Doing what you’re told is an art form, and I was trained to love a life of utter obedience—first to my father, then to my husband.
But my father has rejected me, and I’m not married to my husband. So it’s only me giving the orders here, and the man I love needs me. My bare feet storm through the dimly lit house with my mind narrowing on a single decision.
I’m staying with him, and he’s staying with me.
He’s going to fight it, and I’m going to fight back.
He’s going to win. He’s going to put me on a plane and send me away because I’m dangerous. I don’t have the strength or knowledge to beat him. I don’t have the skills. I have nothing but the force of my will and it’s not enough.
At the back of the house, the sliding glass opens onto the dark forest. I hear him come in the front.
“Sarah?”
I’m not ready to talk yet. I need a minute to take stock of my value to him.
His walking shoes sit by the back door. Mine are in the front. So I stick my feet in his and step onto the deck, closing the glass behind me. Clopping in unlaced shoes five sizes too big, I walk into the darkness, arms crossed, sifting everything I know through the sieve of everything I think I know.
I don’t know how the world works, but I know how the Colonia does.
No. It’s been proven I don’t know how the Colonia functions.
“I didn’t mean those things,” Dario’s voice comes from behind me. When I turn, he’s backlit by the glowing windows of the house. “They were just to upset him.”
“I know you’re not going to cut me in pieces.”
“Good.”
“But I’m not a prop for you. You can’t move me around like I’m an object. Here. There. Now she’s fine. Now she’s cut up like a pizza.”
“I told you I didn’t mean that.”
“But you thought it. You had it in your mind, because you think of me as something you can just send away.”
“I should have sent you weeks ago.”
I’ve never heard him sound so desperate, and it’s then I realize that though he can force me to go, he won’t. He wants my consent, even if he has to demand it.
What is the price of my agency? Does it have to be so expensive?
“I’m sorry about the phone,” I say.
“You should have told me.”
“I know.”
“Why, Sarah? Why didn’t you?”
“I kept thinking he’d stop if I didn’t answer, and he wasn’t saying anything that I thought you needed to know.” First reason stupid, second reason worse. The third has to be dug from the raw, core truth. “He’s my brother, and he was never this nice to me.”
Dario nods and looks away as if he can’t deal with how pathetic I am. It’s unbearable.
“I have value.” I go toward him instead of running away.
“No.” His denial is such a blow I feels my knees go weak under me, but he catches me by the waist. “You don’t have value.” He holds me when I try to wrestle away. “A value is a number. It’s for a comparison to other numbers. Other things. A diamond has value. A piece of real estate. A bank account has value. Not you. You don’t have some value I can measure. You’re priceless.”
All my strength goes into my arms as they snake around him and squeeze him so close, I can’t dream of a world outside his love. His jacket is too thin to hide the warmth and shape of his body, and his bones and muscles cannot mask the beating of his heart.
“I’m so sorry, Dario.”
“You just forced me to do what has to be done anyway. People… men will die. I might be one of them. But my brother’s been sitting in the middle of it. If I turn tail and run, what does that make me?”
“A coward.”
He’s already started a response, but he stops, open-mouthed, before a sound comes out.
I take a deep breath, because of every stupid thing I’ve done, this is the most stupid.
“Let me go talk to Massimo. In person.”
“Are you fucked in the head?”
“I can talk sense into him.” My sense won’t be sense the way Dario sees it. I have another few seconds to dump everything in my head. “We speak the same language. I know what’s important to him. He might have objected to what happened to Dafne. He might not have believed the message—the dress—and if I just—”
“No.”
“Or why can’t I call him and talk to him? He might be an ally for us—”
“There is no us!”
He pushes me back against a tree, changing his angle to the house. With the light on one side of his face, I can see the fire in his eyes. It’s not rage. Not lust. It’s something I’ve never seen before.
“Let me help you,” I say.
“No.” He releases me and walks back to the house.
I chase him with those big, stupid shoes, tripping on the edge of the deck, hands out to break my fall. He starts to come back outside to help me up, but I launch myself at him, feet free, arms extended, pushing him back into the kitchen. We both land in a crouch, me leaning forward, Dario on his back foot, surprised… but not for long.
I get a hand under the seat of a chair and hurl it at him. He throws up his arms and catches it, but I’ve already thrown a vase.
