Chapter Text
Kylo Ren was declared missing the next day.
According to other members of the house, he had gone out to search for his wife who had taken too long on her walk that day, only for her to return that evening having not seen a trace of him. Investigators took what note that they could, the master of the house sometimes left on business, but nonesuch could be traced as the source of him vanishing without a word.
His young bride was frightened beyond words. The pitiful creature had already dealt with the loss of two parents. Out of fear of distressing her, no one dared presume him dead just yet. They kept their tones hopeful, their eyes deceptively open for clues. All to assure her he would return to her soon: because no one had the heart to admit otherwise, what with there being no leads to his disappearance.
The servants certainly whispered, but nothing could be proved. No one thought to check an unused cellar that the Lord of the Manor himself was always peculiar about allowing people inside. It was unused for decades, and something about the man himself made his location assumed to be as far away as possible, not on the grounds.
Rey continued her days wandering the house. Weeping at the piano. She couldn’t bring herself to even touch the keys again. This was her gift and it brought her so much grief. Kylo’s notice. Her parent’s expectations and strictness. The burden of her potential.
At least she managed to weep over something, because no one was too suspicious, like how they would be for a dry-eyed bride during the week that her husband went missing.
Unfortunately the swiftness with which he was declared missing but a damper on her own plans. She had not even decided if she would involve the police in her revenge when investigators were at her door. Now that she hadn’t told them the truth, what she now knew...it was quite complicated, wasn’t it?
Her revenge was in her own hands. She had much to consider.
After days of puzzling, hoping the matter settled itself with the body in the cellar, Rey found she still didn’t know what to do with him and still needed some time to think. More time than he would survive her simply ignoring the matter altogether. While she did not want to be complicit in keeping him alive any longer, it was necessary until she knew her next steps. But she enjoyed the days she stayed away, wanting to press her foot down harder on this monster’s throat until he just couldn’t stand it anymore.
After the first three days: she went down to the cellar to feed her husband.
Kylo looked mildly surprised to see her, or perhaps to see her again so soon.
He smiled and eagerly came to the edge of his cage like the lions at the zoo waiting to be fed. Because she knew how she would escape from this room, she could observe it a little better. There was an urn—upon closer inspection a chamberpot— settled on the floor, that prompted a shudder. She looked at it and internally fretted over that more than any other logistics of keeping him trapped there.
A human trapped there.
The image was so absurd the situation hit across her mind once again. The floor itself was dug up under the bars, soft earth, maybe more comfortable than the stone that was under her own feet.
He’d built it for himself. How thoughtful.
He looked worn from the three days he was trapped. Shadows floated beneath the translucent skin under his eyes. He was a large man, imposing and strong, and she could tell immediately how three days without food had impacted him. His lovely dark hair was now limp and dirty against his face.
“Why don’t you just shout,” she crossed her arms and looked at him from the base of the stairs. She would go no closer. For now. “Timker would surely hear you from upstairs.”
He tilted his head with a seductive smile. Even looking more ragged than she’s ever seen him. It was hard to picture her husband as a murderer. This man had dropped some of the pretense. She saw his discomfort, his vibrating frustration, how ill at ease he was and how that made him look slightly cruel.
“That’s not what this is about. I don’t mean to escape.”
“Hmm.”
Rey extracted the apple she’d hidden from her pocket and tossed it through the bars. He caught it without thinking, looking distastefully in recognition. He must have supposed she’d have to feed him eventually, but hoped she’d come down to do more. And such a small offering couldn’t be comforting.
“What do you mean to do?”
He had stood up when she walked in, like a gentleman would from his seat when a lady entered the room. But now that she had paced the room a few times, watching him clutch the apple in his fist with more need than he’d clearly like to show, he settled himself on the floor.
Her husband was most likely exhausted and hungry. But he didn’t eat in front of her. Perhaps he thought it rude to, when she didn’t have anything to eat herself.
“I don’t mean to do anything. I rest my fate in your hands. This is about what you want.”
The repetition of those words set her teeth on edge. She almost growled at him from outside the bars of his cage.
“Funny how suddenly it’s my responsibility, after everything you’ve done.”
Kylo began to shine the apple skin against his wool coat. He was dressed how he was days ago: when he went out in search of his wife, before everyone was in search of him. It was cold in the cellar, almost as cold as it was outside. He might not have taken it off since he was locked in.
She could tell from the way he was preparing the food, so he could sink his teeth into it without thought once she left, as soon as it wouldn’t be rude to do so.
