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The sound of her heels on the Royal Arctic Institute’s marble floor echoed through the entryway like a series of short, sharp gunshots. Marisa had her eyes fixed on the statue at the end of the hallway while the monkey’s eyes were bolted to the placard at the statue’s base, and neither allowed their gaze to deviate for even a fraction of a second as they strode towards the lecture theatre. That didn’t stop them both from sensing the stares, every pair of eyes grabbed by the noise and held by the spectacle, the disgraced harlot showing her face in public for perhaps the first time since the scandal hit the papers weeks ago. A trail of whispers sprung up in her wake and Marisa felt her heart start to race. She let herself imagine that the harsh claps of her shoes truly were bullets ricocheting through the hallway, taking out each gossiping leech one by one, and only then did her fingers stop trembling – not that anyone had been close enough to notice that they’d been shaking in the first place, apart from her dæmon, and he was the last person whose feelings she was about to concern herself with right now.
He’d begged her not to attend the lecture. He’d sat on her dressing table as she’d selected her outfit, a pale blue sheath dress, the sleeves long and the neckline high, and pleaded with her. She’d ignored him for as long as she could bear, stringing pearls around her neck, slotting matching studs into her ears, painting her nails with the navy polish she’d ordered specially, now that visiting the salon was an activity best avoided. He was still squalling as she slipped on her midnight-blue shoes and began to rifle through her lipsticks.
“Which colour, do you think?” she said to him absentmindedly.
He put his little face in his little hands. “You’re not listening to me.”
“Red is out of the question, of course. The rose is so… demure, I don’t think I can bear it.” She opened a tube containing a deep plum shade. “This will do, won’t it?”
She didn’t wait for his answer, leaning forwards and smoothing the burgundy pigment over her lips with aplomb. He threw her cosmetics bag onto the floor. “Marisa, no. Not yet. Not today. Please.”
She calmly replaced the lipstick’s cap before whipping round and taking him by the throat, ignoring the tension that sprung up in her own neck to match. “Listen to me,” she rasped. “We will not cower, and we will not hide. Not anymore.” She tightened her grip on his throat, and to his credit, he let her, his hands hanging limp by his side, the feel of his sharp nails conspicuously absent from the delicate skin of her hand, where they’d immediately been lodged the last time she’d done this.
She dropped him and they both gasped for breath. “Come on,” she snapped, striding into the hallway and fetching her coat, a deep claret peacoat, a flawless match to her makeup, then wound a scarf around her neck to ward off the bracing spring chill.
Marisa surveyed herself in the mirror and took a deep breath, clenching her hand into a fist to stop herself from mussing her perfect curls. She was happiest like this now, covered in the thick sheet of herringbone cotton, then the wool of her coat, then the cashmere of the scarf, the layers of fabric encasing her like a downy coffin, her marred figure buried deeply enough that she could put the marbled skin of her back and thighs; the loose pouch of her stomach, shivering like jelly while she walked; the stretched bones of her pelvis out of her mind long enough to consider stepping outside.
“You know what happened last time,” the monkey said from atop the coat stand, safely out of reach of her cruel hands.
She closed her eyes, refusing to remember the feel of the saliva that hit her face the last time she’d ventured out of the house, the accompanying slur ringing in her ears for days afterwards. “That’s why we’re going somewhere altogether more civilised,” she said brightly, picking up her bag.
“You know everything that he knows!”
“That’s not true. They say Dr Drummond’s work is groundbreaking – ”
“Who says that?” her dæmon said. “You haven’t spoken to anyone who might know him in months.”
She knocked the coat stand to the ground with a clatter and the monkey couldn’t flee fast enough. She wrenched his ear. “Won’t you just shut up?” she spat. Then she closed her eyes and took a deep breath, her dæmon still quivering in her grip. “I think I hear the car. Let’s go.”
They’d ridden to the Royal Arctic Institute in silence, though as the driver rounded the corner and the familiar limestone brickwork came into view, Marisa began to speak under her breath. “Just look straight ahead. Don’t get distracted. No matter what anyone says. No matter how they stare.”
Her dæmon sighed. “I understand,” he said, and she relaxed almost imperceptibly, because she knew that he did.
