He has me on my feet in an instant. All the tenderness of a moment ago has vanished almost like it hadn’t happened. Like I imagined it.
“Santiago.” Holding my arm at an awkward angle, he picks up the rosary from the nightstand and marches me out of my room, his footfalls sure while mine are silent. “You’re hurting me.”
“I’m being more than patient with you when you seem incapable of following one simple instruction.”
We hurry through the house, and I try to keep up while taking it all in, all the shadowy corridors, the dimly lit spaces, richly textured carpets and curtains, intricately carved wood. It’s out of an old vampire movie, this place.
“Slow down,” I ask when I slip on the stairs he hurries us down.
“Keep up,” he retorts, righting me before I fall.
There’s no one around, and I wonder what time it is. All I can see is that it’s nearly a black night apart for a sliver of moonlight.
“Where are we going?” I ask when we walk through the large kitchen, also dark and ancient looking with only the appliances seeming to be from this century.
He pulls open the door and is about to take a step but pauses and looks at my bare feet.
“Do you ever wear shoes?” he asks, but he’s not waiting for my reply. I don’t even think it’s a real question. But in the next instant, he has me hauled over his shoulder, the flimsy nightgown riding to the tops of my thighs, the wind cool against the backs of my bare legs.
I bounce on his shoulder and look back at the house. It’s even bigger than I’d realized. Four floors with spires disappearing into the low-hanging clouds and thick ivy crawling along the walls. At the center is a large arched window, the glass stained, at the head the window segments creating an ornate circle.
No. Not a circle.
A rose. The segments make up the petals.
De La Rosa. Of the rose.
A light goes on in one of the upstairs windows in a separate part of the house. Through the cast iron I see movement. A woman’s figure. When she sees us, she draws the curtain wider and openly watches.
But in the next instant, I hear a heavy door creak on its hinges as its opened, the smell of church enveloping me again. I crane my neck to look around the small chapel as Santiago closes the door and sets me on my feet.
I take in the pews, six on each side. The wood simple. Kneelers in each without cushions and worn Bibles in two of the pews.
At the back left corner is the baptismal font. It’s large and ornate, made of the same material as the altar. In the opposite corner is a simple confessional. In the place of doors is a deep red velvet curtain to give the penitent the impression of privacy.
Santiago walks to the altar. He doesn’t stop to make the sign of the cross. Doesn’t bow like the nuns taught us to. I wonder about that. About his devotion. His belief. He has a fascination for religion, I think. I don’t know. But after what he did yesterday, how he did it bending me over the altar in the chapel, a sacred place, pouring wax from the altar candles onto my hips. A devout man would not do that, certainly. And then there’s the rosary. Why give me a rosary on our wedding night? Why become so angry when you find I’m not wearing it?
At the altar, he doesn’t raise his head to acknowledge the crucified Christ. Instead, he picks up a box of matches and lights several candles. I notice, though, that the red of the tabernacle lamp glows, and I wonder who maintains it. If there’s a priest or if it’s him.
I think about the woman at the window. “Does your sister live here? At the house I mean?”
He finishes lighting the candles and blows the match out.
I take in the two framed photographs on the altar. It’s a strange place to keep photos, but I wonder if it isn’t his father and brother. I step closer and think yes. I remember seeing them just a few times, and there is a resemblance. They died in that explosion that scarred him.
When I look at Santiago again, I find him watching me, and I take him in. His scars. The tattoo on his face. I glance at those photos again.
He walked away scarred but alive.
They died.
Something inside me feels a tenderness I can’t describe in that instant. I don’t know what it is. Why this matters. I don’t know if it’s the look in his eyes. The loneliness he wears like a coat. No, a second skin. Not something one can remove.
Is that why all this hardness?
But then he slips the rosary out of his pocket and sets it on the altar and bends to open a chest set beneath the altar.
“Strip, Ivy,” he says without bothering to look at me.
My heart does a double beat. “What?”
