Chapter 25: The funeral
The silence in the house had a new quality. It was no longer the quiet of empty rooms or withheld conversations. It was the thick, porous silence of absence, final and absolute. Arthur Moreau had taken his last ragged breath in the master bedroom three days prior, a nurse bearing witness while Izzy stood at the window, watching the garden. The official funeral was tomorrow. Tonight, the old man lay in his coffin in the formal drawing room, surrounded by too many white lilies that made the air taste like a perfumed cemetery.
Julian moved through the halls like a ghost himself. The grief was there, a dull stone in his gut, but it was complicated, marbled through with relief and a gnawing, unfamiliar anxiety. His father had been distant, a monument more than a man, but his presence had been the architecture of Julian’s world. That structure was now dust.
A lawyer had come that afternoon. Reading of the will. Julian sat in a stiff-backed chair, still wearing the black sweater he’d thrown on that morning. The words washed over him: trusts, holdings, percentages. The vast majority of the fortune, the house, the control, all passed to Isolde. There was a single, stark condition appended to Julian’s modest, tied-up inheritance: His welfare and residence shall remain under the guardianship of Isolde Moreau until his twenty-fifth year, she acting in loco parentis.
He was not disowned. He was bequeathed to her.
She had nodded, serene in a high-necked black dress, accepting the documents with a slender hand. She had not looked at him.
Now, night had fallen. Julian found himself outside the door to the master bedroom. It stood ajar. He hadn’t entered since the body had been removed. A faint light, candlelight, flickered from within. He pushed the door open.
The room had been transformed. The medical equipment was gone. The bed was made with fresh, black silk sheets. Dozens of candles, in holders of all sizes, were arranged across every surface—the vanity, the mantel, the chests—casting a dancing, chaotic glow. The air was thick with jasmine incense, masking, but not eliminating, the ghostly antiseptic scent of death.
Izzy stood in the center of the room. She wore a sheer black negligee, the lace tracing the curves of her hips, the dark points of her nipples visible beneath the fabric. Her hair was loose, a cascade of ink over her shoulders. She held a crystal tumbler of amber liquor.
“Come in, Julian,” she said. Her voice was soft, devoid of its usual theatrical edge. It was worse, somehow. More intimate.
He stepped inside. The door clicked shut behind him, though he hadn’t touched it.
“They dressed him today,” she said, sipping her drink. “The undertakers. Put him in that awful navy blue suit he hated. He looked like a stranger.” She turned those emerald eyes on him. “You didn’t come down to see him.”
“I saw him enough when he was alive,” Julian heard himself say. The words felt dangerous.
A slight smile touched her lips. “True. He wasn’t much for viewing, even then.” She walked toward him, the negligee swirling around her legs. She stopped just within arm’s reach. The scent of her, of the jasmine, of the whisky, was overwhelming. “The lawyer explained everything to you?”
“You own me,” Julian said, the stone of grief grinding against something sharper. “That’s the summary.”
“Such a dramatic boy,” she murmured. “I don’t own you. I’m responsible for you. I’m your guardian. Your…” she let the word hang, pregnant in the candlelit air, “…parent.”
She set her glass down on the vanity with a precise click. “He’s downstairs. Cold. Empty. The ‘man of the house,’ as they’ll all say tomorrow through their fake tears.” She reached out and touched Julian’s chest, a single finger pressing over his heart. “But the house isn’t empty. It has a man in it. Right here.”
Her finger trailed down, over the wool of his sweater, to his belt. He was frozen, caught in the web of her gaze and the flickering light.
“You’re the man now, Julian,” she whispered. “And I’m what’s left for you. I’m all of it. The money, the walls, the bed. Your mommy.”
The word, in that context, from her mouth, was a psychic slap. It awoke a tumult in him—revulsion, a terrifying spike of lust, a profound, disorienting shame. Memories of the cage flashed, the aching denial, her mocking voice.
“No,” he breathed.
“Yes,” she said, her hand cupping him through his trousers. He was already hard, a traitorous response to the blasphemy of the scene. “See? Your body knows the truth. It knows who takes care of it now. Who it answers to.”
She began to unbutton his pants, her movements efficient, unhurried. He should stop her. He should run. But his feet were rooted to the floorboards that had creaked under his father’s step for decades. She pushed his trousers and boxers down to his thighs, his cock springing free, erect and eager in the warm air.
