Page 100 of The Madman and his broken Princess
Nestore shuddered. “My love for you has been the anchor in my life, dove.”
When I woke without Nestore by my side, I immediately sat up and got out of bed. After a moment, I remembered that he couldn’t be with my father anymore. The man was gone. I was drawn to the window overlooking the garden. It didn’t take me long to find Nestore. He stood in front of the entrance to the maze. He was completely naked except for his fur coat and held something long in his hand that I couldn’t make out from this far away. Grabbing my bathrobe in passing, I hurried out of the room. My body still sang with what we had done in the past four hours. After our first lovemaking, Nestore had taken back the reins and given me more pleasure than I thought I could handle. Now I was sore in every area of my body.
As I rushed down the many stairs, I put the robe on. As expected, it was cold outside, and I shivered when my bare feet touched the grass. I followed Nestore down the accurate pathway toward the maze. He was still where I’d last seen him, appearing almost frozen.
I touched his back, feeling him stiffen under the thick fur. It felt soft and warm under my touch, so unlike his wearer’s expression. Nestore tilted his head down to me, a frown pulling down his brows.
“What are you doing out here?”
“I keep wondering,” he says, his gaze returning to the arched entrance of the maze. The light from the lamps flanking the pathway only reached a few feet inside the maze. After that, darkness waited.
I shivered at the idea of entering the eight-foot-high rose maze. I didn’t understand how I could have ever thought anything about this place was romantic.
“If your mother is buried in there?”
“She is,” he said quietly, his face turning almost reluctantly toward the maze as if pulled by invisible strings. “Your father taunted me with it. During one of the torture sessions, I…I calledfor her.” He fell silent, goose bumps rippling over his body. My skin pimpled in response, imagining what my father must have done to make Nestore cry for his mother. “After that, he kept mentioning her and told me he knew my father killed her. He buried him on top of her because it was my father’s favorite position.”
I shuddered.
“I can’t bear the thought that she’s found her last resting place beneath my father.” The tortured look in his eyes made my heart clench. “I want to bury her properly. But—” He shook his head as if he was trying to free himself from invisible reins. “I can’t bring myself to enter this fucking maze.”
He closed his eyes. I looked down at the hand holding the thing I hadn’t recognized before: a shovel.
“I’ll come with you. We can do this together.” I held out my hand despite my own anxiety at the mere idea of entering this graveyard disguised as a maze.
Nestore took my hand, expression flickering with confusion. “Why do you always want to help me?”
“Because I care. Because I can’t stop loving you. Because loving you carries me through the dark days, too.”
He exhaled, then his expression became resolute. His fingers around mine tightened, but it was a comforting touch, not the one meant to exert dominance. Side by side, we entered the narrow pathway between the rose hedgerows. Despite Nestore’s impressive height, the hedge still towered about ten inches over him. Soon, the darkness cloaked us. Nestore paused and took out his phone, then turned on the flashlight to illuminate the path ahead of us. He handed it to me and kept the shovel. I directed the beam of light to the ground so we didn’t stumble over anything. My breathing quickened as we moved deeper into the labyrinth. The thick rose bushes dimmed the noises of the outside world. The heavy sweetness of thousands of rosesin bloom clung to the back of my throat, an overwhelming sensation that made me gag.
For a while, we walked side by side in silence, turning left and right. Every twist and alley looked the same as the one before. I wasn’t sure if we were circling back to the entrance or actually going somewhere.
Nestore seemed to be drawn by an invisible line as he led us deeper into the maze. To him, the chaotic uniformity of tightly woven vines made sense. In some alleys, the vines had grown out of control, narrowing the pathway. Thorns snatched at our skin and clothes, but we didn’t stop. The silence was eerie. Our feet sank into the mossy underground, untouched by sunlight. It was colder in here than in the rest of the garden. I shivered, not just from the cold, but from a feeling of utter discomfort and apprehension. Nestore slowed as we reached the center of the maze, his body growing taut. I followed his gaze toward the ground where moss grew over a slight rise in the surface. It was bumpy, as if someone had haphazardly covered something with soil.
“Do you think this is the place?” I whispered.
Nestore nodded, his lips thinning as he stared at the spot that likely marked his mother’s last resting place. He released my hand and approached the spot, but didn’t start digging.
I hadn’t visited my mother’s grave since she’d been buried. Father had never allowed it, and it felt wrong to do it now after all this time. How did Nestore feel knowing he would have to unearth the last remains of his mom?
He moved closer, then stopped. Despite my abhorrence of graves, I moved to his side. With a low growl, he slammed the shovel into the ground and began digging. He tossed soil behind himself. When the shovel hit something more substantial than earth, he halted. I moved a step forward to get a better view just as he pushed aside some soil to reveal a bone. Nestorestared down at it, his expression hardening. The air I drew in felt heavier, earthier, and a little musty. The odor of decay was very faint, nothing compared to what I remembered from the basement.
I wished I could help, but I hadn’t thought about bringing a shovel, and I couldn’t bring myself to dig up a skeleton with my bare hands. Nestore uncovered more of the skeleton with the shovel. Soon, it became apparent that two corpses were on top of each other, one rib cage pressed against the other. My stomach sank. Why had my father tortured Nestore in this fashion, too? Couldn’t he at least have respected the dead?
Disgust for my father washed over me.
Nestore got down on his knees and began to remove the earth with his bare hands, an almost feverish look in his eyes. I directed the flashlight at the ground so he could see properly. Eventually, Nestore gripped the upper skeleton and dragged it up. The limbs remained stuck, and the skull fell off and rolled over the mossy ground. Nestore only held his father’s torso in his hands but tossed it aside with a look of disdain. He knelt again and began to separate his father’s bones from his mother’s, until only her remains lay in the grave. I ripped a few roses off the hedge and threw them into the grave with her. Nestore said she loved those roses, so it seemed fitting to bury a few with her. Nestore stayed on his knees beside the opening. I shivered when I noticed the strands of long dark hair still attached to the skull. The top of the skull had damage, like a head injury sustained before her death. Images of her running away from an enraged man, him catching up and beating her with a heavy object, flashed through my mind. Had she died right away? Had she bled out amid the roses she loved so much? I hoped they had given her a sliver of comfort in her last moments.
Sadness overwhelmed me thinking of Nestore, who never got to say goodbye to his mother. I knew the heaviness of this grief.I’d often wondered how my life would have been with my mother in it, but she was a stranger, and my father would have only managed to make both our lives miserable. Nestore closed his eyes and lowered his head. Maybe he finally said the goodbye he was denied many years ago.
I waited patiently, without a single word, wanting to give him the chance to allow grief and find closure. Maybe this would help him.
He pushed to his feet and covered the remains with soil. “I’ll have a gravestone made. She deserves a true resting place, even if I’m the only one left to grieve her.”
I touched his arm. “I’ll grieve her too. I’ll grieve her for the mother you lost, for the love you were denied, for everything taken from you because of your father’s rage.”
Nestore met my gaze, warmth filling his eyes, and it nearly broke me. So often in the past few weeks, he had gazed upon me with anger and triumph, yet rarely with kindness, but here I saw my Nestore.