She cleared her throat, a strange pull in her own stomach.
“Just eat it.”
His eyes came to hers suddenly.
“I’ll wait until I’m alone. I wouldn’t be so rude to my own wife.”
“You murdered your own wife’s only family. We’re past good manners.”
“I might be a killer but I would never abandon my manners towards my wife.”
She took a tense breath.
“Fine. Give me half the apple.”
He didn’t even hesitate. He held the fruit through the bars, back to her, to deal with serving. Risking her not giving it back.
Rey swallowed and took it into her hand, staring at the shiny red skin.
“Don’t pretend to be good. I know what you are.”
“That’s why it’s for you to decide my punishment, songbird. You know what I am. And what I truly deserve.”
She considered dropping the apple on the cellar floor, just out of his reach. So he would have to stare at it as he went starved.
With a sigh, she took one bite and then tossed it back to him.
“I’m done. You can have the rest.”
His eyes flickered with uncertainty and then his teeth snapped into the apple with a ferocity that unnerved her. While he had made a point to remember his manners: he ate like he was feral. But she assumed that was the hunger. The apple was gone in seconds. Juice dripped down his chin and his tongue swiped beneath his lip to catch what he could
She didn’t know what else to say.
He didn’t seem the least bit embarrassed to be helpless, degraded, in a way.
“It’s your vengeance for you to toy with. I hope it brings you pleasure.”
Rey gripped a bar in her fist and glared down at him.
“Nothing you do can bring me pleasure.”
He looked up at her with his starved eyes glittering.
“But you can bring yourself pleasure, knowing I’m here, I’m sure.”
Rey kept her mouth shut.
It was too late to alert the police of what she knew. She had committed her own crime, and hidden it. It was too late to let anyone else in the house know she must escape. She’d only be suspected of his disappearance.
Rey was trapped. She could only remain until she could leave without notice. Perhaps when he was truly declared dead.
That night, she was kept madly awake at the memory of his teeth gnashing into the apple. She pictured that mouth at her throat, against her naked breast. Biting at her as she lay back in a bathtub in Paris. Making her scream.
She got out of bed and listened to the house for a moment.
It was utterly silent without its master.
Rey groaned and took a quick angry breath of the stale air around her. It was only her breath that filled this bedroom. There was something about having another living thing in the room with her when she was married that was luxurious. Not quite a pet. But something breathing beside her, with unfamiliar warmth.
She had not been a bride for long but already was unaccustomed to an empty bed.
With a growl, she opened her door and walked blindly to the servant’s quarters. She wasn’t entirely sure what she was doing until her knock on the door prompted a terrified yelp from the maid inside.
The door opened warily, just a crack. A blonde head so sleep-disheveled hair poked out.
“Is there something wrong, ma’am?”
Rey was breathless for a moment, staring down at her.
“I told you how I wasn’t yet the mistress of this house?”
The little maid went pale in the dim light. It was clear on her face that she thought she would not be dismissed. Rey needed that fear.
She thought of Kylo, and how he referred to Rey’s pleasure. How it made her pliable.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Now I am. Remember that,” Rey swallowed the lump in her throat. “I want you to go downstairs and make a tray of food for me now.”
The maid’s brow furrowed with nervous caution.
“And bring it back upstairs for you? You’re hungry?”
The girl was sleepy and it was, admittedly, a bizarre request at so late an hour. Her tone was tentative, sensing there was a test, but hopeful that it was merely the demands of a spoiled mistress.
Rey shook her head coldly.
“There’s a guest waiting in the cellar. Bring it down to him.”
The maid shivered from head to toe, but swallowed a frightened sound and nodded.
Rey tightened her jaw.
“You are to bring him a tray every night, at this hour. Do not forget. Do not tell anyone. Or you will be dismissed from this house with the reputation of a thief.”
There was a sharp nod, first eager, then it slowed to something jerky and unsure. The maid knew not what she was agreeing to.
“...and,” Rey bit her lip, “some hot water, and a basin. And soap. He’ll need to wash.”
There. Rey was doing it now. Kylo had planned for himself in his time there: but now Rey was making the arrangements to keep him. Now that she had done so, she was complicit. The captivity was out of his hands, as he wanted it. Rey negotiated what she thought he deserved, what she thought a monster deserved.
She had caught herself making up terms she did not like. She had made herself responsible for him. Even if she hated him: a person obviously deserved to eat, and to at least feel clean.
These are things she didn’t want to make it her power to decide.