“Why not?” The vase catches a chair leg and thuds to the floor. “Because I’m weak?” He uses the chair for a shield against the flying teakettle. “Because I’m stupid?” The flour canister sprays white powder. “Because I’m incompetent?” The salt and pepper shakers separate midair. One is deflected with the chair. The other hits his shoulder. “Because you’re better off without me?” I’m going to throw every last damn thing this stupid kitchen hasn’t hidden behind an invisible cabinet door.
“Stop!” He tosses the chair aside and grabs my arms before I fling the cast-iron pan at his head.
“Tell me why!”
“Because I’m scared!” The expression I couldn’t define—the one that was neither rage nor lust—it’s all over his face, clear as day, and it’s terror. It doesn’t melt away with the admission that it exists but intensifies into something red hot and feral. “You scare the fuck out of me. Anything that happens to you from now on—for the rest of your life—it’s my fault. If I leave you here. Send you away. If your fucking plane crashes on the way to the island, it’s my fault, because you would have been sitting home doing fucking needlepoint if I hadn’t taken you.”
“I’m your wife. Your problems are my problems.”
He lets me go and puts his hands in his pockets. “Shit.” He takes a little blue box from his pocket and stares at it as if every accusation ever made against him—the true and untrue—is inside it. “Shit!”
He opens the box. I expect all of life’s miseries to fly out like crows, followed by hope.
“Look! Do you see this? I didn’t even ask you to marry me. I left you here without… shit!” His face crumples as he holds out one hand, palm up, to indicate some obvious point the diamond ring makes, even if it’s not obvious to me. “I can’t even do this. I ran off like a fucking…”
Without finishing, he falls onto a chair, postured like a dishrag with the box dangling from his fingertips. He runs his fingers through his hair, looking at the floor as if he wants to drill two holes into it.
I can’t bear to see him like this. He wasn’t built to coexist with fear. He’s supposed to channel it into rage, and actions, and plans.
I kneel at his feet, looking up at his reddened face.
“You’re Dario Lucari. You’re my husband. You are not scared. I’m not sitting at home embroidering because you taught me more.”
“I taught you nothing. You’re overconfident. You’re on a suicide mission. I’m more fucking terrified now than I was when I made you marry me.”
“You didn’t make me fall in love with you.”
“Love doesn’t matter. It’s meaningless. Love’s not going to save us.”
He knows a lot more about the world than I do. He knows society. How people move and think. He knows about tools and technology. But he doesn’t know anything about love, and he knows less about what’s going to save me.
“Make me stop loving you then.” I stand before him, and he looks up at me. Every dancing fire in his eyes flickers with life—a kaleidoscope of conflicting passions. “If it doesn’t mean anything, make my love go away. You can’t. Outside your family, you’ve never been loved past reason. Past hurt and harm. You were always alone, and now you’re not, because I love you, and I’m going to fight for it. For us. I’m going to fight for you as hard as you fought for me.”
One eye narrows. A newly ignited fire glints where despair had taken hold.
“That’s not your job.”
I take the box from him and pull the ring out of its slit.
“Saving you is my job.” I slide off the snowflake ring and put it on the other hand.
I’m about to replace it with the new ring, but he stands and takes it for me.
“My job,” he says, sliding the diamond ring past the scar and deep against the base of my finger. “Is to keep you safe from the world, and me.”
“You’d never harm me.”
His touch starts tender along my jaw, but gains force as he grabs the back of my neck.
“Are you sure I haven’t already?” He tightens his fingers at the back of my head, pulling my hair until I’m looking straight up at him. He’s himself again. Powerful. Arrogant. Fierce.
He’s a king returning from a battle that nearly killed him, and I am grateful.
“You have, so much, and you love me.”
“Tell me to stop.” He takes my shirt by the neck and pulls hard, tearing it down the front. “Tell me I’d stop if I loved you.” I can’t move my head as he pulls up my bra.
The terror that filled his expression before is still there, but it’s strapped down by a rigid control, bucking and bloating, stretching the limits of the harness. It will break free without a valve.
I am that valve.
This whole time—the rage, the violence, the controlling demands—all of it was fear.
“You love me. Don’t stop.”
“Love is a liability.” By the hair, he drags me to the hall and throws me up the staircase, pinning my lower back with his knee. “Tell me to stop.”
“I’m not scared.”
With one move, he yanks my pants down. “I made you reckless.”
A burning sting explodes on my bare bottom. He’s never hit me that hard.