The lecture hall was heaving by the time she entered the room, the chairs laid in semicircles, a tiny amphitheatre, looking down at three adjacent blackboards in the centre. It was later than she’d usually arrive for an event like this, but even the thought of idle minutes sat in this crowd had felt like torture, so she’d timed her entry to perfection, three minutes to spare until the lecture began. Her eyes scanned the crowd for silver fur, his broad frame, the slate grey overcoat that he’d likely be wearing in this weather, but her search came up empty. She breathed a quiet sigh of relief as she slipped into one of the only remaining seats at the rear of the room, draping her coat and scarf over the back of the chair before she did so.
A few people had noticed her arrival. Marisa’s skin prickled as she heard murmurs spread out around her, suffusing the crowd like toxic waste pollutes a lake. She anchored her eyes to the clock at the centre of the lecture theatre’s main wall, willing its heavy bronze hands to tick faster, because then the lights would fall and the presentation would start and she’d be able to fade into the darkness, just another attendee, another scientist keen to examine Drummond’s analysis of the new ice floes off the coast of Greenland, another person whose intimate life remained their own, not splashed across the papers every morning to be devoured by these ghouls. Two men sitting in front of her turned, not even trying to be discreet, how utterly classless, and sniggered. She slid her fingers into the monkey’s fur and gripped his skin so tightly that her own shoulder blades began to smart, though her eyes never left the clock, and her face remained as cold and impassive as the icebergs they were all here to scrutinise.
The few remaining seats in the room filled up, though the chair beside her stayed vacant, two men entering the theatre in quick succession, noting her presence, then turning on their heels and leaving again, only to reappear through a different entrance some seconds later, greeted by handshakes and laughs as they slid into another empty chair. As the clock struck eleven and Drummond took his place on the dais, his projector screen now unrolled behind him, the only unoccupied seat in the whole room was beside her, a stark reminder of her ostracism, made worse by the way the guest on her other side had physically shifted his own chair away from her, as if she was emanating an unpleasant odour, the very air around her tainted by her indiscretions.
After five minutes of preamble, Drummond’s assistant walking over to turn off the anbaric lights so that the presentation could properly begin, the door behind Marisa was thrown open, as if the oak had inspired anger in the entrant by simply performing its function as a door. Then this final, fierce attendee slumped down in the chair beside her, utterly unconcerned by his late entrance, and as the familiar smell of hot solder and fury and frost entered her nose the lights were going down, and she and Asriel could only stare at each other in the tepid darkness, hardly a foot’s space between them, their faces both masks of horror as Drummond clicked to the first slide.
A laugh washed over the room but neither Marisa or Asriel heard even a snippet of the gag, their eyes still locked together, both of them having forced their horrified shock to return to the more familiar terrain of frigid anger. She snapped her gaze back to the presentation, her hand twitching, her dæmon huddled behind her bag to avoid Stelmaria’s vicious sneer, his quivering form distressingly out of reach of her manicured fingers. He pulled at the ankle of her stocking, but she jabbed the tip of her heel into his ribs and he shrank away.
He wanted to leave, and of course she did too, of course she did, she wanted to kick off her shoes and sprint out of the building and not stop running until she was continents away from this godforsaken country, until she reached the end of the Earth itself, where not a single soul knew of her or Asriel or Edward, the world suddenly a blank slate, clean and untainted and full of possibility. But even more intolerable than the thought of staying was the thought of leaving, of running away from him like a meek little mouse, giving him this room and this new knowledge and the satisfaction of having chased her away when he had already taken everything else. No. If there was one thing she’d learned to bear this year it was discomfort, beginning with the grotesque stretching of her body as the unwelcome intruder expanded inside her and ending with the merciless stretching of her soul as she was exposed and eviscerated by the courts and the press and the people she’d once considered allies, if not friends, until her insides were nothing but a black hole, an endless, brutal void, its relentless gravity so strong that every day had become an exercise in not being obliterated by it.
She couldn’t focus on a single word leaving Dr Drummond’s mouth, but Asriel wasn’t to know that. Marisa forced herself to nod and tilt her head in time with the rest of the crowd so that an onlooker would have no idea that the only thing inside her head was a harsh, panicked scream. Asriel’s eyes had started tracking the scientist’s movements too, though Stelmaria was still emitting low growls, each breath infused with wrath. Marisa’s cunt pulsed, and it took every ounce of self-control she possessed not to squirm in her seat, though she couldn’t prevent the shiver that rolled through her torso. Asriel’s hand twitched on his knee.