The girl slipped past her into the dark. Rey went limp against the doorframe, not sure what had possessed her to do this, to tell the maid, to reveal her secrets.
Perhaps to remove the weight of them from her soul. And to only use this power once before it would be taken away: herself imprisoned for stooping so low.
She went back to her room to wait for the authorities to come for her, as she was sure the girl would run straight to them when she saw Kylo like a lion in his great cage, and they would be there by morning.
She thought the thieving maid was too cowardly to complete the order until she went down two days later.
She wasn’t intending to go often. But if he in fact hadn’t been fed when Rey had planned him to be, she’d have a bigger problem, and she should check on her own.
He looked slightly better than the last time she saw him. Twin silver trays stacked on the floor outside his cage, empty dishes licked clean. So she had been going down there. How could Kylo have pacified her that she didn’t immediately tell anyone about him being locked up?
He was standing at the bars as well, called by her footfalls on the stairs. Eagerness in his eyes when he saw her.
“You’ve been hospitable, songbird. Have you begun to forgive me?”
She snorted when she shouldn’t have. Nothing about this was funny.
Instead she leaned on the cellar-door and looked at him. It was odd to see a formerly self-possessed man in a barred enclosure with nothing but dirty dishes and a chamberpot.
“Tell me more about the murders.”
He sighed.
“Causing you any unnecessary pain—”
“Was in the end all you have achieved, because my family is dead.”
He looked at her and pursed his lips. He seemed to be trying to explain himself to someone else for the first time. When his explanation made sense to him, but not in a vocabulary that could be shared.
“There was one evening when you lost an earring backstage. Do you remember it?”
At first it was as jarring as a slap to be asked. Her career at the piano was a blur. There were hundreds of evenings, hundreds of stages.
But Rey did indeed remember the hiss she let out when she touched her bare lobe one night, a lost pearl, and the dust caking her hands and knees as she crawled in the half-lit theater to retrieve it. Some things she did not forget. Her racing heart and flushed face. Her anxiety.
Mama would have been cross with her if Rey didn’t find it. These expenses were investments in her career. They were not rich from the money Rey made with her music, as money had to keep up appearances to keep them in a world where she could continue to do so. Travel, accommodations, dress. A pair of earrings was an investment into Rey’s future. An item that would earn their keep, as Rey had to. They were not just something to be worn and lost by a careless girl.
Rey had sneezed at the dust filling her nose, somewhere in a darkened wing, all alone. She had snuck from her dressing room before her parents learned of what she had lost, but the longer she was gone, the more likely they’d come looking for her. And she would be scolded for the stains on her dress she acquired while crawling around looking for the bauble.
A voice curled out of the darkness towards her bare ear:
“This is not how a true artist should receive her regards for a great performance.”
Rey’s head had lifted, bereft to be caught in such an embarrassing position.
Kylo Ren stood where she was, behind the curtain, flowers in his hand and his coat over his arm. Perhaps he had tried her dressing room and been turned away by her parents. Again.
“I lost my earring.”
She was so miserable and so longed to tell someone: even if it made her look stupid she would at least tell the one person who couldn’t punish her mistake.
His eyes softened. Watery, ashamed tears began to gather at the corners of her eyes. He always regarded her so highly, and now she must look like a stupid little girl. Wasteful.
He came to his knee beside her, in his lovely black suit, and his hands spanned the floor beneath him as he too began to search.
“I don’t think it can be found, I just had to try—” she sniffled and bit her lip.
There was a quiet, contemplative pause beside her.
A finger reached out and touched the ear that was unadorned.
“Such a pretty lobe, perhaps even more lovely without it.”
Rey shivered and gave a watery laugh. He was always kind to her. She still wasn’t sure why her parents were so protective about him. Kylo Ren was one of her most impressive admirers.
“Tell you what. We’ll blame myself for the loss. You got lost in a corridor and I redirected you too firmly, it went flying, and I’ll offer to your parents to replace them. Then tomorrow, I can take you out shopping and you’ll have a new pair. No harm done.”
It was too generous. Rey had closed her eyes at the offer and wished it would be that easy. But it would only anger her parents more that she had led Kylo Ren to believe he owed her somehow, and she still knew it would be her fault in the end, no matter what excuse he gave them.
“No, it’s not worth the trouble. Besides, I’ll only be scolded. It won’t be so bad. Please don’t waste your money remedying my foolishness.”
The lights of the house flicked off, enclosing them in darkness, and solitude as it meant the house was empty.
Rey gave a soft gasp, and a hand closed around hers.