“You made me see.”
He smacks me again and pulls my pants all the way off. I twist onto my back, where the edge of the stairs digs into my spine. He pulls off the shreds of my shirt, pushing me to the top of the stairs at the same time as he wrestles off my bra. I’m naked, breathless, halfway up a flight of stairs.
“I love you,” I say.
“Sure you do.” Violently, he pulls my legs open, exposing me to a gaze that has its own pressure. “Say stop or say nothing.”
“I love you.”
“Enough.” He unbuckles his belt. “I swear to God, your next word is stop or it’s nothing.”
“Nothing.”
“Turn over.” He slides the leather belt through the loops. “Hands and knees.”
When I obey to put elbows on one step and knees three steps below, he cracks my ass with the belt.
“Nothing!” I cry.
“Crawl to the bedroom.”
I do as I’m told. With each move forward, he tries to hurt me out of loving him, beating me on like a pack mule. He pulls me onto the bed, flips me onto my back, and opens my legs, brandishing the belt.
I cringe, waiting for him to hit me where I’m most sensitive.
“Tell me to stop.”
“Nothing.”
“Fucking Colonia.”
He doesn’t hit between my legs but uses the belt to strap my left elbow to my left knee. I cringe all over again when he gets another belt from his closet, but he doesn’t hit my pussy with it. Instead, he ties my free elbow and knee together, leaving me splayed before him as he undoes his fly.
“I should lock you in the basement.” His pants drop below his waist as he pulls off his shirt. “Let you wait until I come back.”
“Nothing.”
He steps out of his pants, naked now, hard-on raging. “You think I won’t because I love you?”
“Nothing.”
He slaps his palm between my legs. I jerk with pain, then burst pleasure. He slaps again, pauses, then again, so hard I grunt through my teeth.
“I can stop.”
“Nothing,” I cry through spit and tears.
He puts his hands inside my thighs, spreading me wide so he can see how sore and red I am. When his grip gets too tight to bear, I whimper, but he doesn’t let up.
“If they catch you, they’re going to put you in the staffa—with your arms strapped down this time—and when they find out I fucked you, they’re going to let any aggrieved party fuck you. Then they’re going to hollow you like they did to Dafne, but they won’t kill you. They’ll sew you back up so they can sell you as a virgin.” He takes his hands away. “I won’t let that happen.”
When his cock touches my pussy, I’m so sore to the touch that I cringe and gasp, but I’m so wet he stretches the beaten skin and slides right in.
“Look at me,” he says when he’s buried to the root. “Look at this man who loves you and tell me to stop hurting you.”
I haven’t lied to him. What he’s doing feels good and right. His pain, so carefully placed for my ecstasy, is what I never dared crave.
I challenged him to make me stop loving him, but at this moment, his response is somehow empty. I don’t want to be punished out of love. I want to be cared for through every single thing. I want to be loved not despite my mistakes, but because of them. Because they’re mine, and though I don’t want to be defined by my imperfections, I want to be loved for them. I want less, and much, much more.
“Stop.” My voice shakes, but he freezes. He’s not even breathing. Instinctively, I know he’s waiting for my confirmation, so I swallow, take a strong breath, and say two words with steady purpose. “Stop. Please.”
He stops immediately and bends over me to kiss the space between my breasts.
“What do you want?” he murmurs into my skin, asking my heart for its deepest desire.
“I want you to love me.”
After a pause, he kneels straight and unlashes my right elbow and knee.
“If that’s what you want.” He tosses the belt aside and goes to the other one. “That’s what you’ll have.”
When the second belt is off, he gently lowers my knee. I caress his face, drawing the shape of his cheekbones with my thumbs, tracing the dark circles under his eyes. He rests his elbows on either side of my head and kisses every part of my face.
“Whatever you want.”
“I want you to be mine as much as I’m yours,” I say.
“I am.”
He believes it, and months ago, when I was a different person, I might have believed it too. But I’m different, and so is he.
“You’ve given me every part of you that you’re willing to give,” I say.
A little voice in my head suggests that maybe I shouldn’t be asking for anything. He’s a man. I’ve been raised to do what he tells me. That voice is quiet. It makes statements in the form of a question and tells me to obey the strict harangues of my grandmother. It’s afraid of punishment and consequences.
There’s another voice, and it’s not afraid. It’s been waiting for its moment, and that moment is here.
