BELLS
He took me home.
The drive back was quiet, apart from the music - the classical music he wanted me to savour. Instead, I could still taste him in my throat, still feel the ache of how he'd stretched it.
He just drove on. Completely calm, those beautiful hands sliding down the steering wheel, turning it with measured precision. I watched those long fingers - befitting this elegant man, one who had not needed to hurry anything anymore.
I caught myself wondering what he was thinking. Then stopped. No. He did not deserve my curiosity, the space in my mind it took to analyse him. Not after all of it.
I had dignity, still. I had worth.
I had been strong once, I thought to myself, but was that even true?
Yes.
I had been sharp and certain and I had given as good as I got, sometimes better.
But since I'd married him he had gradually, patiently, worn me down - not with hard blows, nothing so honest as that - but with a thousand acts of erasure until I had looked in the mirror one day and not recognised the woman looking back.
We reached our glass tower at Canary Wharf. I decided I'd make a run for it. He wouldn't lurch after me, not with the tower's security guard watching. These days Jude was too concerned about appearances for that. I inhaled, oxygen filling my lungs, adrenaline pumping, calf muscles tensing for escape. I pulled at the door the moment the car stopped.
LOCKED.
Again.
As though he'd read my thoughts before I'd finished having them.
"In a rush?" he asked, pressing the ignition off slowly, shifting the car into park.
I made a sharp inhale - too sharp, too weak - and swallowed. Watched him step out, circle the vehicle, my door swinging open, his hand extended. The city light caught his jaw and he looked, for one traitorous second, the way he had the night we first had sex, when he slid his hand up my thigh in the back of a cab and I did not protest.
I pushed the thought down. I was still going to run.
My legs swung out, I stood up and pushed past him. The wine I'd had at the performance. The humiliation of what he had me do in the Imperial College car park ignited something in me - the defiance I once had and buried, or that he'd burnt out of me, extinguished through the cool surveillance, control, command, the slow and methodical wearing me down until I'd nearly forgotten it was there. Nearly.
I took a single step. My heel caught in a pavement crack and I pitched forward, the other heel tangling in the hem of my dress. Pathetic. My arms shot out instinctively.
I could almost feel the wet concrete scraping my palms when he caught me - the hard plane of his body moving without hesitation, graceful, in stark contrast to mine. My head landed against his chest. The cedar scent of him reached me before anything else. He stilled then exhaled, heavily.
"Running now, Belly?" he said, voice low and soft, almost fond.
Some amusement there.
I straightened against him. Pushed off his arms, feeling the warmth of them abandon me, leaving behind a tense, longing sensation I refused to fully name.
"Let me go," I said. And walked on toward the building, still unsteady.
I heard him laugh softly behind me. Allowing me this indulgence.
The security guard inside nodded at me, then at Jude, and smiled. The concierge behind the reception desk was bolder.
"Good evening, Mr Larssen," he said, voice bright with the warmth people reserved for men like Jude - men who made rooms feel like smaller, lesser places without them.
He stepped forward slightly, unconsciously, as though proximity to Jude might do something for him. I caught his reflection in the hall mirrors. He clocked me stepping ahead of Jude, communicated this with his eyes, they exchanged looks of male understanding.
And Jude smiled, then shrugged fractionally - women, you know how they get - the concierge nodded, complicit and amused.
It made me want to scream. These days…
Everyone. Assumed. He. Was. Flawless.
The successful executive. The dangerously handsome man. The dutiful husband. And now, apparently, the patient, indulgent one who let his woman have her womanly stomp. I hated how effortlessly he played them all. How the performance was easy, how it cost him nothing.
But he was not fooling me.
Apart from the times he clearly was.
The easy smile dropped the moment the lift doors closed behind us. He entered the code for our £100m penthouse on the 75th floor. We ascended in silence, outside these mirrored walls the city falling away beneath us.
"Valentin's night still young," I heard, behind me.
Did he actually say it? Valentin. All of it, in that mouth. For the first time ever, acknowledging the man's name. His existence. I turned to face him.
"Excuse me?"
He was looking at me with unwavering attention.
"I said" A pause, measured, deliberate. "Valentine's night is still young."
