Noelle is very quiet for a moment. “And did you?”
“I thought so, at first. I was gentle with her. I didn’t treat her as a pet. I tried to heal her instead. My mind was very broken by then, and I thought I understood her. She had voices in her head, too. Angry, sad, clawing voices that made her feel there was no reason left to live, nothing left to livefor. That insisted the pain was too much, that she should give up.” I take a deep breath, willing Noelle to understand, at least a little. “She told me about them, when she wasn’t afraid of me any longer, when she’d started to fall in love with me. She told me about her doctors back in New York, about how they’d diagnosed her with depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and anxiety. She’d been supposed to take pills, and go to therapists for her mind and her body, to try to recover, but she’d been too far gone to do any of it. She’d chosen to hide away in her apartment instead, refusing help, refusing any of her friends’ efforts to make it better—until she wasn’t given a choice anymore. Until she was taken away to a safe house to hide from a dangerous man who had only ended up taking her anyway, and made everything so much worse.”
“The man you bought her from?” Noelle asks softly.
I nod. “I thought I understood everything she’d said, because I’d felt all those things, too. I’d been to doctors too, doctors who used all those same words and added ones likeobsessive-compulsive, and schizoaffective, and gave me pills to take and advice on how to heal. Some of it had worked, enabling me to move past the grief and trauma of Margot’s violent death—or at least, find other ways to cope. Some of those ways, I know, weren’t healthy. The doctors had warned me what might happen if I went off the pills. But how could I not?” I look at Noelle, trying to read something on her face, but her expression is carefully blank. I don’t see the hate or judgment I feared, but I’m not certain what she’s thinking. All I know is that suddenly, more than anything, I want her to understand.
“With the pills,” I say quietly, my voice beginning to rasp from the effort of speaking so much, “I didn’t feel grief. I didn’t hear the voices. I didn’t feel the need for daily and nightly rituals, or to obsessively find and collect the broken things, damaged things, even women, and give them a safe place. I didn’t fight with my baser desires, because I didn’t feel them. I feltnothing. My insides became a hollow void. There was no grief or need or compulsion or lust, but there was also no joy or pleasure or beauty. I didn’t need sex or food, or entertainment. All I wanted to do was sleep.”
“You were depressed,” Noelle says quietly. “Like when I came here.”
“The pills were meant to fix it,” I say bitterly. “All of it, everything that was wrong with me. But it didn’t. So I found other ways to cope. I discovered that with money, many things were open to me. I was able to collect everything I wanted, all those beautiful, damaged things and women that I felt driven to fill my apartment with. I’d discovered that if I were handsome, well-dressed, and rich, I could find associates who would give me ways to vent my lust that was consensual. I could find women willing to let me do the baser things I craved, and theyenjoyedit. But it was never enough. I still felt hollow. I wanted to beloved. Sexual pleasure with paid women, women at parties thrown by men like Kaito Nakamura, wasn’t the same as what I’d felt with Margot.” I close my eyes, feeling the grief swamp me all over again. “ It was a hollow pleasure, without those sweet words and touches, without the feeling of a body straining against mine eagerly because itneededme,lovedme, as ferociously and viciously as I needed and loved it.”
I can’t look at Noelle. I want her to understand, and I know that she can’t. I’ve never laid myself so bare, not even with Anastasia, and I don’t entirely know why I’m doing so now—except that I want one person in this world besides that damned priest toknow. To hear the depths of what I felt, to hear what I’ve done, to hear myconfession. Noelle cared for me, kept me from the brink of death, and now she asked to know why.
For reasons I don’t entirely understand, I want to tell her. I want to purge myself of all of it, at long last.
“It felt like a betrayal of Margot, to want it,” I say quietly. “I hated myself after, every time. I hated myself for wanting more than just sex. And none of my pets wantedme, so it didn’t matter. I looked at their pictures, touched myself, dreamed of them desiring me, lusting after me, finding me as beautiful and broken and worthy of love as I found them, but it never happened. I lost them all, one after another, in various ways—and now I know why. I didn’t understand what they needed. I thought by forcing them into what my twisted, broken mind believed they needed to be safe, I could protect them. Andshe—”
I break off, going silent for a long moment.
“Who?” Noelle asks finally. “Anastasia?”
“No.” I shake my head. “A woman named Yvette.”
Noelle frowns. “Another of your pets?”
I laugh hollowly. “No. I met her here, in Paris, at some party for academics. I was trying to find new avenues of collecting. She was rich, eccentric, and into the BDSM scene. She kept pets of her own, but not out of any kind of altruistic imaginings. They were just for her pleasure—and I suppose for theirs, as well. We became friends, in a way. She saw herself as my mentor, I think. She taught me how she kept and trained her pets. She thought she was helping me—and I thought she was, too. But in the end, it destroyed what I had with Anastasia.”
“How so?”
This—this is the hardest part. The part I know will destroy any connection I have with Noelle, any chance that she might change her mind. That she mightstay.
“I fell in love with Anastasia,” I say simply. “I didn’t treat her like a pet, and Yvette saw it. She convinced me to train her, to punish her, to do the things I did with you and more—the meals on the floor, kneeling, other things.” I take a deep breath. “Anastasia saw what you did—me, in my room, though I wasn’t punishing myself the way I have been. It—intrigued her, I suppose. And I began to lose control with her. I would come into her room at night and watch her, touching myself. I could feel my darker desires coming out. Iwanted—and I fought it. But Anastasia came tome.” I swallow hard. “She seduced me, in a way. She made love to me one night, and then she found the pictures of the girls I kept—pictures I burned after I came back here. She was upset, and I lost my temper with her. I choked her—”
Noelle’s eyes widen, and I shake my head. “No permanent damage was done. But she demanded answers, like you have. And I told her—almost everything.”
