Do I have anything to be worried about? feels like the more accurate question. The amount of women who must want him, who must throw themselves at him…
“No, and it didn’t matter regardless. I didn’t consider ours a real marriage. From day one, it was forced, unnatural, and filled with mines I needed to avoid. I lived my life and she lived hers.”
“Is that a decision you made alone?”
“I tried to do it differently in the beginning,” he tells me. “I tried to live as husband and wife. I took her out for fancy dinners. Bought her lavish presents. Gave her anything she could possibly think to ask for. But nothing was enough for her. She resented my absences. She hated that my staff answered to me first. She questioned my every move and decision. I wasn’t sure if her goal was to make me hate her or to try to control me. Either way, she only got one out of two.”
“Was she that bad?” I hear myself asking, leaning into his story.
“I didn’t think so. Then I found the maid’s body in the dumpster.”
I recoil in horror. “How did you find out it was her?”
He looks like he doesn’t want to say. For my sake, I’m sure. Given what I’ve seen him do, I know Anton doesn’t have a weak stomach. “Her name was carved into the poor woman’s forehead.”
I feel like I might puke or faint again. Maybe both. “Oh my God…”
“After that, I warned Marina to stay the fuck away from me. She just took my anger to mean that I was fucking the maid and was heartbroken over losing her.”
“Were you?”
“My heart doesn’t break so easily, Jessa. It wouldn’t matter either way, but I never laid a finger on that woman,” he says. “That was the last straw, though. I decided then that I had to divorce her. She would do nothing but bring me down and cost me allies and followers.”
He falls silent for a moment. I have to resist the urge to reach out and touch him, to comfort him. To be there for him the way I want to be.
“There was a particularly bad incident days after the maid’s body was found. I was in an important meeting. She decided to crash it and make a scene. Things got… bad.”
“Bad how?”
He shakes his head, clearly not willing to give me details. “That was the day she told me she was pregnant.”
I gasp. “She was pregnant?”
“She miscarried a few days later. But yes, at the time, she was pregnant.”
“Did she blame you?”
“I blamed myself, too,” he says without shying away from the guilt. “But still, I saw the miscarriage for the blessing it was. I couldn’t raise a child with Marina. Fuck, if the child were to have a shot at an even halfway normal life, then he or she couldn’t have Marina as their mother.”
“Maybe motherhood would have calmed her down.”
He snorts. “No, it would have sent her over the deep end. The woman was not all there.”
“Did you ever try to get her help?”
“The mere mention of it would throw her into one of her episodes. She would break things, smash things, hit walls. She treated the staff like they were her personal punching bags. It’s no coincidence that we lost employees in droves when Marina was the mistress of this house.”
I shake my head, trying to imagine the person capable of throwing Anton’s life into chaos.
“You wanted the truth, Jessa,” he says, taking my hand boldly this time. “This is the truth. After she miscarried, I waited until she had recovered and then I went to her bedroom. I told her to pack her things and leave, because I was going through with the divorce.”
“How did she take that?”
“About as well as I expected. She destroyed her own room and tried to set the curtains on fire. I had Dr. Spegal sedate her. When she came to, she seemed calmer. She told me she would leave.”
"Did she?
"The next day.” He nods. "And three days after that, she was dead.”