Chapter 12: The Reckoning at the Bathhouse Door
After the miscarriage, when Elena had woken later and asked for some alone time to take a bath, Marcus helped her to the bath then gathered the five husbands for a talk. “Our decision was wrong. We do need to apologize to her. Thoroughly. For everything we’ve said and done. Actions alone aren’t enough, not for how badly she’s broken. She needs… she deserves to know how sorry we are. We have to tell her plainly what we’re doing to improve ourselves and our situation. She’s been through hell her entire life, and for five years we became a part of that hell. She’s confused why we’re suddenly nice to her. Why we suddenly care. We haven’t fully discussed this with her. We should.”
The bathwater had long gone cold. Elena watched the last faint traceries of pink swirl away from her knees, dissolving into the murk. Her skin was pruned, her body hollowed out and aching in a way that went beyond muscle. It was a soul-deep fatigue, the kind that makes every breath feel heavy.
There was a knock on the door and it creaked open just a crack.
She went rigid, a jolt of pure instinct, water sloshing against the rust-stained sides of the tub. But it was only Marcus. He stood silhouetted in the dim light from the hall, holding a clean, folded linen robe and slippers. He didn’t come closer.
“They’re all out there,” he said, his voice low in the quiet, dripping space. “In the main room. They want to talk. To you.” He paused, choosing his words like stepping on uncertain ground. “All of us, together. But only if you’re ready. We can wait. Or it doesn’t have to be today.”
Elena stared at the water. Talking. The very idea sent a tremor through her exhaustion. Talking meant their eyes on her, their voices filling the air she had to breathe. It meant words, which could be weapons. They always had been.
But Marcus hadn’t moved. He waited. He had sat through the blood and the screaming and hadn’t looked away. He’d gotten the blood out from under his fingernails, she noticed.
She gave a small, almost imperceptible nod.
He approached then, setting the robe and slippers on a dry patch of crumbling marble shelf. He turned his back, giving her the illusion of privacy as she climbed out, the cold air hitting her skin like a slap. She fumbled with the robe, her fingers clumsy. It was too big. It swamped her. She pulled the belt tight, the fabric smelling of lye and sunlight. She slipped on the simple slippers.
“Okay,” she whispered.
He led her through the gloomy corridor of the decaying manor. The floorboards groaned under their weight. She could hear them before she saw them—a rustle of clothing, a cleared throat, the low hum of tense silence. Marcus stepped aside at the entrance to the main room.
They stood in a rough half-circle, these five strangers she’d been bound to. They looked like men waiting for a sentencing. The arrogant set of Jovi’s shoulders was gone; he stood taut, his amber eyes fixed on the dusty floorboards at her feet. Cai’s usual easy stance was rigid, his arms crossed tightly over his chest. Kael, the bear-shifter, seemed to be trying to make his large frame smaller. Oscar, the copper-haired one, was utterly still, his yellow eyes watchful and unreadable.
It was Jovi who moved first. He stepped forward, the leader by default, by age, by birth, the first husband. His jaw worked, as if the words were stones stuck in his throat.
“We were wrong.” The sound was rough, grating. He still couldn’t look at her. “About everything. I believed the rumors. I saw your silence and called it contempt. I saw a girl who ruined my family’s standing with her… crime.” He forced his head up finally, and the pain in his amber eyes was stark, unvarnished. “It was not your crime.”
A breath hissed out of Cai. He uncrossed his arms, running a hand through his sandy hair. “I called you a social climber.” His voice was lighter than Jovi’s, but it shook. “To your face, once, in the palace gardens when you walked by. You didn’t even look at me. I thought it was arrogance. Now I think you were just… trying to disappear.” He swallowed, his charming facade completely stripped away. “I am so sorry, Elena. For that. For the herbs. For not asking. For not seeing a person.”
The silence that followed was heavy. Then Kael shifted his weight. “I never said anything cruel,” his deep voice rumbled. “I just… didn’t say anything at all. I thought my silence was better than their insults. It wasn’t. It was just another wall. I’m sorry for the wall.”
Oscar’s voice was soft, almost melodic, but it held a bitter edge. “I made jokes. Snide comments about the ‘ice princess’ in our midst. I found it clever.” His yellow eyes met hers, and there was no evasion there, only a cold, self-directed disgust. “It was cowardly. It was vile. I apologize.”
Marcus stayed by the door. “My apology is for waiting. I knew something was wrong the moment I saw you at the wedding. I should have spoken sooner. I should have made them see.”
The words hung in the air, thick as the dust motes spinning in the weak light from the grimy window. Apologies. Five years of venom, neutralized in five minutes of ragged speech. It should have felt like a relief. It didn’t. It felt like a new, terrifying landscape she had no map for.
Elena’s fingers twisted in the overlarge sleeves of the robe. She felt their collective gaze, heavy and expectant. They wanted… what? Absolution? A nod? A tearful reconciliation?
Her voice, when it found its way out, was the faintest scratch of sound.
“I don’t know how to forgive.” She lifted her stormy eyes, looking not at any one of them, but at the space between them. “I’ve never been taught.”
It was the rawest truth she owned. Forgiveness was a luxury for people who had safety to spare. She’d only ever learned how to endure, how to compress herself into smaller and smaller spaces until she was almost invisible.
Jovi flinched as if she’d struck him. Cai’s eyes shone with a wet sheen he quickly blinked away.
“We’re not asking for it,” Marcus said quietly from his post. “Not yet. Maybe not ever. We just… needed you to hear that we see it now. What was done to you. What we did to you.”
“We want to try,” Kael said, the words sounding awkward in his deep rumble. “To be… something else. Not jailers.”
Elena stood there, shivering slightly in the damp robe. The monumental weight of their shifted perception was almost as oppressive as their hatred had been. At least the hatred had been simple. This was a tangled knot of shame, obligation, and a desperate, fragile hope she didn’t trust.
“I’m tired,” she whispered. It was all she had.
Jovi moved. Not towards her, but to the hearth. He knelt, his movements efficient, and began to build a fire with the dry wood stacked there. No one had lit one in days. Cai walked to the kitchen alcove, picking up the kettle. “I’ll make tea,” he muttered, his back to the room. Oscar silently fetched the least threadbare blanket from a chest and laid it over the back of the lumpy settee near the growing fire. Kael just stepped further back, giving her more space.
It was a clumsy, unorchestrated ballet of penitence. No one touched her. No one demanded a response.
Elena stood for a moment longer, watching Jovi’s focused profile as the first flames caught and leapt, painting his stern face in warm, moving light. She walked slowly to the settee and lowered herself onto it, pulling the blanket around her shoulders. It smelled of cedar and dust.
She watched the fire. The men moved around the room, giving her a wide berth, attending to small tasks. The silence wasn’t comfortable, but it wasn’t hostile. It was… conscious. For the first time in five years, she was in a room with her husbands, and she was not bracing for an attack.
The tea Cai brought was weak and too sweet, but it was hot. She cradled the chipped cup, letting the heat seep into her cold fingers. She didn’t thank him. He didn’t seem to expect it.
Forgiveness was a language she didn’t speak. But this quiet, this space, this cup of bad tea served without a demand… this was a dialect she might, painfully, slowly, learn to understand.
Outside, the afternoon light began to fail. Inside, the fire cracked and popped, and for now, that was the only conversation that mattered.