Birds of Paradise

  “The last time you brought me down here with something to give me, you had my husband, bleeding and tied up,” I commented as we descended the stairs. “Am I to expect something similar?”

  He didn’t answer straightaway, waiting until we’d gotten to the bottom of the stairs, until his hand was fastened around the doorknob so he could face me.

  I almost tripped on the last step, would’ve had Lukyan’s free hand not steadied me. The thing that had made me trip was the sheer volume of emotion on Lukyan’s face. Granted, sheer volume was all relative considering what I was used to, but I glimpsed something that looked a lot like nerves on his usually unshakeable exterior.

  And something looking like warmth. Something that did have time to spread to my bones.

  “No, it’s not exactly murder that lies in here,” he said. “At least I don’t think. Though you might consider doing so to me if this doesn’t go to plan. And there is a great chance of things not going to plan. A lot of risks. The literature is not decided on such steps, so I had to take a risk.” His grip on my arm tightened before it moved down to clasp my sweaty hand in his dry one. “I don’t normally take risks. But the payoff is worth it.” Another pause and the squeak of the door handle turning. “The payoff being you.”

  I didn’t have time to answer, to ask him who snatched my cold, calculating lover and replaced him with this slightly warmer but no less calculating one, because my breath was taken away.

  Quite literally.

  My heart even stopped beating.

  Because what had just days ago been a stark and empty room full of death and bloodstains was… something else entirely.

  My mouth opened and closed rapidly, trying to alternately speak and get oxygen.

  Lukyan’s hand tugged mine, and out of shock more than anything else, I let myself be led. I was standing in the middle of it before my brain gave me a chance to panic.

  But the panic caught up. My heartbeat returned, in my throat, pounding at it so I almost choked. Dread and anxiety blurred my vision.

  A strong sting of pain in my palm brought me back.

  Lukyan came into focus.

  “You’re still inside,” he reassured me.

  I glanced around me in wonder and horror. “How?” I choked out.

  He didn’t answer.

  But I barely noticed. Because the ceiling with a couple of watermarks, and a few indications of concrete wall had me realizing I was still inside. I wasn’t out.

  But I still was.

  I was in the garden. Down to the tiles beneath my feet. Down to every single flower I’d pored over from the windows. The dense shrubbery, everything, surrounded me. The only thing missing was the crisp outside air. Even the stale and slightly damp air of the basement was masked with the smell of flowers, leaves, dirt.

  Life.

  I jumped when something flew above my head.

  Lukyan’s hand squeezed mine once more, and his eyes fastened on where the colorful bird had settled on a small birdhouse in a tree that brushed against the ceiling. I knew it must’ve been potted because there was no soil to bury it in, but the way the rest of the garden was structured around it made it invisible.

  Logic and fear fought in my brain, not knowing whether to panic or be relaxed in my state of limbo. This was everything that was outside, but it wasn’t.

  “I couldn’t get something as rare as I would’ve liked shipped live at such late notice,” Lukyan said, eyes still on the winged creature. “Dead would’ve been another story.” His eyes went to me. “But we don’t need death to destroy for now. It wasn’t working, what we were doing in this room.”

  He glanced down to the floor that was now covered in shrubbery and life, like he could see the stains, the death underneath it.

  “Well, it was,” he amended. “To a point. But it wasn’t working well enough. You are not me, Elizabeth. Thankfully. You cannot learn to live with what is broken inside you with purely death.” He paused. “Maybe neither can I.” The bird chirped, and his gaze went to where it was puffing its chest, demanding attention. “Maybe we needed to see that the dead aren’t the only things that can survive inside these walls.”

  I continued to watch the bird nibble at the seed in the house, entranced by the movement, the ruffling of the feathers, the beauty of it. The harmony of it.

  Lukyan was right. It was surviving, thriving, in the place where only death had endured before.

  I was surviving in this garden that wasn’t a garden. There was panic still, because parts of my brain still couldn’t rectify that I was really safe inside. Because I was never really going to be safe inside.

  I’d constructed the illusion of safety inside a house because that meant that the fear inside me might’ve been able to be overcome. That the guilt I carried might not kill me.

  “It would be helpful at this juncture if you said something,” Lukyan commented, voice flat but somehow still full of unease.

  Worry.

  I glanced up at him. Features blank, but still etched with something. With worry. My hand went to his jaw, cupping it with tenderness I didn’t think I was capable of. Tenderness I didn’t think he was capable of accepting.

  But he just stood there, accepting it.

  “I don’t know what to say,” I whispered, tears prickling at the backs of my eyes.

  He cleared his throat. “That my risk paid off.”

  I leaned up onto my toes so my lips could gently press against his. “Your risk paid off,” I murmured against his mouth.

  One Week Later

  I was sitting in the dead room.

  A book lay open on my lap—my favorite book, in fact—but the enticing and horrifying words lay dormant, unable to yank my brain into the world beneath the pages.

  My brain was elsewhere.

  My brain was searching for that dark and ominous place Lukyan had retreated to these past days. And saying that Lukyan was somewhere dark and ominous meant something—since Lukyan himself was a creature that lived in menacing midnight every hour of the day.