“I want more.” I wrap my legs around Dario and pull him close.
“Tell me how much more.” With a shift, he’s inside me again, gently rocking side to side. “It’s yours.”
“I want everything you’re not willing to give me.” I hold his face to mine, nose to nose, eye to eye. “I want your regrets.”
“I regret everything I did to you. But nothing that brought me to you.”
A halo of quiet euphoria ripples outward from our joined bodies, but I keep my eyes on his.
“I want your anger.”
“No.”
“Yes. Say yes. I don’t need protection from you.”
He doesn’t look away. “I can’t.”
“I’ll take it.”
“Sarah.” My name is a scold, a call, a declaration of love. The swell between my legs increases as if a rock was dropped in the exact same place in the pond.
“I want your fear.”
“I’m always afraid, Sarah.”
So deep in his eyes, I see it. His fear is small, but bright, and constant, and raw. It’s the fire under everything else, and the rippling waters of my pleasure will never put it out.
“I want your love.”
“You have it.”
“Your trust.”
“Yes. Look at me, Sarah.” He moves slowly, with his mouth so close to mine that we share his words. “Look at me. You have it.”
I want his respect and his joy. I want his tenderness in a way I’ve never been allowed to want anything. I want his very soul and no less, but I can’t say it while locked in his gaze, with every syllable building in my throat turning into a single vowel of surrender.
From ten miles above, I hear his voice groaning “yes, yes, yes,” as he joins me in heaven.
We don’t say a word, lying there wrapped in each other. There’s no vocabulary to define what just happened.
The effects of it are temporary, and the world intrudes.
A musical dinging comes from somewhere in the room. He groans and picks up his pants, reaching into the pocket for his phone.
“Tamara.” He looks at me as he listens to the response, then presses his lips tight. “Let me get you on speaker.” He touches a button and says, “Repeat that for Sarah.”
“Hi, Sarah.” She sounds as if she’s speaking softly into a tin can.
“Hi.” My reply is weak with the shock of Dario including me in a conversation about my own phone.
“I pulled the data delivery schedule for Sarah’s carrier. The towers aren’t delivering ping data in real time. They batch compressed folders on a schedule. Upside for the carrier is less stress on the network. Downside for law enforcement and their benefactors is that you can’t get around the schedule.”
“How long do we have?”
“Sixty-three hours, seventeen minutes.”
“And the other number? Denise?”
“Landline. Data pings on the cell side are the same.”
“Thank you.” He’s about to cut the call when Tamara pipes in again.
“I’ve changed her routing to a VOIP out of Siberia. Which I would have done in the first place if you’d told me.”
“Next time.” He kisses down the length of my arm with a reverence that turns rough inside the elbow.
“Next time.” She hangs up.
He throws his phone aside and kisses my shoulders in earnest.
“I want my phone back.”
“I’m getting you a new one.”
“What if Denise calls that number?”
He backs up to look me in the eye.
“You’re very smart, Sarah Colonia.” He leans back. “And very brave.”
“What does that mean?” I sit up. “Yes or no?”
“It means yes, even with a new phone number, you’ll get the call. You can still jump into danger for your friend.”
“And you still trust me. Even after me doing a stupid thing.”
One eye narrows a tiny bit. I expect him to say he has yet to punish me for calling Massimo, and just to prove he can—he will.
Instead, he takes my right hand, where I put the snowflake ring.
“When I put this on your finger…” He removes the old ring. “I stole you. I didn’t care about anyone or anything. I didn’t earn the right to have you, so I took you. You’re not a stolen thing anymore. You’re not my prize. I said a lot of things before, and for some of them, I’m sorry.” He kisses the base of each of my fingers, back and front. My palms are damp again, but he doesn’t seem to care. “But you are dangerous. You’re too well-intentioned. You’re a pain in the ass, and you might get me killed. Whether you agree to marry me or not, I’ll die a better man because of you.”
“You won’t die.”
“I know I’m a terrible person.” He lifts my left hand and kisses it around the new diamond. “Will you marry me anyway?”
“Yes.”
“Thank you.” He kisses my lips.
I hold the diamond up to the moonlight. It’s not just fire. It’s electric. It’s a sky full of falling stars.
This ring is a “yes.”
Yes, I will marry him.
I will stand beside him, with him, and for him.
I will sin in his name.
I will not leave him behind.