The slides passed in a blur, then Drummond was calling for a brief pause while he switched to the next deck, though he bid that the lights remained low. Chatter began to rumble through the room, punctuated by the sound of papers being shuffled and chairs being scraped across the floor as a few patrons nipped out, this short break an ideal opportunity to use the facilities. Marisa kept her eyes glued to the screen, her heart pounding in her chest, and though she heard the quiet smack of spit as Asriel opened his mouth, whatever cruel line he intended to throw at her never reached her ears, because before he could utter a word someone left through the door just behind them and the piercing wail of a baby barrelled through the air to their eardrums, a knife to the gut.
Their heads whipped round in unison, both of them truly wondering if this was a twisted hallucination, wielded somehow by the other as a monstrous attack. Sadly, the sight of one of the Institute’s most notorious board members standing jovially beside a young woman with a perambulator made clear that the sound was harrowingly real.
The door swung closed and they both turned back to face the dais, a flush creeping up Marisa’s neck as the sound continued to assault her ears, the block of wood muting the infant’s cry but not extinguishing it. She stole a brief glance at Asriel and he looked truly wretched, and the sight did soothe her distress a little. Drummond was taking his place before the crowd again and she willed him to start speaking, praying that his voice would be loud and strong enough to drown out the muffled cries. Then she stopped her fruitless pleas with a start, remembering that she had always known the Authority to be chaotic and cruel, this moment just another piece of evidence to add to her roster. It was not as if his fiendish nature bothered her, per se, though she could only despair at how often she now found herself the victim of His cosmic cruelty.
The cries were weakening now. Marisa blew out a slow breath, sitting beside Asriel in silence a simple task compared to the torture of the past few minutes. But then she felt an uncomfortable tingle in her chest, teetering on the edge of pain, silk strings being pulled from her breasts with a sear. Her cheeks flamed and she leapt to her feet, picking up her bag in one swift move, her calves brushing Asriel’s knees as she shoved past him and fled from the room, shooting the still-fussing baby a glare as it was being bounced in its mother’s arms. She hurtled to the bathroom and into a stall, locking the door with her trembling hand and spinning around on the seat so that the monkey could reach the buttons of her dress. “Quickly,” she urged him and he did his best, his small fingers slipping the thick fabric buttons back through their loops as fast as he could manage.
She pulled the dress from her shoulders and slipped off her brassiere, the cream satin blotted with milk, traitorous drops still beading on her nipples. She let out a ragged breath as she held the damp fabric. “No,” she said. “No, no.”
Her dæmon curled around himself on the floor, his shoulders hunched, his eyes latched to the ground. “Let’s just go,” he said. “I told you we shouldn’t have come here.”
She nodded, her eyes stinging. He did up her dress in silence while she took deep breaths, pressing her hands to her eyes and composing herself. Then she stood and smoothed her dress down over her thighs, unlocked the stall door and stepped out into the bathroom, the sodden fabric clasped in her hand.
Asriel was leaning against the sink counter, his arms folded, Stelmaria sat rigid beside him. Marisa gasped. “Get out,” she said, her voice splintering, and she resisted the urge to kick her dæmon as she heard the humiliating waver in her words. He leapt to the windowsill anyway, the thought bleeding from her mind to his. She forced herself to swallow and then spat, “Get out,” at Asriel again, the phrase infused with more ire this time. His propensity to enter rooms as if their very existence offended him made it easy to forget that he could slink around with a graceful poise when he so chose, a predator effortlessly cornering their prey.
That’s how it had felt the day of the trial, the last time they’d laid eyes on each other. He’d stormed out of the courtroom as soon as his sentence had been announced and trapped her in the witnesses’ cloakroom before she’d had a chance to escape, grasping her upper arms so aggressively that her delicate skin had been dotted with bruises for days. He’d been trying to squeeze the child’s whereabouts from her, his saliva spattering her cheeks, Stelmaria pacing beneath the cabinet on which the monkey had installed himself, and it was only after his wild, savage eyes had bored into hers that he’d realised she was telling the truth about neither knowing nor caring, and then he’d thrown her to the side and stalked out of the room with a snarl. That was two months ago, and while his anger had obviously waned somewhat, she knew that a single unwelcome gust from her mouth would be enough to waft the embers back to an inferno.
For now, however, his face remained impassive. “You left these,” he said, nodding to her coat and scarf, which he’d dumped unceremoniously next to the sink. Then his gaze fell to the brassiere in her hand and he frowned.
She forced herself to set her shoulders back and jut her chin forward. “I want you to leave.”
He laughed cruelly. “I don’t care what you want.”
