Georgia's POV
The car ride home is suffocating.
Josiah sits opposite me, profile sharp against the window, occasionally illuminated by passing streetlights that flash across his face like a strobe.
Revealing fragments of the monster beneath. A clenched jaw. A cold eye. A mouth tight with controlled rage.
Outside, California sleeps under fog, buildings appearing and vanishing like ghosts.
Inside, I drown in thoughts of conversations that shouldn't have happened, of feelings that shouldn't exist, of a future I can't have.
He knows. He always knows. What will he do this time?
"You seemed to enjoy the opera."
Josiah's voice cuts through silence like a bone saw.
I meet his gaze, finding it cool and calculating. His emphasis on "enjoyed" carries weight I can't ignore.
I nod, not trusting my voice.
His mouth tightens. He adjusts his gloves, unnecessary, theatrical, then reaches over to straighten my wrap.
His fingers linger at my throat. Not pressing. Not yet.
But the threat hangs between us like a guillotine blade.
"I've observed that some women mistake attention for affection."
His voice comes with false casualness.
His eyes meet mine, hard as flint striking steel.
"It's a dangerous confusion."
The warning is veiled but unmistakable. Not in his words but in his tone, in his hand at my throat, in the calculated pause that follows.
He could kill you. Right here. And no one would question it.
"I'm not confused about anything, Josiah."
He smiles then, a gesture that never reaches his eyes.
"Good. Because I would hate for either of us to be... disappointed."
The rest of the journey passes in silence, but his threat hangs between us, tangible as the fog pressing against the windows.
As we approach the house, our house, I study its imposing silhouette against the night.
Every window dark and silent. Every room holding secrets I was never meant to discover.
I should be afraid of Josiah's warnings. Of the stakes. Of everything he implied with those manicured hands that could so easily wrap around my throat.
But that night, it's the unspoken promise in Carlisle Brocandale's eyes that keeps me awake.
I lie in bed, listening to Josiah's measured breathing, and think of Turner's violent skies.
Of chaos and inevitability.
Sometimes destruction is the only way forward.
Of the dangerous truth that, for the first time since I signed my life away to Josiah Mason, I feel something other than numb.
I feel alive.
And in this gilded cage, that's the most dangerous thing of all.
-----
It begins as a whisper. A phantom thought.
The memory of a ten-minute conversation that shouldn't matter, but somehow colonizes my mind like nightshade unfurling its tendrils through soft loam.
Carlisle Brocandale.
His name alone unsettles me, the syllables dangerous on my tongue, though I never speak them aloud.
It isn't just the man himself. Not merely the tall figure of him, obsidian hair, bespoke suits that hang like liquid shadow, and a quiet gravity that seems to bend light around him.
But the thing he left behind.
The seed that took root and spread, unnoticed at first, until it devoured everything like beautiful ivy strangling a crumbling wall.
I think of him at the strangest times.
Watching cream spiral into coffee's abyss.
Pen hovering over paper as ink bleeds into my signature.
Nodding vacantly during my husband's monologues about quarterly projections that fall like winter rain against a window.
He invades the quietest of moments, when my thoughts should be tethered to the mundane.
The liturgy of must-dos that scaffolds my hollow days.
But there he is, his gaze slicing through the gauze of daily monotony.
Not the usual male appraisal that reduces me to flesh and curve, but something infinitely worse.
Like I'm interesting. Like I contain multitudes.
His gaze carved through my careful veneer, past the immaculate armor of makeup and the four-figure gown to something I'd nearly forgotten existed beneath the lacquer.
His voice haunts me.
Velvet dragged across broken glass when he spoke of Turner's violent oceans and Degas' bone-tired dancers.
The rich timbre reverberated in my ribcage, awakening something I'd meticulously chloroformed long ago.
Something feral.
Something alive.
Perhaps they are. Or at least, they should be. Truth and art, interchangeable.
The idea follows me like a spectral hound I foolishly acknowledged once.
Relentless. Uninvited. A constant gnawing beneath my breastbone.
I can't shake the feeling that I've been living inside a beautiful lie, breathing recycled air.
And the worst part?
I don't know if I'm even capable of returning to the woman I was before him.
Or if I want to.
I spent a year becoming Josiah's perfect wife. Perfect hostess.
I speak in measured cadences, laugh on orchestrated cues, entomb my desires in a sarcophagus of propriety.
I learned that silence trumps honesty, that strategic smiles can wallpaper over fractures, that my purpose isn't to be seen but to complement.
An extension of my husband's success. A living, breathing satellite to his meticulously curated universe.
Now, something feels askew.
A masterpiece hung crooked on an otherwise pristine wall, the dissonance making my molars grind.
After the opera, I move through days in a narcotic haze.
I stare at our Pasadena estate's manicured gardens, barely registering the mechanical heartbeat of sprinklers or the jasmine-scented breeze.
I nod through lunches with women whose conversations about renovations and summer homes dissolve into white noise.
Silver against porcelain. Rehearsed laughter. Rustling silk.
The world around me bleeds into cacophony, a discordant symphony I can't quite decipher.
I'm elsewhere.
I'm back in that crowded room, golden light fracturing across crystal, distant violins rising and falling like tides in the background.
Standing by Carlisle, his gaze anchoring mine, the air between us crackling with unspoken sonnets.
The sandalwood scent of him.
The heat radiating when he leaned closer, his voice pitched lower, speaking verses meant only for my ears.
The brush of his fingers against mine when he took my champagne glass.
A simple act, but it sent lightning through my veins that made me want to gasp, made me feel something I haven't permitted myself to feel since I bartered my soul for security.
I catch myself searching for him everywhere.
At the market, fingers grazing peaches whose velvety skin recalls the crimson heat that climbed my neck when he smiled.
At the country club, ice splinters in my glass like his cufflinks when he gestured toward a painting.
Even in my bedroom, silk nightgown against skin making me wonder how his touch might feel.
A thought I banish instantly, heart hammering with guilt and something nameless but achingly familiar.
Foolish.
Dangerous.
Unstoppable.