“What then?” Noelle asks softly, and I sigh.
“She stayed. She stayed, and she loved me anyway. And that might have been the end of it—even with Yvette’s jealousy, which I didn’t see until it was too late…that Yvette wanted me for herself. She’d convinced herself thatsheloved me, that we could be some kind of—” I wave my hand in the air—“—masochistic power couple. She hated Anastasia for being more to me than just a pet, for becoming my lover. And there was a man who Anastasia met before she was taken.”
Noelle’s eyes widen, but I keep going, afraid that if I stop now, I won’t be able to tell her the worst of it. “He was the heir to a mob organization in Boston, an Irishman named Liam McGregor. He loved her, and he came to save her—and I hated him for it. I truly don’t know what I would have done of my own volition when he broke in here to take her back—but Yvette was here. And she had a plan on the spot.”
I take a breath, feeling the fear and hate and guilt of that night rise up again, all the horrible emotions that I have lived over and over, day after day. “She told me to order him to fuck her, in front of our party guests and us, while she held him at gunpoint. To tell Anastasia to prove that she loved me by feeling nothing when the man who came to rescue her was inside of her. That if she came while he fucked her, she would die. And I was convinced that Anastasia had betrayed me, that I would lose the second woman I loved in all my life, felt my mind break. I—” I force myself to look at Noelle, to see the horror in her eyes as I tell her the worst thing I’ve ever done. “I did it. I ordered him to fuck her while Yvette held a gun to his head. I told Anastasia that if she loved me, she wouldn’t come, that I would kill her if she did. I forced her first time with the man she wanted before me to be nothing more than a violation, and we watched as he did it. And she—” I feel the bile rise in my throat again, acrid shame filling me. “She did come for him. He fought Yvette before she could shoot Anastasia and knocked her out. He shot me—” I nod towards my knees, and the healed wound in my other shoulder, “—and left me bleeding out. As Anastasia screamed for me, he carried her away.”
Noelle is speechless. I can see on her face that she can’t think of what to say, that wherever she thought this story was going, it wasn’t that.
“I regret it, in every part of me,” I tell her quietly. “I wanted to blame Yvette, but that would be taking the easy way out. I made a choice, out of rage and hurt and betrayal, but it was still my choice. That should have been the end of it—but I went after her in Boston. I thought I could convince her to come back with me—especially when I learned she was pregnant and the baby could be mine. Yvette followed me, and when I tried to take Anastasia back, and Liam followed us, there was a fight. There was shooting—” I grimace, nodding towards the still unhealed wound in my shoulder. “Liam nearly killed me. A friend of his, a priest, sat with me as he took Anastasia home. No matter how I begged her, she had told me things between us were finished. So I lost not only her, but another child, you see. I wanted to die. But Maximilian Agosti, the priest, wouldn’t let me. He sat and heard everything that I have just told you, through a long night, until Liam and Anastasia came back.”
“And what did he say?” Noelle asks softly, her voice choked. I can hear the emotion in her words, what she’s holding back, though I don’t know entirely what it is. I don’t know what she thinks of me, after all of this, and I’m afraid to ask.
“He said—” I press my lips tightly together, remembering back to that night of blood and pain, and the dark-haired man who sat and listened to my confession, what I thought would be my last. “He said that he believed in forgiveness. That if I truly saw what I had done wrong, if I tried to change, to make amends, that I could be forgiven. That many things, like Margot, were not my fault. That whatwasmy fault was never too late to mend. That I could begin by leaving Anastasia and Liam in peace, by letting them choose a different life for the child she carried. A life I would be no part of. That was my penance, my loss. He told me to let her go and go home. She said she forgave me—and I did.”
“But you didn’t forgive yourself.” Noelle shakes her head. “I saw what this place was like my first day here. Whatyouwere like. And by keeping me—how was that making amends?”
“I was broken. Losing Anastasia and our child broke everything in me. I wanted to die. I wanted to dissolve and rot away in my hatred of myself, of what I did. I didn’t forgive myself, not any of it. And when Kaito sent you—” I shake my head. “I waswrong, Noelle. I thought my penance would be keeping you safe, doing what I had done with the other girls, but without any of the mistakes I made with Anastasia. The beast inside of me, the monster thatwants—it took over. I was convinced that was my redemption. I waswrong. I hurt you. I lost control. The sickness in my head—” I swallow hard, moving further away from her on the bed, wishing I could curl into myself with pain and regret. “Iam wrong, Noelle. I am sick. I always have been. Others saw it before I ever did. I wanted you, and I hated you for not being Anastasia, and I loved you. I wanted you to be something I didn’t deserve, and in some warped idea of protecting you, I began the same mistakes all over again. So there is your answer. Do you see? In that very long story are all the reasons I stood in that kitchen and opened my veins, but the greatest of them all is this—I came back here with a chance to begin anew, to live differently, and Icouldn’t. The sickness, the monster in me, can never be stopped. So I chose to stop it. I should have killed myself when Margot died—that was my first mistake. All the others came from that—and I thought it was time I fixed it before I hurt you again. Before I could hurt anyone else. But you didn’t let me die. You saved me, and now—”
“Now what?” Noelle swallows hard, her fists clenching in her lap. “I know you’re more than that, Alexandre. You’ve done horrible things. I can’t deny that, not after everything you’ve told me. What you did to Anastasia—” She shakes her head, biting her lip hard. “But I know that’s not you, deep down. I’ve seenmorein you. I see you now, and I—I don’t believe you’re lost. I believe that priest—Maximilian—was right. But you hate yourself so much—you’re so mired in your sureness that you’re broken and evil and disgusting. You’re so convinced that every mistake you’ve ever made flows from the simple act of loving one woman, that you keep twisting your own future. You’re like that snake, eating its tail—”