His eyes were soft, and that gaze felt almost like being held. Heat moved through me before I could stop it.
Was he gaslighting me or had I been going crazy?
He took a step toward me in the confined space, cedar and something lethal filling my lungs.
I took a step back. Fixed my eyes on the floor. Watched his shoes - silent on the steel - close the distance. One step back, him forward, until the lift wall met my spine and the heat of him was simply there, inescapable, his body a fact I could not think around.
He didn't touch me.
His voice just dropped to that register - low, deliberate, seductive, the one he used when his mouth was against mine, and the world had narrowed to just him.
"You're magnificent when you're angry" he said quietly. The way he stated things he considered simply true.
My pulse was loud in my ears. I said nothing.
"You were, the whole evening," he continued. "You know that. Even in the parking lot. Perhaps especially there."
"Don't," I said, making myself look up. He exhaled, thumbed his collar open, as if to release the heat.
"My Belly. So defiant." He chuckled, then reached down. Straightened my earring - barely a touch - his fingers grazing my jaw.
Then his breath was at my ear as he whispered.
"Your mouth pouts like you want me in it... again", I felt him smile, palms landing on my waist, sending shivers of want and anguish down my spine. My body leaning toward him but my breath quickened. I reminded myself what yielding into him cost. I reminded myself I had to run.
I lurched back the moment the doors parted, nearly fell down - but composed myself, turned around. Fast steps, deliberate - make it to the guest room, just make it - his soft laugh trailing behind me, his long measured strides following at a pace that suggested he found my urgency almost charming. A predator-prey pursuit in slow motion, in elegant, cultured rhythm, neither of us running.
I stepped into the guest room. Turned. Threw my weight against the door.
His hand stopped it. One hand, almost gentle, pushing it wider despite my whole body braced against it. I could feel the heat of him through the gap, the sheer immovable fact of him. I looked up at his face and found him watching me with that expression - patient but hungry, pupils blown wide, gaze that pierced through me, a man wanting to take what was his.
"Please," I heard myself say, breathless, something cracking open in my chest that I hadn't planned for. My body was acutely, traitorously aware of him - the breadth of his shoulders filling the doorway, the height, the line of his jaw, the way his eyes moved over me with that devastating inventory, almost friction, like he was recounting something he knew by heart, cataloguing each inch of my skin.
I wanted to hate that awareness. I almost did.
"Please. Not tonight." Tears welled, blurring him.
"Not after everything." They came down then, quiet and helpless.
"I'm begging you."
He held the door for an excruciating moment. Did not blink. Did not move. The calculation behind his eyes running permutations - he could push it open any time. Could take what was his. We both knew it.
"Jude." I swallowed against the tightness in my throat. "If you ever loved me. Please. Just tonight. Stop."
It had worked once, and God how I hoped it would work again.
Something shifted in his eyes. And I saw it - it bothered him, briefly, visibly. Not kindness on his face exactly, but the absence of whatever he usually kept in its place, the composure thinning for just a moment until there was something underneath it, something wounded.
"I do love you," he said quietly. Softly. "You the only thing in this world that I love, Isabelle."
I managed something that might have been a smile, weak and undone.
"I love you too." The most frightening thing - it did not feel like a lie even as my voice trembled around it.
A beat of silence.
He looked at me for a long moment. Longer than necessary, and I could not look away. I watched something move through him and settle, or get put away, and then his face returned to its usual composure, unreadable, beautiful.
"I know," he answered.
He stepped back. Let the door close.
I locked it immediately. Turned around. Pressed my back against the cold wood and slid down until I was sitting on the floor in the dark, knees drawn up, silk dress pooling around me. I listened to his footsteps in the hallway - measured, receding, the slow certainty of a man who hunted furtively, force the last bastion.
Then our bedroom door closed behind him. Soft. Deliberate.
I released a breath I hadn't known I'd been holding.
The tears came in torrents then, and a broken sound rose up through my chest that I pressed both hands to my mouth to contain.
Mercy.
I turned the word over in the silence, examined it from all sides. Because that was what this had been, and I knew it, and the knowing was its own particular humiliation.
