Chapter Text
When the last shuddering breath left his body, she expected to feel a victory as brazen as her lover's, or the silky purity of relief. Instead, her own body filled with a kind of numbness, as if the knife had entered her own lungs and punched the wind from them in the same gesture.
She stood over him, a victorious gladiator above the corpse of a hungry beast, breath slowing as the frenzy of her passions ebbed. The moments before had existed in a sequence of sharp flashes of imagery, color and light vivid and disorienting. Now, time settled back into itself, slower, steadier, relentless in its passage. The body lay static, an inescapable constant, its accusations reverberating in the sudden silence.
In life, he had overwhelmed: master, lord, seducer, tyrant. He had worn too many guises, too many fearful aspects, to garner trust or pity. (And yet she had trusted him, enough to doubt the truths she knew, enough to court disaster. For this, she could never forgive herself.)
In his dying, she had defied him, too filled with hate to take stock of her handiwork, too fixated on neutralizing the threat. Only at the last did she feel anything other than hate and rage, in the moment when his eyes—always so cold, even in the heat of his desire—lost the astonishment they had held at being bested by a woman. In his death rattle, she heard the anguish of a vicious mind imagining what horrors lay beyond that final shore. No circle of Hell could be too good for him, and yet she understood him as she never had before, in the moment she saw his eyes fill with fear.
In death, he was reduced, all menace flattened. Simple flesh that would become earth once more, ashes to ashes. Blood that pooled beside her feet and cooled on her hands, sticky, impressing her guilty fingerprints onto the handle of the knife. A little water could not clear her of the deed. She had punctured the vessel, and out had spilled the soul, and now all that was left was the empty husk of the rotten fruit. She could not find sorrow within her thoughts for a man who had lived as brutally as he had died. But who would not feel pity at such a sight?
It was enough to make even the most devout heart question the power of prayer. She had begged God not to abandon her, and now she could not tell if the image laid before her was evidence of His support or of His absence. A thousand years of prayer, her knees bruised from the cold stone, would not be enough to expunge this cardinal sin. She would not (could not) allow herself to regret it.
Time scratched away, all the while—at the flaking plaster of the frescoed walls, at the wax oozing down the sides of candles. Tick, tock, tick, tock. Death would have come to him eventually. She could not forgive the man who had drawn blood from her Mario's temples, who had ordered Angelotti to be dragged from the well, who had demanded not only her flesh but the delicate portion of her soul that would have been torn from her in the act of yielding. But all that was past. He was dead, stripped of vigor and power, nothing more than a still life of bloodied cloth surrounded by flickering candles. Like this, she could forgive him.