“It’s alright,” lips moved slowly towards her naked ear, “I’m here.”
She squeezed his hand tightly when she felt a soft warmth brush over her skin.
“Someday, you will be kissed here, if you forget your earrings…”
“Rey.”
The voice made her flinch away. The cry echoed from the hallway outside the door. It must have been important, it was her father searching for her instead of just Mama. That was a bad sign. If caught, it wouldn’t be easy to explain this situation.
Rey shuddered in the dark and stood up.
“It will probably be best that they do not know you were alone with me. Thank you, Mr. Ren, for your kindness.”
“I’ll keep looking. If I find it, I’ll have it sent to your hotel.”
She scarcely remembered what excuses she made as she left him.
Rey clutched the bars of the cage in front of her as she remembered going to find her father, leaving Kylo Ren in the dark with his flowers, and most of all that her bare ear had been kissed by this man, many, many times now. Her reverie had gathered her up to stand before her husband, the bars between them now, her eyes fluttering with confusion.
“It was then I saw that you were frightened of them.”
He looked completely at peace as he explained this to her. Rey’s mouth went dry.
“I carelessly lost an expensive piece of jewelry. Anyone in their right mind would be scared to face their parents afterwards.”
“And a replacement could be bought, and extras, one for every five pairs your mother purchased with your earnings.”
Rey shrank away, her mouth hanging open. He looked angry at this statement, angry at her mother, angry at his victims.
“You were petrified,” he told her, and it unsettled something deep within her to be told of her own feelings. “I saw it.”
Rey let out an indignant cluck.
“So you chose to murder them?”
“I set you free.”
Rey let out a heartless laugh.
“And sacrificed your own freedom in return.”
The words felt poisonous on her lips, and wrong. She stepped back in fright. Rey hadn’t locked him down here. He locked himself up on his own volition. That hadn’t been her choice.
So why was she thinking like it was what she wanted?
“You’re going to pay for what you did.”
She shook her head and let her eyes wander the bars of his cage. This all felt so unbelievable she almost reached into her pocket for the key.
Why did she even bring it with her? She wasn’t down here to let him out.
Why had that horrible thing never left her side since he was sealed up down here, like it would ever be used?
The maid didn’t speak. She did her duty. And she never met the eyes of the mistress of the house nor the man in the cage.
The man was at least polite to her, who was the master of the house, once, though she supposed not anymore with the way things were going. It was curious. When she brought him food, he never asked to be let out or even looked distressed. She’d come back from taking the pot out to the woods and he’d be calmly sipping tea in the cellar as if he were in the dining room with a newspaper in front of him.
The only thing that was hard was that Mrs. Timker was harsh about the maid’s lateness. Thinking she would sneak off to dawdle when she was on an errand to the mistress, though she could not say it was so. It was a secret.
The mistress herself was cold about the subject: which was hardly ever spoken of. But she did raise the maid’s salary, doubled it, then absently tripled it: so as the lady of the house had done when she was just a visitor, the maid said nothing. Occasionally Mrs. Ren would grasp her elbow, worried, and hiss for her to see to it that their guest had a blanket for the incoming snowstorm.
There were no rules about declining her prisoner’s requests: though he made few of them. After a few weeks she grew bold enough to ask if he wanted anything, secret-like, but he merely smiled and shook his head.
“Until it’s decided I deserve something, I won’t ask,” he said clearly, his shoulders wrapped in the blanket her mistress asked that she bring him, his fine clothes rags underneath. Then he did something curious. He looked at her and drew a finger to his lips, as if shushing her.
So she didn't speak about it. Man seemed happy enough down there, if only the Mistress seemed bothered about it.
It was almost normal, not at all unpleasant as the nasty business seemed, until the day a sleek black car arrived and a man with ginger hair stepped out. He came to the door and sniffed as the maid took his hat and Timker asked what his business was.
“If Kylo Ren is dead,” his eyes were cold, as he slowly removed a shiny leather glove “then the house is mine.”
“My husband is not dead. He is missing.”
Rey had to force herself to stop pacing the library. The action looked as if she were too quickly angered by the news.
How would one normally process this shock?
Of course even a woman whose husband was missing under normal circumstances would react to this visitor’s news with distress. She still had to find a balance of her seen reality and seen reaction.
“But presumed dead.”
Rey looked over the figure lounging in her husband’s chair. Smug as anything. Already comfortable.
Ready to have her thrown from this house at a moment’s notice.
“My husband never mentioned the business of who the house would go to. And he's never mentioned you.”