“Look at you,” she cooed, wrapping her fingers around his length. Her touch was shockingly familiar, possessive. “So ready to assume your responsibilities. To fuck your inheritance.”
She led him, by his cock, toward the bed. Not to it, but to the space beside it, where a large, low chaise lounge was draped in velvet. She pushed him down onto it, on his back. Then she climbed over him, straddling his hips, the sheer black lace of her negligee riding up. The candlelight shone through the fabric, outlining her body like a sinuous shadow.
From where he lay, his head tilted back, he could see the vast, empty bed where his father had died. The black silk seemed to drink the light.
Izzy leaned forward, her breasts brushing his chest. Her hair curtained their faces. Her breath was warm and tasted of whisky. “He’s right downstairs,” she whispered, her voice a husky promise directly into his ear. “Listening to the boards creak. Knowing his boy is upstairs, fucking his wife. Making her his. Making her your mommy.”
She positioned herself, her hand guiding him. Then she sank down onto him in one slow, devastating stroke.
She was hot and impossibly tight, still slick from her own anticipation. The sensation ripped a guttural groan from Julian’s throat. It was a violation of every natural law, a rending of the fabric of his world. It felt like falling, and like coming home.
“That’s it,” Izzy moaned, beginning to move, a slow, deep roll of her hips. “That’s your place. Inside me. This is your house now. This cunt is your house. You worship it. You live in it. You satisfy it.”
Her words were filthy, sacrilegious, an incantation. Each one struck him like a lash, each one stoked the fire coiling in his belly. He gripped her hips, his fingers digging into the soft flesh through the lace. He thrust upward to meet her, the chaise groaning beneath them. The sound was obscenely loud in the silent house.
“Say it,” she demanded, her rhythm becoming harder, more frantic. Her nails scored his chest through the sweater. “Say who I am.”
He couldn’t. He squeezed his eyes shut, but all he could see was the black bed, the empty bed.
She slammed down on him, grinding against his pelvis. “Say it, Julian. Or I’ll stop. I’ll get up and walk away and you can spend your first night as the ‘man of the house’ with that blue-balled ache you remember so well.”
The threat was real. The memory of the cage, of the tormenting denial, was more potent than any shame. It broke him.
“Mommy,” he choked out, the word tearing from a place of raw, desperate need.
“Again.”
“Mommy!” It was a sob, a prayer, a curse.
“Yes. Your mommy. Your fucking mommy. Now give it to me. Come inside your mommy. Mark what’s yours.”
It was the permission, the twisted command, that shattered his last restraint. With a broken cry that was part agony, part surrender, he erupted into her. His hips pistonned up, driving himself deep as the spasms racked him, a brutal, unending release that felt less like pleasure and more like exorcism.
She rode him through it, milking him with fierce, clenching contractions, her own climax hitting with a silent, shuddering intensity. She threw her head back, the cords of her neck standing out in the candlelight, a beautiful, ruthless goddess claiming her sacrifice.
For a long minute, the only sounds were their ragged breaths and the pop of a candle wick. She finally stilled, resting her weight on him, his softening cock still nestled inside her. She pressed a kiss, strangely gentle, to his sweaty forehead.
“Good boy,” she murmured, the words vibrating through his skull. “My good, loyal man.”
She lifted herself off him, the separation feeling like a loss of terrible magnitude. She stood, the negligee falling back into place, already the poised widow. She looked down at him, sprawled on the chaise, exposed, spent, emptied of everything.
“The funeral is at eleven,” she said, her tone now practical, almost domestic. “Wear the dark gray suit. The one from Milan.” She walked to the vanity, picked up her glass, and finished the whisky.
As she moved toward the door, she paused, her hand on the knob. She didn’t look back.
“This is how it is now, Julian. This is your life. You have a roof, an allowance, a purpose. You have me.” She opened the door. The colder, darker air from the hall rushed in. “Sweet dreams, son.”
The door closed.
Julian lay in the aftermath, the smell of sex and jasmine and melted wax clinging to him. The throbbing in his groin was gone, replaced by a deeper, more permanent ache. He looked at the empty bed. He looked at the door.
The cage had been unlocked a month ago. He understood now, with a clarity that chilled him to the marrow, that he had simply been moved into a larger one. The walls were now the house, the lock was her will, and the bar he gripped most tightly was the terrifying, shameful need she had just carved into his soul. He pulled his trousers up over his sticky flesh, the man of the house, and began to tremble.