Body trembling, and nerves raw, she climbed from the bed and tiptoed to the closet doors. The bedroom curtains had been left open, and the moon was full and high. The blue glow from the sky kissed the room, illuminating where Raphael usually lay. But when Maria’s eyes found him, he wasn’t lying down. He was kneeling on the bed, head cast down and palms flat to the mattress. He was inhaling shaky, shallow breaths. Maria stepped forward, and when she grew near she saw that he was coated in sweat. His messy dark hair was clumped into strands and lay haphazardly over his forehead. A lump lodged in her throat at seeing such a formidable man so torn.
Maria couldn’t help it. She reached forward and laid her hand on Raphael’s head. His breathing paused. Maria’s heart lodged in her throat, fearing she’d pushed him too far. Raphael’s body grew rigid, but his head began to rise, slowly. Maria held her breath as his haunted golden eyes met hers. Her bottom lip trembled at the lost expression on his face, at the tear tracks tattooed on his stubbled cheeks. His lips were pale and, seeing him there, alone on his bed with nowhere to turn, Maria wanted to be the one he turned to. No, she needed to be. She knew that feeling. Knew that suffocating, all-consuming, drowning feeling of being absolutely alone in the world, segregated by pain and despair.
Maria yelped as Raphael cast out his arm and gripped her wrist, his teeth bared. Fire lit in his eyes, replacing the sadness with what looked like naked hatred. Maria tried to pull back her unwanted touch, but Raphael’s grip was strong. “Do you want to die, little rose?” he asked calmly, but with threat in his low, exhausted voice. “Do you want me to wrap my hands around your pretty slim neck and end you now?”
Maria stayed quiet, and as if she were facing the most dangerous predator, she dropped her eyes, body sagging, becoming pliant. She wanted to show she was no threat, that she only wanted to be of comfort. Raphael squeezed her harder. Maria fought back a whimper, but then he threw her hand aside. “Get back to bed and don’t bother me until morning.” Despite his harsh words, she could hear the raw pain in his dismissive tone. Hear the fragility of his heart.
Maria knew she should have turned but, defiant, she stayed still. She knew she should have kept her eyes downcast like Raphael had ordered her from her very arrival in this mansion. But she didn’t. She disobeyed it all.
Maria raised her head, meeting Raphael’s ever-furious gaze. He made to move toward her, but she stepped back. She pictured the reflection of her naked body in the bathroom. How she had failed once again to face her scars. Meeting Raphael’s lost and haunted gaze, a wave of courage overcame her. Maria acted immediately, just in case she lost her strength. Lifting her hands, she brushed the straps of her dress off her shoulders. Raphael’s nostrils flared when her body was bared. Maria had shown him most of her body over the past weeks. But she had never rid herself of her dress; he had never removed it. She had never so boldly displayed her body for his eyes. She hadn’t even bared it fully to herself.
Raphael’s jaw clenched. Maria saw his length begin to swell. But it wasn’t about sex right now; it was about commonality and understanding. It was about compassion . . . about pain and darkness shared.
It was about healing.
Ignoring her weakening legs and arms, Maria began to lift her hair. Raphael was rapt, watching the long strands lift inch by inch until Maria had made a messy bun on the top of her head. She wound the hair around and around, tucking the strands under until her hair was secured out of the way. His eyebrows pulled together curiously.
Maria fought the fear clawing up her throat. Closing her eyes, she began to turn. She feared her legs would give way, but she held strong as she revealed her back to Raphael. Five years. It was five years to the day that she had been taken. Five years since her skin had been stripped from her body. Since she had been bound and gagged and placed in the darkness of a coffin.
Maria’s eyes opened, and she focused on the ruined picture Raphael had destroyed only hours before. It had been of a white dove in flight, soaring through a crystal-blue sky. Only now the dove was ripped apart, the canvas ruined, and the blue sky fragmented into nothing. “His name was William Bridge,” she confessed, the dark memories releasing from the inner prison in which they had been buried. “I didn’t know it until much later, but he was a janitor at my school. He had been watching me for months before he came for me.” Maria fought through her thick throat. “I don’t know why he had singled me out from any other student. It was never discovered.” She paused to gather her composure. “When I was sixteen, he broke into our home.” She kept her voice steady, even though her pulse was firing at the speed of light and the visions of that night were crushing any joy she had ever been able to feel. “He killed my father. Then my brother. He killed my mother.” Maria felt a tear escape her eye, but she didn’t wipe it away. Her hands were paralyzed at the knowledge that someone was seeing her back. Even she had not been able to look at it, growing her hair so long that it had become her shield. Protecting her from the past she had been running away from for so many years. “He didn’t kill me,” she continued. “It wasn’t about death with me. Instead he captured me and took me to his home, deep in the countryside. The home where he took all his victims.” Maria inhaled a shuddering breath. “He placed me in a coffin. In a metal coffin with tiny vents so I could just about breathe.” She closed her eyes and was immediately taken back there. Fear, so strong and intense that it was crippling, took hold of her body. But her confession poured from her lips. She knew once she had opened up about that time, she would never be able to stop. Maria curled her arms over her naked breasts and tried her best to keep her composure. “He kept me there for days, only opening the lid to give me enough water and hunks of bread to keep me alive.” In her stomach, Maria felt the endless pit of despair that had kept her company all those months form once more. “I was starved and kept in the coffin for so many days I thought I would die.” Maria’s face became flooded with tears; the room before her blurred. “Then he came for me.” Maria flinched at the memory of the bright sun blinding her eyes after so many days in the coffin. She remembered the pain in her body as she was forced to walk, her muscles cramping at being awoken from their forced sleep. She recalled the pounding headache from lack of food. Maria glanced down at her naked body. She recalled the bones jutting out from her sallow skin, how her stomach concaved and her legs and arms were nothing but pale skin draped over bone. Maria sobbed, but she kept speaking. “He tied me to a wooden table by my wrists and ankles, stomach down. That’s when he began slicing into my flesh. Stripping the skin off my back in pieces, as if I were a cow and he was collecting my hide.” Maria felt the knife in her back as though she were back on the table. She held back her scream as she felt the skin being pulled from her wasted muscles. “When he had taken what he wanted, he placed me back in the coffin, face down. He left me there in pain, no relief. He fed me through a latch in the bottom of the coffin. A hole out of which I could vomit when the pain and infection became too much.” Maria shuddered as she remembered those hazy days of nothing but agony. “He only ever took a small piece of my skin at a time. Leaving me for weeks in between.” She shook her head. “I didn’t know why. I was so far gone mentally and physically I never considered it.”