She hoped her tone was neutral, as if to mask understandable surprise.
Hux grinned and folded his hands.
“I am so distant he might not have even known the house would go to me should something happen to him. His side of the family liked to forget about me.”
Rey sniffed the truth in that statement. Somewhere in the cellar, her husband still lounged in his prison like this man did in his seat, completely unaware.
“There is no proof he is deceased.”
“And none that he still lives.”
Rey had it. But it would damn her forever.
Hux looked over at her and half-laughed, a taunting smile on his face.
“Should he not turn up, and be announced dead by the authorities, I do, to a certain extent, contain a capacity for charity…”
She came down that night in her finest black dress to taunt him.
At least, at first.
But he would not budge in his civility. When she dropped the fur stole from her shoulders, to reveal the silk straps over her shoulders, he greeted her warmly. When she drew near, he was eager.
Hux and the servants and perhaps everyone else in the world was asleep. This was just between Rey and her husband.
Her thigh slid through the bars and her bare leg presented itself to him.
“Why Rey,” he bowed to his knee and placed a kiss just above hers, “how you spoil me.”
“You don’t deserve it,” she hissed, twisting the pearls she shouldn’t have bothered to put on tonight in her fingers.
He kept his lips hot on her skin. They drew up, reuniting with a place they knew well.
Rey pretended it made no difference to her as he lifted the black silk over her hips and kissed her bare cunt. His mouth was soft and patient. It was not desperation, or begging, that had his tongue slide between her lips and worry them open. It was her power, but he gave her that power freely.
Rey gripped a bar of the cage and lifted one foot to a crossbar a few inches above the floor. Opening herself up. Her other hand slithered into his hair.
A chill ran down her spine as he licked and sucked at all the good things he had shown her about her body. This was perverse, she shouldn’t miss this the same way she missed his smile and his kindness. But a wistfulness came over her for the past that she couldn’t explain as she shuddered and came, clutching the bars as if she were the one trapped inside.
He cupped the back of her knee and smiled up at her as he drew back from her spent body. But the smile waned when he saw her face.
“Something troubles you. More than my crimes. More than your parents.”
An ache settled inside her at the implication that her parents were a mere trouble. But as one who had already lost her entire life: she found herself more than desperate to keep this one here than to return to life before him.
What a horrible thing to feel.
She tried to ignore his prompting, but it spilled out:
“Your plan ignored a single detail. A cousin. A male cousin. Should Kylo Ren cease to exist, this is his house. Not mine. And he will displace me.”
Kylo’s face went white. A part of her wondered if he left this fact dangle so that she would have to free him. But his shock is clear, streaking his face in horror much like she felt when she finally stepped from the bathroom of the hotel in Paris...
“No,” he shook his head, clinging to the bars. “No, no, Rey, Rey we mustn’t play games now. Let me out.”
She stepped back with a sob. She hadn’t heard his tone waver from perfect calm for a single moment he was caged. Now it was real to him. Now he wanted to escape.
Then this was really happening: and she must do what was right.
“I can’t. It’s for me to decide when you deserve it. Perhaps you should also feel what it is to lose what you love.”
Rey took a deep gulp of air as he rattled the bars and shouted for her to let him go. Then she turned on him and retreated up the stairs.
“Not you, Rey,” he proved he truly couldn’t escape if he wanted to, which had been her suspicion the first few weeks, “not you. Not you. Not you.”
He truly couldn’t get out unless she let him.
She couldn’t. Not until it was like he said. Not until he earned it.
She made herself scarce in the house as long as she could.
Kylo Ren could still be alive, if only in the legal sense, so her answer was hanging with a trembling if in the beginning of the sentence.
Her routine changed, growing more self-conscious. She kept herself out of sight, in the tower that overlooked the stars in the evenings and in the forest and gardens by day.
Hux had overtaken the study. Thus the piano was in his new territory. The viper had infested her husband’s desk with his nest.
He found her one afternoon, reading on the stairs of the tower where she had been given her first kiss, annoyance plain on his face.
“I’ve been looking for you.”
She glanced up, trying to train the contempt from her face.
She could not lose this house to him. Not before she knew in her heart what was right for her to do about the man she had trapped in the basement.
“I like solitude,” she said, turning a page, hoping her firmness would grant her what she liked.
Hux knelt at the step above her. She would have to pivot to face him: but she did not. He leaned down to make her feel small.
She turned her head from him, but would not do so.