  But this was different. It was the way the air smelled before a storm, taunting you with the fact you couldn’t control what was coming, that you wouldn’t know how bad it would be—if it would rip you to shreds or if you’d weather it—until it was upon you.

  I’d tried to distract myself with the basement garden. I sat there for hours, meditating, getting used to the feel of life surrounding me, trying to let it lay seed to the dead I’d been harboring for years.

  I was doing this because I was terrified. Terrified that this onyx version of Lukyan was borne from me, from the fact I was chained to this house and he was inexplicably chained to me. I fought battles in those days, silently waging war against the thing inside me that kept me scared of a world that could offer me no more pain than I’d already experienced.

  I actively engaged with people on the website I used to only lurk on. I talked to people. It was hard, harrowing, but it somehow helped. Though I had to pretend to respond well to the ‘you can do it’ chant most of them poured out onto the screen.

  I hated that cheerleader, candy cane, circle jerk bullshit.

  Sometimes you can do it. Sometimes you can’t.

  Despite that, I found some kind of solace in the faceless anonymous strangers caught in the web of their own weaknesses.

  I read. Books I’d been afraid to touch because if I touched books that would’ve been put in the self-help section of Barnes and Noble, it would mean I needed help. Wanted it.

  Before, I hadn’t.

  I’d wanted to sink into the floorboards in that house in the middle of nowhere and rot beside the wood until none of me remained.

  Now I wanted something different.

  Help.

  It was asking for help that took the most strength. Withering in your misery was easier.

  If Lukyan noticed my renewed vigor—which he almost certainly did because he noticed everything—he made no comment on it.

  It hurt mor
e.

  So that’s why I retreated to the comfort of the dead and beautiful things, hoping they might offer something.

  But they were dead.

  The dead didn’t offer anything but reflections of the living’s worst fears.

  So I sat.

  My eyes roved over him when he strode into the room. He barely spared me a glance before walking toward a frame. It might’ve hurt had I not known him better. Had I not felt that power, that intimacy in that short but soul-destroying glance.

  I learned to pay particular notice to the birds inside the frames in moments such as this, moments lingering on the edge of something. The air thickened with the approaching storm.

  “It’s often the most unremarkable-looking things that prove to be most extraordinary,” he said.

  The bird inside the frame was indeed lost against the beauty and color of the rest. It was small, especially considering two large birds with expansive wingspans flanked it. The feathers were a muddy brown mixed with black and gray, almost like tiger stripes.

  “The New Caledonian owlet-nightjar,” he said, after my eyes had finished running over it. “Little is known about this creature, not even what its voice sounds like. There are only two known specimens in the world.” He ran his eyes atop the glass. “It took me five years to finally acquire this. It’s famously elusive to all who seek it. Some researchers doubt that the species is still in existence, after a probable sighting being reported ten years ago with nothing confirmed since then.”

  He turned to me.

  “I acquired this only six months before I… acquired you,” he continued.

  I wasn’t going to argue with that. He did acquire me in a sense. I was just the same as these beautiful beings, except I wasn’t beautiful, and my cage was slightly larger. And with Lukyan’s gaze, I somehow came back to life and remained dead at the same time.

  “It’s possible that this species is extinct because I chose to collect this one creature.” He glanced back for a moment. “Maybe. But I had to have it, you see. Because it was something the world didn’t possess. Had no knowledge of. It was a mystery to everyone. One of the rarest things on the planet.”

  He took a step forward and I stood, the book on my lap tumbling to my feet. I did that because he was stalking, like he was going to crush me with his embrace. I stood not to escape that, but to welcome it.

  But he stopped short.

  That small distance, that definite stop, was the first breeze, gentle but definite, a sign of the storm that was about to rip through this room.

  Rip through me.

  “And interesting that six months after, I chose not to make the rarest, most mysterious and remarkable thing to walk the face of this earth extinct. I knew killing you would be a mistake, because then I wouldn’t satisfy my need to know something unknowable to everything else on this planet but me.”

  The proverbial breeze intensified.

  “It was the most important and crucial decision I’ve ever made, Elizabeth, not killing you,” he declared, as if to cement it on my soul.

  There was more.

  I knew this.

  My body braced.

  But it wouldn’t be enough to withstand the storm.

  His eyes never left mine. “At the beginning of this, of us…” He trailed off as if he wasn’t ready to speak the words he’d chosen.

  Dread was a snake that coiled around my throat. Around my heart.

  “I let you assume something,” he continued.

  He didn’t speak. “Assume what?” I prompted.

  “The identity of the man who was responsible for the contract,” he said.

  The snake squeezed tighter. “Christopher,” I clarified. “It was him. There was no one else. I’m not important enough to anyone else…” I watched his eyes, coming to a terrible conclusion. “You lied to me?”

  He watched me. Heard the hurt and pain in my voice. “No, I let you assume a lie was the truth.”

  I scoffed. “There are no subtitles or loopholes in deception, Lukyan. It’s deception, no matter if it’s by omission or not.”

