Genesis
Present day.
The convent was normally quiet at this time, the halls and balconies awash with the silver light of moonbeams filtering through the windows. The other girls and the nuns were asleep in their beds, rosaries concealed under pillows. They were heavy sleepers- all of them. But the world outside never slept, and neither did I.
I slipped silently out of my room and into the hallways making my way down, my bare feet slapping against the cold stone floors as I made my way unseen in the dark through the chapel, through the dorms and through the staring eyes of the saints whose faces were painted on stained glass murals. I had become familiar with every creaking floorboard, every blind spot, and every hall where the guards never looked. St. Mariana's Convent was my prison, but I had perfected the art of the dance between the bars.
The wooden gate at the rear of the convent gardens groaned and I was off, leaving only the shadows to catch me.
The men I met did not usually expect a Moretti daughter to track them down in the bleakest reaches of ruined churches and abandoned backstreets. They expected crime lord daughters to obey, to submit, and to sit pretty in their silken gilded cages until their fathers bartered them off like trophies. I was not sorry to disappoint them.
I stood face to face with my target for the day, I knew he had what he was looking for. I saw it in the way he leaned in close to me, the way the darkness in his eyes deepened as moonlight touched the fine line of my throat. I let my fingers graze against his chest, let him think, for a fleeting moment, that they had been rewarded. Men spoke when they believed they were rewarded. They inhaled what they shouldn't, words spilling off their lips between gasps and sighs as my fingers paused, as my voice gentled like prayer.
When I dropped to my knees, one thing popped into my head.
Caspian.
I would close my eyes, and for a brief instant, I could nearly fool myself that it was him. That it was his fingers in my hair, his breath rough against my skin, his cock in my mouth and his body shuddering in my hand. And then I'd banish the picture as quickly as my mind built it, cloak it in the armor of ambition and necessity. Because this wasn't lust. This was power.
I never gave it to them all. That was my rule. They could take what I gave, but not that. My virginity intact—a final piece of myself that I would not give. Not them. Not anyone. Not yet.
And they gossiped. Oh, they gossiped.
They spoke to me of my father's empire, of blood and betrayal oaths, of bribes and bodies and handshakes in the dark. They spoke of how only the name Moretti grew more ferocious, of how loyalty was not given—it was stolen. But above all else, they spoke of him.
They spoke of the child who once was a ghost in my past, now risen from the dead as something so much, much worse.
"They call him the British King," one of them breathed. "A man who doesn't make a mess, who doesn't leave a trail."
I overheard them, heard the quiet awe hiding beneath their tone, and something unspoken stirred within me.
He was no longer mine. He was something else now. Something to be feared, something to be powerful, something out of my reach.
And never—not once—had he ever sought me out.
No letter. No word passed through clandestine hands.
Seventeen years.
And I waited.
I rested my head back, looking up at the man standing over me as I struggled to swallow him—the slack-jawed shock on his face was the only signal I got before his shaking fingers constricted on my shoulder as he orgasmed and cum poured down my throat.
Rising up from my knees, I stood on my feet, smoothing the wrinkles in my cloak, and dabbing at the edge of my lip with a delicate finger before turning and vanishing into the shadows. With greater knowledge. Greater strength. More fragments of the empire that would one day be mine.
My father had spurned me.
But I had never forsaken his throne.
…
The bell tolled, its deep clang echoing down the stone corridors of St. Mariana's Convent, recalling to me the strict routine that regulated my days. I stood against the window arch in the library, chin on my hand, looking down upon the neat-clipped gardens far below. The nuns fitted in with their unobtrusive competence, their black habits flying about them as they hurried along with a basket of herbs or tended flowerbeds with dainty fingers. Their soft prayer merged with the far-off hum of hymns sung inside the chapel, an omnipresent loop of piety I had learned so long ago to tune out.
The library air was heavy with the scent of parchment and wax, ink-stained fingers and dust motes hung suspended in delicate strings of pale light. Centuries stretched along the precisely ranked rows of plump leather books standing slimy-tongued on vast wooden shelves—so many words, so many rules, so many voices locked in withered leaves. I would sometimes dream of filling up my own words into the empty margins, carving myself into the quiet, but never did. I did not need to. I discovered, over the years that passed, that power was not found in being listened to—it was found in listening.
Seventeen years.
Seventeen years spent kneeling on cold stone floors, reciting prayers I did not believe in, of crushing rosary beads between fingers until the marks were still on skin. Seventeen years of silence that I had not requested, of restraint that I had mastered, of a life governed by the sound of bells and the slamming of large wooden doors.
My days blurred together, all the same and unchanging. I rose with the dawn, roused by the pitiful clang of the morning bell. I dressed in the same simple robes, splashed my face with frigid water that would have seared my skin, and floated through the halls like a ghost. Morning prayers. Breakfast. Latin class. Chores. Afternoon prayers. Scripture readings. Evening prayers. Sleep. And then it started all over again. Infinite. A prison clothed in hypocrisy.
I was not a friendless person. I had no desire for human companionship. The other convent nuns whispered among themselves in hushed tones, laughing and notes inserted by young suitors or sobbing over lost lives to them. They walked around me, watching me with suspicion, as if they knew of the razor-sharp blades that I kept wrapped up behind my icy exterior. They were mistaken in their interpretation of my silence as compliance. They were mistaken.
I did not seek shelter in epistles or pilfered gossip in candlelit dormitories. I discovered it elsewhere—in the hushed confessions of the merchants who came to the convent, in the cautionary way the nuns spoke of the world outside when they believed no one was listening. The men who came for blessings on their endeavors were apt to speak too freely, boasting of arrangements with men I had come to recognize. Names I had learned. Names that went back to my father's empire.
I had always known Caspian would be something special—there had never been anything else for him. The boy I knew had been tempered in the flames of loss and expectation, beaten by the fists of men who only understood his potential for violence and conquest.
But nonetheless, I'd let myself believe—to think—that he would remember. That I wouldn't become yet another specter of the past that he'd burned.
Seventeen years, and nothing.
I should have been proud.
Caspian had lived. He had survived. He had done something with the pain, the betrayal, the abandonment that had been given to him and shaped them into something unbreakable. He had become a man to be reckoned with, a name whispered in the same reverent tones as death.
And still, there I sat, hemmed in by the dark gloss of the library, melted wax trickling on the table beside me, I could sense the pent-up bite of bitterness seething in my chest.
He left me behind.
I had waited. Through the empty days, through the clockwork prayer I didn't believe in, through the silent game of chess that I had built behind the convent. I had waited for some sign that he hadn't let me go. That I wasn't alone remembering what we'd lost, what we were to be.
But perhaps that was silly. Perhaps I had been silly to think even all these years, all this silence, afterwards he would be thinking of me as I had been thinking of him.
It didn't matter.
It couldn't matter.