“When you’re not where you should be, with everyone else, I have to keep track of too many places at once. Don’t make it hard for me to keep an eye on you. Or you’ll vanish quite like your husband did.”
A shiver racked down her spine, but Rey turned her eyes back to her book as if he hadn’t said anything at all.
Hux snatched up her book and dropped it down the stairwell.
It landed with a thud, as all things that fall from such a height do.
Rey found herself a bride again.
This was not the hasty preparation of her first wedding. It only felt faster, as she was floating, numb, from the moment that Scotland Yard declared Kylo Ren missing but likely dead and the newspapers did the final honor of announcing it so.
It felt like madness to go on with such a terrible secret: so she became like all people who carry such secrets. Entirely forgetful of them. Moving through her day like an automaton. Picking trims and appetizers for a wedding that she would hardly participate in as a conscious being.
Hux did not come to her door like Kylo would have. He kept close watch on her other ways.
Mrs. Timker hovered over her like a black cloud. It was maddening. Rey was about as free as Kylo was, and she hadn’t even murdered anyone.
It turns out, the new master of the house had a deep grudge against the previous one. He glittered with jealousy for a dead man. It seemed to be the parasitic mindset that brought him to their door even before Kylo Ren was officially dead, that he took the man’s house, land, and wife in one fell swoop.
So he was much more precious about Rey than she had expected.
Rey did not know what else to do and moved like a zombie through each day, every day too late.
It wasn’t safe to draw attention to Kylo. She never went near the cellar. She didn’t confer with the maid for the status of her prisoner. She sampled slices of dry cake and could not speak but for a slight nod or two and sat at her piano bench and didn’t so much as touch a key.
She became something else entirely, floating through the house, haunting it, with his legacy and his name.
About to make some cruel transfer so that nothing was his anymore.
On the eve of her first wedding: Rey had lost her innocence to her beloved.
On the eve of her second, she went to the cellar of his house to say goodbye to him.
Now he looked trapped. Truly trapped. His face was shadowed and swollen with an internal agony that made it hard for her to look directly at. Her whole body shivered as his hands tightened on the bars.
“The maid tells me it’s tomorrow.”
Rey struggled with it. Facing this decision, made somewhat helplessly, but still made for reasons only she could understand.
He was hers. His fate was hers. And if she did not feel he had atoned, she could not let him out.
She had broken his heart, and in breaking it, he finally knew loss as she did.
Rey slipped herself like a sylph between the bars. She held out to him a music box in a hand that would not tremble now.
“I had it made special for you.”
He looked at her like he longed to hold her, but couldn’t, even though no bars separated them anymore.
He gulped and took it and wound the key.
A piece from La Sylphide. The same that she had played on the piano as he touched her.
His eyes closed.
“Congratulations.”
He said it like a dog obeying an order. A lump rose in Rey’s throat.
You took this happiness from me. My parents, my family, my love of you.
He did this.
She straightened her chin.
“I’m not here for congratulations.”
He sighed as she shed her robe. She was naked underneath. He looked over her with an expression she hadn't seen in a long time: a strict authority, a cultivator of art, the face he'd make as she played piano. Presenting him a piece.
“In Venice, there was a night where I had my bags delivered to the wrong room. Your room. So in the confusion, you would know that I slept next door, so close. Waiting for you…”
She had been twenty at the time. Before he asked for her hand from her father.
“...thinking maybe you would come to me like this.”
She shook her head and swallowed.
“I was too innocent. And my parents answered the door and ordered our room be moved to another wing. I didn't know why at the time.”
He had been trying for her at every turn. They must have known there was nothing he wouldn't do.
But what if she had just chosen him. If she had wanted to.
He nodded, remembering it too.
“I pulled the fire alarm that night, and as we all went outside to safety…”
Rey took his hand and drew it to her belly, where it spasmed down to the fingertips before flattening against her tight skin like he had been burned.
“You wore only a towel,” Rey swallowed and took a deep breath, closing her eyes to the feel of his skin, “and I couldn’t lift my eyes from your skin as all the residents of the hotel shivered on the street in the middle of the night, little virgin that I was, and when my father noticed he put his hand tight around my arm. The next day you remarked upon the bruise.”
“I did, and I knew then that I’d kill him.”
“And he slapped me, when we went back to the room,” she opened her eyes, “and I thought I didn’t know why. But I did. I knew what I wanted.”
If Kylo Ren had still been in the hotel room adjacent to hers, if they had not been moved, then he would have heard her cry out.
Dark rage looked back at her.