He glances behind him as he rummages through the chest. “Strip and kneel.”
“We’re in church.”
He pauses, turns to look at me and half-laughs then shakes his head and resumes his work.
“Strip and kneel. I won’t ask you again.”
I glance back at the door, but no one will come in. I turn to look up at the altar. At Christ. Apart from the wedding, I haven’t been to church since I left home. I told my father I went weekly but I never did. I haven’t been to confession since then, either. Do I even believe anymore? I don’t know.
“Ivy.”
I blink to look at Santiago’s back as he sets things on the altar. He’s not looking at me, but he’s warning me all the same.
I pull the nightie off, shudder at my nakedness as I lay it over the back of the nearest pew. He’s just turning to me when I slip off my panties and set them on top of the nightgown, and I watch his eyes as he takes me in. They’ve darkened. And when he meets mine, I see the hunger inside them. Something insatiable.
And it’s like my body feels it. Or maybe it’s that it remembers his touch. Remembers the orgasm because my nipples tighten, and there’s a dampness between my thighs.
I lower myself to my knees and look beyond him to the altar. To what he placed on it. And my stomach falls away. I know the long, innocuous-looking cane from my years at the nun’s school. And the wooden paddle, although thankfully I’ve never felt that. The cane, though. That was Sister Mary Anthony’s favorite.
There are other things too. A short leather strap. Another heavier cane. More paddles. They don’t look new. In fact, they look well-worn.
I swallow, turn my gaze up to his.
He studies me for a long minute, the silence heavy around us. The air in this place weighted.
As if reading my mind, he turns back to his collection, chooses the long, wispy cane and picks up the rosary, then walks toward me. He cocks his head to the side and taps my clasped hands with the end of the cane. I hadn’t realized I’d been holding them in prayer.
“Habit,” he says.
I nod, but it’s not so much a question.
He drops the rosary around my neck. The beads feel cold and heavy like each one is a weight.
“You don’t go to church. You haven’t been to a mass in the past half year.”
“How do you know?”
“You think I didn’t have someone watching you?” He walks a circle around me, and I turn my head to the right, then to the left to follow him.
“Why would you do that?”
“Because I knew in time, you’d be mine.” He’s still circling.
“Why?”
“That’s for another time.” He stands before me again. “Does it hurt? Kneeling there?”
I nod.
“Do you like it?”
I shake my head.
“Are you wet?”
I don’t answer that one.
He grins, then begins his circling again.
“If you’re going to punish me with that thing, just do it and get it over with.”
I hear the swish then, and an instant later, I fall onto my hands as a strip of pure agony blazes across the bottoms of my feet. Before I can process, there’s a second strike. Tears spring from my eyes, and for a moment, I can’t breathe.
He crouches behind me. I’m still gasping for breath when he wraps the length of the rosary around his fist and tugs my head backward into his chest.
“You do not give the orders.”
I clutch his forearm, my breathing gasps, chest heaving.
There had been a moment earlier that I’d found him tender, kind even. Almost. When he’d learned I hadn’t eaten, he’d been upset. When he’d cleaned the tattoo, he’d been gentle. When he’d slipped his hand into my nightdress and grazed my breast, I’d leaned into his touch.
“Did you like that?” he asks.
I shake my head. “No!”
He brings the hand holding the cane between my legs and rudely cups me, and I think what I must look like on my knees before the altar, my body jerked backward, knees spread, on display.
“You’re wet through.”
I don’t know if it’s on purpose that he lets the cane rest against my sex.
“But this isn’t about your pleasure, Ivy,” he says, smearing his wet hand over my stomach as he rises.
“Please don’t,” I can’t help but say as I reach back to cover my feet, feel the rising crisscrossed welts there. I was only caned once at school, and it wasn’t anything like this.
“That’s better. I like the please. But put your hands back in prayer and kneel up.”
“Please.” I crane my neck to look back at him.