She closed her eyes and drew in a slow breath, then stalked towards the sink to rinse the sodden satin, pretending as if he wasn’t there. She felt as raw as an exposed nerve, and ignorance seemed the safest response to his petulance. She could feel him studying her as she squeezed the fabric beneath the stream of water, not yet sure what she was doing, and if she hadn’t been committed to remaining disengaged she might have laughed, because for all the knowledge crammed into his oversized head, it rarely occurred to him that there were whole worlds of experiences he could never access, a million sensations about which he didn’t know that he didn’t know.
She stole a glance at her coat, wondering how she might grab it and escape without him lunging for her, but her plotting was interrupted by another piercing wail from the corridor, and for a terrifying moment she worried that the mother and child were about to enter the bathroom and stumble upon them. Her stomach knotted.
Mercifully, though, the sound faded away, the infant simply passing by, but it was enough for the tingle to return, stronger this time, and then she was pulling at her collar before she could stop herself, Asriel’s presence blocked out by necessity.
“What are you – ” he started to say, his brows furrowed as she pawed at herself, but then his gaze fell to the stains blooming across her chest, and he blinked. “Oh.”
She span around and the golden monkey reached for the first button, but his hands were trembling too and he could hardly push it through the loop. The stain was spreading. Marisa reached behind her neck with a pained whine, desperately trying to free herself from the cloying fabric.
“Stop,” Asriel said, low and commanding, reaching for her, but she didn’t, pulling at the dress so roughly that the top button flew off. “Stop,” he said again, moving to stand behind her, holding her in position with firm hands on her hips. He unhooked the buttons as if he was slicing open a specimen, his fingers tracing her vertebrae through the cotton as her bare back was revealed to him. She pulled the fabric down her arms, exposing her chest to the air, and she let out a rasp at the sight of the creamy droplets. She bowed her head over the sink, her hands gripping the steel taps to keep from shaking, her eyes filling with tears. The milk dripped onto the porcelain of the basin, like the most innocent blood seeping from a fresh wound.
Marisa felt a howl rise within her, and the effort she channelled into containing it made her whole body tremble with the strain. She shuddered against the cool metal of the faucets, her skin tight in the crisp air, but she refused to yield to her distress, because she knew that if she started to sob now then she wouldn’t be able to stop, and she would rather die than weep before him like that.
Her eyes were pressed closed and her head was angled resolutely downwards, so she didn’t see Asriel’s arm lift in the reflection of the mirror, his hand coming to hover above her bare back, as if tenderness remained a word he knew but its meaning was now lost to him, a rung of a ladder he couldn’t find in the darkness. She snapped her neck up and his hand had been pulled away before her eyes opened, so that all she saw when her lids rose was her own hunched, pathetic form and him looking down at her, jaw clenched, hands behind his back, his expression cool as he surveyed her. She felt vaguely like an animal about to be slaughtered, and that was the first thing that helped her relax.
She took one more deep breath and reached for a hand towel, desperate suddenly to wipe herself clean and hide the alien vessel that was now her body from the world once more. As soon as she let go of the taps, however, it was clear that her hands were still shaking, and before she could stop him Asriel had reached behind her and fetched the towel himself. He span her roughly around by the hips. “I’ll do it.”
She was so exhausted that she let him, sagging against the marble countertop as his eyes roved over her bare torso, noting the milk still slowly beading on her breasts and the drops that had meandered to her abdomen, the skin still loose and supple from when it had been home to another mere months before. His breaths became more rapid, and then he’d dropped the towel to the floor and was licking the milk from her himself, his tongue swirling around her areolas, hardening her duplicitous nipples to stiff points, his hands stroking the outside of her thighs as he lapped the milk from her skin.
Her eyes pricked with tears but she didn’t stop him, gripping the counter as he moaned against her stomach. He used his tongue to draw a path from her belly to her neck, stopping briefly to lick the new beads of milk from her breasts, then started to maul her throat and press into her, grinding her pelvis into the hard edge of the counter until pain flared across her back. A wave of arousal accompanied the new ache and she spread her legs with a moan, letting him lift her up and place her roughly on the marble countertop. He mashed his lips against hers and she frowned as she tasted something unusual on his tongue, sweet and creamy like ripe honeydew melon, and then she realised that it was her, her milk, the disgusting substance leaking from her breasts like she was nothing more than livestock. Rage coursed through her, and then she was biting his tongue and pulling his hair and digging the sharp points of her heels into the backs of his thighs and feeling herself start to drip as she did so. He was always ready to battle, and so he wrenched her head back to expose her neck and sunk his teeth into the soft pale skin until she gasped.