“He is already dead,” she narrowed her eyes and furrowed her brow at him, “you cannot kill him a second time.”
He was shaking.
“Consider the man fortunate, then.”
His hand, emboldened by fury, seized against her stomach and then curled around her waist like a snake. She allowed it.
“I think I knew,” he said sadly, “by how you’d flinch at the piano when you made mistakes.”
Tears spilled out of her eyes.
“Tell me about the murders.”
He swallowed, his other hand joining its twin on the other side of her waist. Rey sliced through the space between them bare as the day she was born. Her front pressed to his clothed chest.
“They did not know who killed them. I wore a mask.”
She half-laughed.
“You would.”
Thinking to himself, he turned his face away from hers.
“They did not suffer. If I knew all that you told me now, and all that I suspect you have left to tell me, they would have.”
Rey bit her lip and shook her head. It was not simply to have her. It was to have revenge for her.
This was too much to bear. In a way it was another reason it felt like she caused it. But it also felt like she could let go. That she was freed from the tremendous pain that a man’s desire for her had her parents wind up dead. It was his quarrel with them, not his want of her.
He had said, many times, she faintly remembered, that this was her choice...
“Come. I'm going to be married tomorrow.”
His whole body was tense with fury, but she knelt at the floor of the cage. There was enough room for both of them to lie comfortably. At least, she could. If he bent some limbs, he could follow suit.
He fell in a prowling position over her body. Changed. Not reticent and pensive in his prison. For the first time she saw the face of the man capable of being a murderer. And he was hovered above her, staring into her eyes and pawing at her bare breasts.
Because she let him.
“Just once more?” he whispered as he leaned himself down to kiss her.
She nodded and opened her legs for him to lie between. He got himself comfortable as she squirmed, not realizing how needy she had been for his touch when all she could focus on was her anger for so long. She was already so wet and yielding. He noted this, eyes flickering to her face as if to confirm something, and she shivered by their dry, knowing look. Her breaths came in hot gasps as he petted her slick folds.
He pressed his lips to her neck.
“I thought I’d never have you again...yet somehow knowing it will be the last time is crueler.”
He held her steady as she shivered against him:
“Rey. You will never be lonely again. You carry two lives with you. Yours and mine.”
A gasping sob fell from her throat. She thrashed on the floor of the cage as he thrust in, reaching for the bars inches above her head for leverage as he began to drive in and out.
“You’re right, Rey. You are my life. It is the one I gave to you. It is for you to decide what you do with it. Take it.”
“If I condemn you, I condemn myself.”
He nodded above her, pulling himself roughly against the bars with both hands to fuck her so well. He moved in her like thunder. Quakes from each riotous thrust travelled down her thighs.
“Damn me, damn yourself. Damn us together.”
Rey’s legs pulled around his waist and she sobbed as she knew she loved him entirely. She could not give him up.
But if she lost the house to Hux, she would lose him, and he would die here.
If she let him go, what power did she have left over a murderer?
The morning of her wedding came and Rey felt further than life than she ever had before.
The guests whispered about the pretty bride and how she was veiled in organza and tragedy. Two parents. A husband.
Hux twitched impatiently the entire morning, like a buyer on the day of a great sale. That’s what this was. The final exchange of Kylo Ren’s property, entirely obtained.
It all happened so suddenly that she did not realize how she got there at all. Moving as if drugged through the morning of the wedding.
Over the roar of the organ, she heard it so clearly it stopped her blood.
I will always be with you.
She had prayed there would be a way for her parents to tell her this, to reach out to her from beyond. But it wasn't their voices.
It was his.
Rey froze at the end of the aisle, clutching her bridal bouquet, and gasped as if waking up. She looked over to Hux, who noted her faltering pace with a sneer, and declared it loud enough for the first few rows of seats:
“I cannot marry you.”
He practically spit out the word: “What?”
But Rey was spared explanation as Mrs. Timker appeared at the other end of the aisle Rey had just crossed over:
“This wedding cannot go on!”
The blonde maid’s elbow was clutched in her hand, the girl cowering with a face so read it could burst into flame.
Rey’s words were at once forgotten when the chapel rang with a cry:
“Kylo Ren still lives!”
“Kylo,” she whispered to herself, knowing what she had decided for herself only moments ago would be true to the entire world. She felt glorious relief. “I have to go to him.”
Armitage Hux had looked like nothing could surprise him, the deck stacked in his favor, for so many weeks that his pale shock sent a thrill through Rey’s body.
“ What?”
Rey laughed and hitched up the skirts of her gown so she could run.
