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Part 2

The dinner dragged on, interminable and dull and between them buzzed a sense of restlessness. Of specters from the past and words still to pass between them. It was unusual, she thought to herself, to find her marriage in such a position. She could count on one taloned hand the number of times such knots in the tapestry had weaved into the usually calm cloth of their union.

The leather of the car seats were cold and she pulled her cloak around her for warmth. The weather was undecided, the seasons skirting from the end life of autumn to the stricken depth of winter that she so favoured.

She watched as he watched the city trail by in a blaze of half lights and she wondered to herself just what went on behind those restless, innumerable doors. Not like behind the massive, oak doors to the ancestral home that he had grown up in. Transparency, no secrets, had always been the key. Yet now she wondered if she had miscalculated (because everything she did was calculated so all ends were imagined and weighed) in telling her beloved husband about her former lover.

The question crept into her mouth, heavy and dry on her tongue and a resentment, however small, into her head. He had lovers, more than she could count on taloned hand, before she came into his life. She thought back to that moment in the kitchen when they had discussed the inevitability of what they would become as people and as a couple. The night before that he had taken women in to his bed with the casual ease of a man betrothed but not in love. He could not, should not, resent her for her indiscretion with Hannibal.

She stole a sideways glance again, her eyes cutting through the unnatural silence, to look at his hand a mere inch from her own. She noted the tight sinews, clenched under calf-skin leather, betraying the torment he was feeling.

Such skilled hands she thought absently.

She reached for his gloved hand and he took it immediately, as if she were offering him some aid to survival.

He lifter her ivory hand to his lips and kissed the back of it.

It was different for him, she knew. Her resentment became a whisper of an emotion, pushed deep into her stomach where it was wretched; unwelcome as anger or loathing. It was different because he viewed himself as the winner and she the prize. She knew, as Hannibal had taught her vitally, that in the end that was what all relationships were. Where Gomez differed though was that he thought himself unworthy of such a prize as Morticia. That made it love. And she considered herself all the more unworthy to feel such a depth of emotion.

He thought himself a prize winner by a fluke; right time, right place.

In the depth of night, wrapped in each other and sated of conjugal desires (for the moment) they would debate his theory. He laughed at her affront often and she would argue that while yes, he should worship her; she was the one who was undeserving. He told her to hush. He was there; right time, right place.

Morticia would be lying to say it did not appeal to her vanity to have the handsome, Castilian play- boy under her spell but it ran deeper, far deeper, than any sort of magic. A spell weaved over 20 years lost all sense of magic, it became vital to her ability to live and breathe. To die at the right moment and with him by her side. It was fundamentally intense.

He was not Hannibal. She was not thawed by coldness and that she knew, reflecting on that gloriously violent relationship with her lecturer, had been her mistake. She needed Gomez's heat to stave off her coldness. Hannibal had lectured only in the act of passion, not in the feeling. And feeling was everything.

Gomez was, to allow herself a cliché, her soul mate. She spun the words through her head and laughed at the banality; there were no words, in any language she knew, to describe how she felt.

She leaned across the seat as the car crunched across the gravel of their drive. She felt his pulse at her lips, tasted earth and electricity on olive skin that burned with heat.

"Ti amo," the words danced off her tongue, naked and full of promise, "Mon cher".

A low growl, in the back of his tight throat, conceded her admission. In that moment, after she had let him bask in his anger, she had channelled that unusual emotion into action. If you are angry, she might as well have muttered in her lowest, most honeyed voice, show me how angry you are. This is your challenge; show me why you're better than him, mon amour…in every way.

Of course she already knows why he is better in so many ways than Lecter, but that takes the fun out of it for her and for him.

The lobby of the huge house, though cold and desolate, welcomed them in its timeless embrace. Lurch took his leave swiftly, glad for a relatively early evening.

It was then he grabbed her, though she had felt in his grasp from the moment he slipped the ring onto her finger (surprisingly modest for her ostentatious tastes). He pressed her to the balustrade at the bottom of the stairs while he let his coat, soft wool and ermine, fall carelessly to the floor. He was painfully hot, his ire escaping through his skin. He compelled her up a step, silently, then another. His hands were hard on her hips. Then on her breast. She moaned unwillingly, into his mouth, and a smile of satisfaction graced it as he moved his lips to her jaw bone, her neck.

He sucked, bit, hummed against her ivory skin in a way that made her knees weaken. He turned her roughly and pushes her forward again, up more steps than she could count. One had reached down to pull the lace of her skirt up and she was trapped between his strong hands and his back.

She gasped as his hand fled upwards, quicker than she could calculate, and grasped her intimately. She bent at the middle, clutched the dusty bannister with hands clawed in pleasure. She felt him press against her and for a moment, despite her better judgement, she became frightened of his unbridled desire. But her husband was not so unmeasured and though his hand, that she had only recently labelled very skilled, did not stop its ministrations he loosened his hold on her.

"Not here," he murmured, encouraging her forward with his other hand.

"Anywhere," she whispered, grumbling.

"Don't make me," he laughed slowly, a flash of the jovial and wonderful husband she had left behind at dinner returning to her.

Atop the stair, where the staircase split into two and led off to the different wings of their home, he stalled. He looked at her and she saw the flair of rage again. She smiled from under long lashes.

"I can't wait," he murmured lightly and with that all the fervour that she thought had dispersed returned with scalding vengeance. He pushed her against the wall, this time under her splayed palms she felt damp, expensive wall paper as he made light work of her skirt.

If this were not her home, she allowed her fogged brain to think, she would beg him to show some restraint. But instead she begs him, not with words but with actions, to take what is his.

She wrapped a leg around his waist and used the other to lever herself on the rich red carpet under heel. She lifted her skirt above her waist and did not grumble when her favourite panties - lace formed in intricate cobwebs- were ripped like cotton thread under his clean, desperate hand. She cried, as a wounded bird does, when he pushed into her. Don't wake the children fluttered inanely into her head, but then they were miles away, receding in a haze of pleasure.

He pushed into her. Intense heat, intense cold. All the sensations that Lecter taught her with all the emotions Gomez felt for her. She cried out in pleasure, this time a breathy scream that was just quiet enough that she heard her husband say "Mine".

He chants it like a mantra, a Pater Nostre, with every earth shattering move that he makes. Against her mouth, pressed into the jet of her hair, tattooed on her collar bone, branded on her breast, deep where there is nothing but sensation he has left his mark time and again.

Mine.

"Yours," she whispered gently as he pulled her over the precipice, delicious and unearthly, for a second time.

He let go finally, his hands climbing up the wall on either side of her, white and pressured. He rested his head on her shoulder, a final declaration of "mine" on his tongue. She ran her hand over the back of his hair.

"Better?"

"Infinitely," he answered quietly, followed by a laugh, "That would make any man-"

He stalled his sentence and looked down at her. She smiled forgivingly.

"The mere suggestion," she murmured, "of any other man makes my skin crawl."

"delightful," he pressed a kiss to her forehead.

"Take me to bed Gomez," she commanded lightly, "And let names, and shadows, from the past be. There was nothing in it, you must know."

He looked at her thoughtfully as he scooped her into his arms. He would be thinking of his cigar now and when next they would indulge in such heavenly pleasure. She smiled at him.

"Maybe not for you, Morticia," a frown creased his brow, "But no man, however cold he may be, can know you and not be affected. Could have felt you under his hands and not burned it into his memory. You underestimate your power."

She did not let him see it but the sentiment offered her no comfort. She buried her face in the crook of his neck and tried, with a fear she had not felt before, to push Hannibal into the locked box in her memory where he had stayed, a devil in waiting, for many years.