Thirty-Nine ◑ The Husband

The warmth circulating in the bedroom vanished in a split-second as though sucked out by a powerful vacuum.

Lucille stood motionless by the door, her hand growing slack around the doorknob. Denial punctured every pore of her body as her senses recovered from her numb shock. Her heart, which had seized up, began to beat once more, even though it was in a pace that made her gasp for air. She pressed her head against the crack between the door and its frame, closing her eyes and straining to listen to the voices outside, hoping against hope that she was mistaken. That this wasn't what she suspected it was.

But she was right. It's Agnes.

Clear as a bell, as sweet and mellifluous as Lucille remembered, was Agnes's voice. She was engaging Cade pleadingly, like they'd been doing this countless times before.

"You let her in here?" she nearly whimpered. "Why?"

"Because I had to," Cade replied. "Our cover would've been blown too soon, so I had to . . . keep her company."

"Keep her company," Agnes repeated with an incredulous huff. "You said I was the one you loved. You said I was the one you ever truly loved, even after all those years."

"And you still are," he said, and his voice softened in pliant surrender, exuding a strong emotion that could only be called love. It was something too intimate to even hear in this context. It was too raw, too real. "You're the reason why I'm doing this. We can't be together if she's still here."

"But I can't do what you asked me to do." She sounded close to tears now. "She's my friend."

"She's not. She never was." Cade's tone darkened in warning. "Remember your flashbacks. Remember what she made you see and feel. Those memories are what brought you to me in the first place, and I have proved to you over and over that they're real. We'll just take the candle. Once we have it, she'll be mortal. She can be ended. The rest will fall into place from there."

Lucille had heard enough. Enough for her knees to turn to lead, enough for her entire world to go black and leave her in a floating state of disbelief and shame.

The humiliation burning at the back of her throat triggered a natural, almost primal urge to shift the narrative, to find a way to disprove what was presented to her. She tried to turn the doorknob, but it was locked from outside. The need to go out and explode was intense now, so much so that she brought her fist towards the door in a forceful arc that should've smashed through the wood.

But it didn't.

Her knuckles had collided with the surface, yes, but nothing was broken. Not even her hand. There was some kind of an element that slowed her hit halfway, rendering it useless.

It did, however, still make a sound.

The thud of her fist against the door shook the entire room. The two stopped whispering immediately.

Lucille took this as a chance to wreak havoc on the locked door, ramming through it with her entire weight. It didn't budge. It didn't even move. Either something supernatural was keeping it in place, or an equally strong force was hindering her ability to tear it down. Still, she kept pummeling her fists on the door, filling the entire place with noise, all the while stopping herself from screaming.

If she opened her mouth, she would cry. And the last thing she wanted was to succumb to the ache in her heart.

So she punched and pushed with all the strength she could muster, her teeth bared in a silent snarl. She didn't stop even when she felt a peculiar sear of pain around her left wrist where her bracelet was locked, not when she heard heavy footsteps echoing from the other side.

She didn't need to see who it was.

"So you're up," Cade commented in a casual tone.

Lucille answered by shouldering the door. Another bolt of pain seized her wrist. This time, the gold chain of the bracelet visibly tightened around her wrist, glowing momentarily orange as though set in its melting point. Her skin sizzled.

The bracelet. It was preventing her from using her magic.

Cade exhaled exasperatedly. "You're only hurting yourself."

The words reverberated in Lucille's mind and triggered a succession of memories flashing rapidly. She was thrown back, way back to the life she had long forgotten, to the man at the other side of the door and to the very words he'd just uttered. Only in a different language, only in a different context. Once again, she was in that cursed candlelit bedroom, on that carved marital bed, beaten and bruised and heartbroken.

Except this time, it wasn't Dimitri who stood over her. It was Cade.

It had always been Cade.

Her husband, her love, her death.

This was exactly something that destiny would cook up. The whole thing seemed like a farce at this point. Out there was the woman she'd trusted with her life and the man she was sure she'd fallen for again—the people who'd caused her demise all those centuries ago.

Their paths had indeed crossed. Lucille should've known. She should've seen this coming, read all the signs. . . .

Instead, she had blindly waltzed into the twisted trap of her past and let history repeat itself.

A towering wave of anger crashed over Lucille, sending streaks of heat into her veins, her bones. She was disgusted with herself, absolutely repulsed, and this self-loathing coursed through her until she found the strength to scream.

All the rage, all the pain. They came flowing out of her in layers of shimmering heat that turned into wisps of fire. However, the bracelet around her wrist held back the building power bursting out of her. The room went from fiery warm to deathly cold in a fraction of a second.

"It's futile," Cade said as though he could see through the door. "You'll never get yourself out of there."

"Cade," Agnes began to say in the background, but she didn't continue.

Tears of fury clouded Lucille's eyes. "Agnes. . . ."

"Don't even try," he warned her. "You've done enough damage. You know what comes next. You know it's inevitable."

This resonated in her mind again, tugging at strings of memories that had been hiding there for the longest time. Her vision blurred, the colors shifting and melting to form what seemed like an amphitheatre. There she'd glimpsed dozens of men, and among them was Cade, dressed in a tunic and an armor.

Her past. She was getting dragged into the past again. She didn't want to see it. She didn't want to experience her own stupidity again, didn't want to witness it unfold before her eyes.

"It's quite astonishing how gullible you've become," Cade told her in a detached, uncaring tone. "First you took Mia's word as it was, without asking for anything more. But I suppose you and that woman are made of the same stuff. You're just as unstable, just as foolish to think you're doing things for love. After that, you took my bait and believed that Dimitri was the one you should stay away from—"

"Stop!" Lucille couldn't bear to listen to him repeat her mistakes. "I will—"

"Kill me? Kill us?" He was mocking her now. "You really haven't changed, have you? You just got better at hiding who you are. I admit, at first I couldn't quite believe you're the same woman I'd married, the one who'd promised to screw me over in every way possible. I almost believed you've changed, but no. You're still the same nightmare, the same delusional lunatic hiding under the facade of a starry-eyed girl—"

"What more do you want?" she yelled. "You finally have me here, what else could you possible want?"

"Finally?" Cade repeated meekly, like this was some sort of a private joke. "This is only the start."

"No," Lucille growled, pounding against the door, only to find that the bracelet was stuck in her wrist like a too-tight shackle. From the other side of the door, the sound of Cade's retreating footsteps grated her ears. "No!"

Whether or not he said anything more, Lucille didn't hear. Her anger exploded, but along with it came a pain so intense that it blanketed over her senses.

She couldn't even properly hear herself anymore, yet she knew she was screaming herself hoarse. She tried to summon more of her powers even with the growing sting in her wrist. The gold was impaling her now, cutting through her skin and causing thick rivulets of blood to flow down her arm.

Then there was silence, the kind that made her ears ring. Dazed and losing every sense of reality, she picked up a chair and threw it at the window, but the thing shattered upon contact. The room was air-tight, and escape was just as futile as Cade had said it would be. Her left hand was slick with blood now. The rest of her body was limp.

If this was the truth, she wished to have no part of it. She didn't want to remember. She'd die if she recovered even a bit of memory.

Lucille collapsed on the floor, which seemed to be moving in waves under her. She was consumed with betrayal, hatred, and rage. It crept up her body like poison being pumped through her veins. Her surroundings began to dissolve rapidly, carrying her away. . . .

Into the recesses of how they first met.