The mass of her in her wedding dress moved like a storm cloud. Shouts of surprise and horror rang through the church as the bride made herself vanish before all the guests.
She did not stop running until she was up the path from the chapel to the road leading up to the manor. She faintly heard the commotion of the confused crowd of wedding guests in close pursuit. But only she knew where she was going. Her flight led her to the cellar, with the key in her hand, sobbing with relief as she went to the bars of the cage and knelt at the cage-door.
“Rey.”
A tired face looked up at her from where he was slumped on the floor. There was a music box playing as if wound for hours in his fist. She met his eyes. Exhausted but so happy. He looked like he hardly believed it. That she was here.
“You came back for me.”
Her hands shook terribly as she struggled with the key. She had to let him out. She was so desperate her teeth were chattering.
“Of course I did, darling,” she breathed, fitting her key into the lock.
The room began to fill, but all they could see was each other’s smiles.
“The maid revealed this horrific crime to me when I caught her smuggling food out of the kitchen on a silver platter. I thought she was stealing, but her duplicity was even worse than anything I had ever imagined—”
Rey was entirely ignorant that the housekeeper was speaking, loud enough to fill the dank room, to the authorities she had brought to the house and the wedding party. Such perfect love glowed between Rey and her husband that it was impossible to notice anything else.
“—arrest this evil woman for holding this man hostage in his own home and for the crimes of bigamy—”
Kylo Ren stood from his cage and stepped out, freed, to greet the crowd of onlookers. Despite how thin he had become, he held himself proudly, strongly, and Rey herself swooned a little until he hooked an arm protectively around his wife’s waist.
“What do you mean, arrest her?”
There was nothing but safety and protection now when he held her. It felt so good, so right. There was nothing he wouldn’t do for her.
Rey peacefully rested her head on his chest. She had to be ready to let him go. Now she was, and with that came accepting that she was his. She did. Wholeheartedly.
Timker looked pale as she turned back to the officers who had arrived there to issue the arrest. The was a titter of shock that rippled through the crowd: as the dead just spoke.
But he had little to offer that they expected from the shocking crime revealed.
“A man caged in the cellar is offensive enough for this woman to be locked in a madhouse.”
“What happens between myself and my wife under my own roof is a private matter, Mrs. Timker, and a waste of time for these good gentlemen. And I am now free: as I was never hostage. You cannot press these charges on my behalf for what was consented upon in our marriage. Now if you’ll excuse me. Hux, sorry old chap.”
Kylo had scooped up his bride in his arms and began to walk with her across the cellar floor. As Rey held herself in his arms, eagerly holding his shoulders, with his free hand he clapped the duped, jilted groom on the shoulder sympathetically.
The crowd parted to allow him to cross the threshold of the door with Rey in his arms.
He contrived for her a sort of device.
It was not always necessary. Time spanned in long moments where all that passed between them was sweet words and soft flesh. He could come to her whenever he wished, fold her over the piano bench, speak of the love for her he always had and she would be nothing if not receptive to her husband. Adoring him.
But sometimes she knew he was bad.
He had given her this device for when he was.
Her husband whined and pleaded whenever she ensnared him. Not in the cellar, not again, not when his gift made it more convenient. Though he struggled, and could easily overpowered her if he truly wished for it, she could kick open his legs and place his cock in the contraption of little bars, fitted to the length of him, where only a key could let him out.
Rey always held the key.
And sometimes she left him like that for a long time. Kneeling at her feet and begging for it to be over, swollen and red and whimpering. Sometimes she lay him back in their bed and stroked her fingers along the exposed skin so he shivered and begged to be let out. Sometimes she made him cum with it on, so hard and with so much finality with it digging into his skin and spilling into empty air that he’d feel he’d never have her cunt ever again.
Then when she decided he was good again, Rey would take out her key, and the lock would click open, and a different man would fall gratefully into her arms.
And they were happy like that.
The house was quiet at night now: as there was not a cage being constructed in the dead of night as there was during the weeks that Kylo Ren's precious visitor arrived. No covert and discrete builders tasked with a secret contract. Rey giggled wildly into his shoulder when he told her about the noises when they shared a bath together on night. She remarked upon her peaceful sleep, which she had assumed was just a shared bed, but certain aspects of his wickedness amused her so she could not help but howl with laughter when he told her.
She still locked him up for a little bit after he revealed such naughty things. He knew why he was being punished. He always knew.
It was up to her to decide these things. For he was hers.
Had been for even longer than she was his.