A Dowry of Blood (A Dowry of Blood, #1)

by S.T. Gibson

ven loneliness, hollow and cold, becomes so familiar it starts to feel like a friend.

"Even"

am trying to tell you why I did what I did. It is the only way I can think to survive and I hope, even now, that you would be proud of my determination to persist.

Nothing else will do. Nothing less than a full account of our life together, from the trembling start all the way to the brutal end. I fear I will go mad if I don’t leave behind some kind of record. If I write it down, I won’t be able to convince myself that none of it happened. I won’t be able to tell myself that you didn’t mean any of it, that it was all just some terrible dream.

I will render you as you really were, neither cast in pristine stained glass nor unholy fire.

Sharp, dark eyes, a Romanesque nose, and a severe mouth. There was no shadow of malnutrition or disease on your face, no childhood scar gone white with age. Just smooth, impassable perfection, so beautiful it hurt to look at.

you have in you more of the scientist obsessed than the lover possessed, and that your examinations lend themselves more towards a scrutiny of weakness, imperfection, any detail in need of your corrective care.

My long reddish hair shined with the illusion of life but was always cold to the touch, even in the sunlight, and my skin had a pallor most women had to paint their faces with white lead solution to achieve. My eyes were dark and flat, more animal than woman, and I often startled passersby because

“Love makes monsters of us, Constanta, and not everyone is cut out for monstrosity.

that. I thought that she was simply fading the way flowers denied sunlight droop and die.

I loved you too much, my lord. I craved you like maidens crave the grave, the way death burns for human touch: inconsolably, unrelentingly, aching for the annihilation in your kiss.

The love he had for you was the cartographer’s love for the sea, trembling and all-consuming and so far beyond the reaches of right or wrong.

“Don’t you dare apologize,” Magdalena said, dark eyes flashing with passion. “I never want to hear you apologize for something he’s done ever again. It has to stop, Constanta. It all has to stop.”

“It would be easier if he hated us,” she said. “But he loves us all terribly. And if we go on letting him love us, that love is going to kill us. That’s what makes him so dangerous.”

Fear for your life made you look like a man who could really love and be loved, like you might hand over your heart and all its secrets without my having to crack your ribs open to get to them.

Slowly, the noose of your love was loosening around my neck.

Your memory will fade to shadow and I shall never speak your name again, not even when I tell my lovers the story of how we two met. There will only be sweetness and kindheartedness, and a hundred years of bliss.

That explains why we never got name except for "my lord"

But when I thought of a lover, I thought of Magdalena and Constanta. Everyone else paled in comparison to their radiance.

Magdalena was here with me, my stern, beautiful Magdalena with her heart like liquid gold. And so was Constanta, lovely, dreamy Constanta with her mouth shaped like compassion. My sisters, my most intimate friends. My girls, mine.

I would have crawled to her if she asked me, on my hands and knees like a dog.