities is another.”
“Does that mean I could sire another?” I said, pressing my hand to my abdomen in shock. An old habit, associating birth with a womb. But it wasn’t childbirth I had in mind. You gave me one of your surveying glances.
But you must understand, I was only a girl.
I believed, was to surrender myself to you with total abandon and adoration. And God, how I adored you. It went beyond love, beyond devotion.
You turned a strong-minded girl into a pulsing wound of need. I never knew the meaning of the word enthralled before you.
His mask dropped to the floor, spilling flowers at your feet. Blood trickled down his neck onto the blooms, and my mouth watered at the tangy scent of iron.
In my mind, I was God’s lovely angel of judgment, come to unsheathe the sword of divine wrath against those who truly deserved it.
“You will have the poor with you always; is that not what your Christ says?” you said with a sneer.
I wouldn’t realize until later that you were irritable precisely because I was in bloom, because there were suddenly so many sources of joy in my life apart from your presence.
I would go out of my way to fix her plates of cheese and apples even though I had started to lose my taste for mortal food by then. I think I could have loved her, if I was given a chance.
“You wish to run off and live a rustic life with her in her hovel, is that it?” “What? No! My lord – I would never – I love you! You and only you have my heart.”
I hadn’t been without you for a single day since you found me, and I realized with shattering terror that I had no idea who I was if you were not at my side.
I never penetrated to the burning heart of you, only came away with empty, scorched fingers.
I was happy to spend countless lifetimes chasing the warmth coming off you, even though the haze was clouding my vision. I still wake to the smell of smoke sometimes.
My piety was a sporadic, half-feral thing, sometimes lashing out at God with teeth bared, other times nuzzling against His loving providence like a kitten, but prayer steadied me. Whether I was talking to myself or something more, it brought me peace.
Vienna seemed to me a perfect encapsulation of the wonder of city life, and I shuddered to think she may fall.
From such a great distance, the faithful torches burning along the outer wall made it look like Vienna was on fire.
I had earned my right in your bed and I hadn’t been consulted on inviting somebody else in, no matter how beautiful she was.
I didn’t know if I wanted all of your attention, or all of Magdalena’s.
Maybe it wouldn’t be terrible, a treacherous thought offered, to share you with another if you still looked at me like that when we were alone.
“Do you want Magdalena for your own? To be your companion by day and warm your bed by night?” Jealousy slithered up my throat as quick as a snake. But there was some other emotion mingled in, dark and sweet. Desire.
“Ours is a solitary existence. It would be good for you to have a friend. A sister. I have never forbidden you from taking lovers, Constanta. Remember that.”
You made it sound like a gift, a gentle reminder of my own freedom. But I heard your double meaning: do not deny me this.
How can I blame you for wanting her, my lord, when I wanted her so badly myself?
Moving with shameless deliberateness, Magdalena cupped my jaw in her hand and kissed me full on the mouth.
behavior they had seen from Magdalena. “You must never overthink any good and pleasurable thing,” Magdalena went on, her cheek almost pressed to mine as we twirled. The wine on her breath was as sweet as blackcurrants.
“We should never deny ourselves any pleasure in this life.” I could almost hear you in those words. Had you coached her? I wondered.
“You must sit with me tonight at dinner. I must have you close, Constanta. I want us to be the best of friends.”
“I think I shall never marry, my lord. I will simply take lovers and never let any man shackle me with wedding vows.”
I grant them a private audience, but that’s as far as it will ever go. Not that they know that, of course. They sincerely believe they have a chance, poor boys.”
the other third simper and fawn because they know where true power lies, and they wish to ingratiate themselves with it.”
“And the women?” “Ah,” she said, her voice almost a purr. She broke eye contact with you and shot me a smirk. “Women are another matter entirely.”
Her blood smelled strongly spiced and as sweet as fortified wine, shot through with a salacious, irresistible musk.
I wanted to take her away from you and pull her into some darkened hallway, unfasten the lace ruff from around her throat and run my mouth along the pale slope of her neck.