When Jude was merely cold, merely controlled, what he wanted from my body he took with a methodical detachment, almost administrative. But when I had truly displeased him, reached through that impeccable facade to the raw underneath, there was a brutal, ruthless quality to it that I had no clean word for. He never left marks. He was far too careful now, far too considered for anything so legible.
It was more the sensation of being reminded, precisely, repeatedly, forcefully and at length, of the terms of my situation. Of exactly how little recourse I had. Of exactly how much he could take, and how I could be stretched, which part of me and for how long, if he decided to. And the worse thing was - my body would still betray me. I would still react to the breadth of his shoulders, his muscular body against mine, his length and girth and the unstoppable certainty. He'd still call me a good girl in that low voice and I would still come, every time, even if I were crying as his rhythm progressed mercilessly.
And then he would look at me afterwards, as I lain there ruined and humiliated, with him leaking out of me, or on me - assessing briefly. Then maybe ask whether I wanted tea.
Kiss my lips even - sometimes tasting himself on them. That was perhaps the worst of it - that it cost him nothing. That it left no trace on him whatsoever.
Tonight he had stepped back. Tonight he had let the door close. Said I was the only thing he loved in the world. Which I suspected was a lie. Because what he'd loved the most was control and obedience. And me to the extent I'd yield to it.
Mercy.
I thought again, and pressed my hands harder over my mouth. And then, beneath the terror - something that shamed me more than all of it - the ghost of wanting him anyway. Even here on this floor. My body's memory of him working against me, against everything, quiet and persistent. Because despite the cruelty he'd been tender for moments tonight. And that, apparently, was enough.
Then Valentin's face surfaced. The way it had kept surfacing all evening - through the performance, through the interval break in that bathroom, through the car park, through all of it. The image came in fragments, the way trauma does: a series of sharp-edged shards I couldn't stop turning over. The way he had looked. The sound of his fingers cracking. The glimmer of steel from the knife aimed at him. The pavement.
I didn't know if he was dead.
That was the thing I couldn't get past, could not stop analysing. The gap in my own knowledge that kept yawning open every time I tried to find solid ground. I had seen something happen. I had sat there and I had seen it. And then at the Royal Albert Hall - Jude's hand had been at the small of my back like nothing had happened, that proprietary pressure that meant walk…
And I had walked.
I had sat beside him at the Royal Albert Hall and listened to Mahler and I had not said a word about Valentin. Not one word. Not to him. Not to anyone.
An innocent man. A kind man, and foreign, and I had known for weeks that flirting with him had been a terrible idea - some part of me had always known how this could end - and I had chosen not to believe it. And if I had stopped, Valentin would have been fine. Would have been absolutely safe.
This was my fault. The thought arrived without the softening of uncertainty. Plain and declarative as the locked car door. I had been stupid enough - wilful enough - to convince myself that Jude Larssen would not find out. Or perhaps I had simply been too tired, too worn down, too starved of warmth.
I was still breathing heavy, sitting there on the floor in the dark - thinking not just about what Jude was, but what I had been before him and what I had allowed myself to become.
I had been strong once, I recalled again. Yet tonight I was a woman that sat in a car and watched something terrible and then got taken to a concert hall, straightened her dress, and walked in to be paraded in front of everyone.
I didn't recognise myself.
I sat in the dark for a long time. Heart hammering. Listening to the silence on the other side of the door. Thinking about Valentin. Thinking about whether - somewhere in the city, in a hospital, in the street, wherever they had taken him - he was still breathing.
I pressed my back against the door. Soon I'd stand up. Take this dress off. The diamond earrings. Soon I would sleep, if I could sleep, then wake up tomorrow and try to find the man who had dared to fall for me, and whom Jude had hunted down for it.
I had to know if he'd survived, no matter what it'd end up costing me if Jude found out.
But not tonight.
I sobbed until I'd lost my voice, while the rest of the apartment filled with a dense silence, and on the other side of the wall Jude Larssen - who said he loved me, who had let the door close, yet possibly killed a man tonight - did not make a sound.
Tonight he had me defeated but tomorrow...
Tomorrow, I'd try again.