He raises his eyebrows as if waiting for me to follow his direction.
I do, but I brace myself.
“You’ll feel that with every step tomorrow.”
I keep my gaze forward on the altar, tears blurring it.
“Do you know what my father expected of me?” he starts, circling again.
I shake my head, sniffle. I’m not sure what’s worse, the anticipation of the cane or the cane itself.
He stops in front of me, looks me over, slides the instrument of torture between my legs.
I stiffen.
“More than I could give,” he says, drawing it away. “I spent countless hours where you are now, and I can tell you I did not sob when lines crisscrossed my back. I did not so much as sniffle when the bottoms of my feet burned, the skin opening with each step.”
My mouth falls open. I glance at the photo of the stern-looking man on the altar, then up at him. I try to imagine him as a little boy kneeling here. And I think of my own father who has never in my life raised a hand to me. I think about my mother’s punishments, but they were never calculated. Hers were impulse. The momentary, uncontrolled rage of a dissatisfied woman.
“I’m sorry,” I tell him when he’s in front of me again. “I’ll wear it. Like you said.”
He walks behind me again.
“Please don’t,” I plead. It’s taking everything for me to stay still, kneel up, and not cover myself.
“Lean forward and put your hands on the floor.”
I glance back, then, after a moment, I do as he says. I put my hands on the floor, presenting myself to him. The pain that is surely to come overrides my humiliation.
When he slips the cane between my legs, I cry out, but he doesn’t strike. Just taps for me to spread them wider.
“Like that,” he says when they’re as he wants them. I’m sure he can see all of me. “Don’t move.”
I hear him walk away, watch as he slips into a pew, setting the cane against it in the aisle. I dare a glance and find him sitting back watching me.
We stay like that for a long time, and as cold as the stone is beneath my hands and knees, sweat drips off my forehead as I wait for him to make his next move. I swear an eternity passes before he does. Before he finally rises, and I breathe a sigh of relief when he comes to me without the cane. When he kneels behind me and puts one hand on my hip and slides the other one up along my back, exerting pressure as he reaches the space between my shoulder blades, then closes his hand over the back of my neck. It’s still tender from the tattoo. His fingers weave into my hair to curve around my skull, and I know what he wants, so I lower myself to my forearms and rest my forehead on the cold stone, and when I hear him unzip his trousers, I claw my fingers into the narrow crevices between the large stones and brace myself.
He takes hold of both hips and splays me open, fingers digging into skin.
I close my eyes when I feel him at my entrance, and I’m hungry for it. I feel that hunger slide down the inside of my thigh, and I know he sees it and feels it, and when he enters me, it’s in one fell swoop. I can’t help my cry. It takes all I have to keep my forehead on the ground as he takes me, keeping his hands firmly on my hips, not touching me where I need him to touch me. I know this is my punishment. His pleasure. He will use me for his pleasure tonight. And I’ll take it.
And when our breathing is ragged and his thrusts frantic, and I feel him thicken even more inside me, I feel his fist at the back of my neck as he winds that rosary around it and draws me up, the sensation different like this.
With one hand, he chokes me with that rosary while with the other, he digs his fingers into my hip, those fingers so close to my clit, so close to my throbbing, wanting clit. And when he comes, he wraps that arm around my middle and holds me so tight that for a moment, I can’t breathe. As he empties inside me, I can’t breathe.
When he’s finished, when he’s loosened the choking rosary, when his arm isn’t a steel bar crushing my ribs, he takes the shell of my ear between sharp teeth, and I still want. Even as I feel him draw out of me. Even as I feel his come slide down the insides of my legs, I still want.
And when he finally speaks, when he finally moves his hand and cups my sex to press his thumb against my hardened clit, I come. Just like that, I come. Even as he warns me not to disobey him again. I come as his seed spills out of me onto the church floor. I come as the hand that wielded that cane cups my sex and reminds me of what he told me last night.
That I belong to him.