  He glanced down, looking almost… sheepish? No, guilty.

  “I don’t disagree,” he said quietly. “But at the beginning, it was just easier letting you assume what you wanted because I didn’t plan on you being around for long enough to know the truth.”

  I wasn’t hurt by the words, nor his businesslike tone. But it was that guilt, that emotion etched on his face that had me bracing, tensing. Because I knew I would hurt. Soon. Because if Lukyan was betraying even the ounce of guilt that was on his face, this deception was likely to destroy me.

  “And after?” I prompted. “After it became apparent that I was going to stay a while? Where did the truth go then, Lukyan?” I didn’t ask what this truth was because I wasn’t ready for it. No, I needed the insulation of the why before I got to the what.

  “Because if you got the truth, you wouldn’t stay,” he said. “Because I didn’t want the truth to burden us. Burden you.”

  I pursed my lips. “So you instead burdened me with a lie, with the knowledge that you kept the truth from me when I gave you every ounce of myself, when a lie would’ve been so much easier for me?”

  He clenched his fist. “It was a mistake. Fueled by my feelings for you. My love for you.”

  I sucked in a breath. “Well, mistakes made in the name of love are okay, then,” I said, voice dripping with sarcasm.

  He didn’t reply, just clenched his fists.

  “So, who was responsible, Lukyan?” I asked the question I didn’t want the answer to. That I needed to know the answer to.

  “I was,” he said quickly, like it might not hurt as much if he did it with efficiency.

  My heart stopped.

  “You?” I choked. “But you didn’t even know me then.”

  He nodded. “I didn’t know you personally, but I knew who you were. Knew you were the estranged wife of Christopher Atherton.” He paused. “And my family and I also had knowledge that he would not take another wife while his current one still lived.”

  “Still endured,” I corrected. “I wouldn’t call living what I was doing.”

  He didn’t move, but he continued to speak. “Yes, well, we also knew Christopher wasn’t finished with you. He had… plans.”

  The words hit me like knives. Like bullets. Ripping through the flesh, the wounds that had only just scabbed over after festering for years. I didn’t need to ask Lukyan the specifics of those plans. I knew. The marks covering my body knew.

  He was watching me closely, even closer than his normal Lukyan stare, like he was worried Christopher’s skeleton might burst through the door and rip my heart from my chest. He needn’t have worried—Lukyan was doing an excellent job of that himself.

  “He was close to executing those plans, and that didn’t suit our interests,” he said.

  I bit my lip. “Your interests being?”

  “Placing my youngest sister at his side,” he said. “As his wife.”

  I swallowed. “I see.”

  His eyes glistened, the ice melting inside them to show me the human inside the monster.

  All too late.

  Much too late.

  He held his entire bodily stiffly. Not the granite, definite way he held himself normally, but awkward, tense, as if he was uncertain on what to do with his powerful limbs. He was waiting for something. Maybe more questions from me, more of a reaction than the blank façade that hid the screaming pain inside me.

  He got nothing.

  He’d already taken everything, and with his words, he was going to take things from me I didn’t even know I had.

  “I don’t have a relationship with my family, except for what I’m forced to have. I am indebted to them, but I hold no affection for them,” he said, like it would somehow make it better. He didn’t love his family; therefore, it was okay to work with them to ruin my ruins of a life. “But we work together to gain power. That didn’t trouble me gre
atly before. It was about problems and solving them.”

  “And whoring your baby sister out to a psychopath was a solution to a particular problem?” I hissed. My palms itched.

  “Yes,” he said. “And don’t trouble yourself with the notion that she’s weak, that she would let herself become victimized. She knew what she was getting into.”

  I nodded, worry for his faceless sister—whom I hated without logic—the last thing on my mind. “Yes, so of course you had to take care of the weak, pitiful victim in order to get into the situation she was so sure of?”

  He nodded once.

  “Ah. So she’d be prepared for violence? For rape? For degradation?” I paused. “What am I talking about, of course she was, because you already knew about it. Because you did your research on me, while it was all going on. While he was doing that to me. Didn’t you?”

  I was certain of the answer because I was certain of the kind of person Lukyan was. Logic dictated that he learn his enemy, his mark. But that didn’t mean I didn’t hope, pray to a God who had never existed for me, for something different. For someone different to choose this moment to come out of Lukyan and for once be good. Be the hero.

  But nothing came.

  Because I fell in love with the villain, and I should’ve been prepared for him to act like one, and to destroy me.

  “Yes,” he said, the voice he used to utter the one word rough and full of pain.

  I didn’t inspect that.

  I didn’t move.

  He searched my face desperately almost, searching for something. Maybe some kind of understanding. Forgiveness. Some softness, some tenderness he could clutch onto, exploit.

  I may have fallen in love with the villain.

  He was and always would be that.

  He may have fallen in love with the victim.

  But I was not that anymore.

  I was the hardened monster he’d turned me into.

  So he got nothing.

  “I didn’t even see you,” he said. “Not once did I get a glimpse of you, during your time as his wife.”