Their dæmons were clawing at each other on the floor beside them, and with the monkey incapacitated by the sharp pain of Asriel’s bite, Stelmaria pinned him to the ground and dug her claws into his back. Marisa buckled, almost falling into the basin, and Asriel forced her legs apart and created a wide tear in her stockings, grunting as his fingers brushed against the lace of her drawers. “Get these off,” he growled, undoing his belt and exposing himself in the meantime.
She reached down to slip off her heels, but he clearly had no patience for that, because his fingers were suddenly scrabbling between her legs and ripping the lace in two, the ruined scrap flung to the floor before she had time to protest. Then he’d shoved himself inside her and it hurt and the pain was a welcome relief. They fucked against the counter, his face buried in her neck, sucking and biting at the tender skin until her blood vessels burst like rivers after heavy rains, and the thought of her throat marred by bruises only made her wetter, because it was what she deserved, her depravity tattooed across her skin by the hot sear of his mouth. His thrusts were becoming more erratic, and when she grabbed his hair in her hands and twisted, hard, he pulled his teeth from her neck and placed a hand around her throat instead, squeezing until she started to choke.
He was swimming in her now; drowning, even. He groaned, his forehead pressed against her shoulder as he gripped her neck in his strong hand. His breath was hot against her skin, burning her, and then she’d shoved his hand from her throat and was hitting his chest with her fists, tears rolling down her cheeks. They were both gasping and moaning, one hot, roiling mess of fury and distress. Asriel clasped her to him to stop her fists colliding with his torso, which made her milk start soaking through his shirt, the fabric of which began to rub against her in just the right spot, searing friction, and then they were coming together, clutching each other, once each other’s raft in a swirling storm, now the other’s body nothing more than a fracturing plank of wood, no protection whatsoever from the swell of misery that continued to crash down upon them both.
They twitched in each other’s arms, panting, groaning, Asriel’s hands running up and down her back, Marisa’s ankles locked behind his backside, her legs holding him to her. Her face was buried in his neck, but the scent that would once have reliably soothed her racing heart had no such effect now, and as she returned to her senses a great chill swept through her and she shivered in his arms, their embrace the frozen core of an affair that’s incandescent shell had long melted away. He tightened his grip on her as she shuddered, his head resting against hers, his hair brushing against her temple.
It was Marisa who pulled away first, refusing to look at the milk stains on his shirt, the secretions no longer any concern of hers now that they’d left her body and attached themselves to another. She wiped herself quickly, perfunctorily, and then slotted her arms back into the sleeves of her dress, the monkey doing up just enough buttons that the sheath was secured around her neck. Then she slipped on her coat and wound her scarf around the battered skin of her throat. Asriel was leaning against the wall, his cheeks flushed, his belt still hanging loose, though he’d tucked himself away and rebuttoned his trousers.
They stared at each other. Marisa’s eyes were brimming with tears. She blinked and a drop fell down her cheek, which she hurriedly swiped away.
“Hey now,” Asriel said, cracking a melancholy smile. “You know what they say. No use crying over spilt milk.”
Her gaze hardened. “You fucking bastard,” she spat at him, then stalked out of the room, the door slamming behind her with a smack.
The silence in the small bathroom was oppressive. Stelmaria sighed beside him. “Asriel – ”
“Don’t, Stelmaria,” he growled, pushing himself away from the wall and walking towards the door, though he paused briefly as a scrap of fabric caught his eye beneath the basin. He bent to fetch it: it was her underwear, almost ripped clean in half by his ferocious hands. He closed his eyes and inhaled, placing a firm palm against the wall to steady himself, then hurled the ruined garment into the bin with a roar.
There were ten minutes left of the lecture by the time he returned, the lights still mercifully low, allowing him to slip on his coat before he sat to cover the damp patches on his shirt. He’d vaguely wondered if Marisa might have returned too, but of course that was a fantasy, her chair cool and empty by the time he settled himself in it. Drummond was still droning on, something about the increasing shrinkage of ice over the last decade, and Asriel found it as impossible to concentrate then as when she’d been by his side scarcely half an hour before. Instead, he let the tips of his fingers skate across his shirt, his coat still unbuttoned, and then brought them to his lips, the taste of her milk impossibly sweet on his tongue. If he had been a man who cried, he might have done so there and then.