A rock rests in her hand. She lunges forward, dashes it against his father’s head, not a powerful blow, a spirit’s fist against the monster.
Stunned, Giorgio Bramante falls to the red earth, silent for a moment, eyes hazy, lacking vision.
The sheep flee, feet echoing into nothing down a corridor lit by the chain of dim yellow bulbs that lead from this grim and deadly place. Alessio wants to join them. Running in any direction, provided it leaves this hidden tomb behind, forever.
Anywhere except home, a place to which Giorgio will return. A spoiled dream of lost memories and deceptions.
As his father writhes, half conscious, in the dust, the woman bends, stares into Alessio’s face, and for a moment his heart stops again. It is as if she knows his thoughts, as if nothing need be said at all, because in her eyes is a message they both comprehend: We are the same. We are what he owns, what he uses.
The blood is dry on her mouth now. She looks at him, pleading. For his forgiveness, perhaps, which he grants readily, since she is, he understands, a part of his father’s damage too.
And for his hand, which joins hers, tight, the blood of Ludo Torchia’s slaughtered offering joining them, and with that bond comes a promise of safety at last, perhaps, even, of release.
“Run,” she urges softly, and his eyes flicker towards his father, still barely conscious, but recovering quickly. “Run to the Circus. Don’t stop. Wait there. I will meet you.”
“And then?” the boy asks meekly, frightened and hopeful at the same time.
She kisses him on the cheek. Her lips are damp and welcome. A sudden rush of warmth falls down her cheek and enters his open mouth, a sacrament made of salt and pain and tears.
“Then I’ll save you forever,” she whispers in his ear.
Remember…
The pain below, the delicious violence, the taste, the feel of blood that first time he took her, with brutal, rapid force, in a lonely dig down some desolate country lane in Puglia.
Judith Turnhouse lost her incurious virginity that day, in the remains of a dusty, unremarkable Dionysian temple while the other students worked with their trowels and their brushes, no more than fifty metres away, out in the sun, unaware. The condition was taken from her in no more than three or four savage minutes, as if it were truly meaningless, a pathway to some brief instant of fruition on his own part, one that lay outside her own small individuality, dismissive even of its existence.
She was the simple vessel, the physical route to this conclusion, and somehow this made it all the more rewarding. In her humiliation and his animal fire lay a reality, so hard and wretched and alive that she could nurture it later, cradle the feeling on the cold lonely nights when she thought of him, nothing but him, over and over.
Here, now, in the Mithraeum beneath the Circus Maximus, in the place they’d agreed on all along, she could recall everything of the last fourteen years, every time they’d coupled, every savage, bloody encounter, beneath the earth, against rough stone, fighting, fucking… it was all the same, and had been from the beginning.
That act was the closest she would ever achieve to ecstasy, the ritual that took her out of herself, sent bruised and battered angels flying through her head, then left her exhausted, praying for the next time.
Never again.
That’s what he’d said, all those years ago, before the world changed.
It was a lie, on both their parts. She’d watched his son stare through the keyhole in Piranesi’s piazza that morning, followed them furtively as he led the child into the dig.
She’d caught his attention, drawn him away from his child. Away from the boy, they had argued in near silence. They had fought again. And then, on the promise that this was the last time — no more violent encounters in the dark, no more mouldy soil in her hair — she’d won, proved victorious through the brute physicality of the madness that conjoined them.
Not love. That was too mundane a word, and besides, there was scant affection inside it, and no respect.
This was need and, that last time, as he heaved so ruthlessly into her she could feel her skull cracking against the rock wall, she knew he would deprive of her of this, her only delight, because that was Giorgio Bramante: hard and cold and supreme in his own mind, a man to rule over everything and everyone, to take from them what they found most precious, simply because he could.
Even on that hot June day, feeling his power inside her, some mindless, ecstatic agony rising alongside every thrust, she understood that he would still take what he wanted, leave her there, walk out, with his strange little child, go home, to his miserable battered wife, believing nothing had really changed, that he could return to his world of papers and study, the life of a successful, intellectual academic, and no one would know, not even when it happened again, with some other naive student this time, some other vessel to take her place.
Giorgio Bramante was at war with everything: her, his family, the world. But most of all, she knew, he was at war with himself. And there lay his weakness…
He was scarcely conscious when the boy fled. He had barely recovered his senses when she scolded him for his fury and his threats, told him to stay inside, where none of his victims could see him.
When he came to, he scarcely thought about the fact she’d struck him, that they’d been seen, locked together against the wall, their secret captured, stolen.
“Alessio,” he groaned, eyes scanning the chamber anxiously.
It was all so easy.
“Those stupid students took him,” Judith said quickly. “They’re terrified of you, Giorgio. Leave this to me. I’ll talk to them. They’ll keep quiet. I’ll find Alessio. Stay here. Don’t worry.”
She could find somewhere to keep the child for a day. Perhaps more. A lesson would be delivered. A bargain would be struck. It was, too, though not the one either of them expected. Giorgio’s fury, and the way it sparked such an unpredictable chain of events, saw to that. But by the time Ludo Torchia was dead, everything had changed. Alessio could not be returned to the world, not without the destruction of everything she possessed. And Giorgio was gone, lost to her, through his own stupid arrogance, turning murderous and suicidal inside his own grief and guilt and overweening self-hatred.
There was no going back. Not when he asked, that first time in prison, for her help in tracking them down, one by bloody one. Not now, near the end, a conclusion he craved because only in that final act — the sacrifice of himself — would lie peace.
And in his place, she found another. As Giorgio Bramante grew more bitter, more insane, in jail, his son flourished under her tutelage, from boy to youth to man, ever closer over time until he was hers completely, as she had been his father’s, bound together by the brutal force of her character, an icy devotion that made captives of them all.
In her mind there was no hiatus in time between then and now, between the blood and sweat in a cave in Puglia and this end, the one he sought, the one she would deliver, in a way he had never expected, beneath the Roman earth. All was continuous, linked, cemented together by the same harsh inevitability born of the sinuous, brute passion that had once joined them.
She waved the gun at them, the three men in black, the inspector, crouched, helpless, Giorgio, imploring, pathetic, hands outstretched.
“He failed you,” she told his son, alarmed now, because there were more men arriving. Time was growing short. “He failed me. He is old and useless and wasted. Do it!”