A/N: So here it the long anticipated chapter? Thank you for your patience with me. I moved across the country and I am moving again. My life is crazy, and I really mean that literally. I would tell you more but I live a double life. :) I am so thankful to Faeyero who has been on this roller coaster ride with me. Also mad props to mayberrygal109 for her cover art. Gorgeous.

It's not over yet but this was the hardest chapter yet to write. I know I haven't responded to comments; I am so sorry. I need to get with it. Once I move, again, I will. I promise. Fair warning. This chapter has some violence in it.


Chapter Fifty Three

It was not difficult to keep his composure as he left Crawley's office and stepped into the frigid air. There was talk of snow. He'd remembered his hat but forgotten his scarf. Yes, it took a moment for the anger, the rage, really, to hit Richard fully. He remembered falling from a rusty swing when he was a boy and hitting the ground so hard the breath was sucked from his chest. For a moment, he had felt nothing. And then he had felt everything. It had slammed into him. Now, his mouth twisted wryly as he walked away from Crawley's office. For months now, since Mary's return, he was that boy falling from the swing, the sky so blue it hurt his eyes, knowing he would hit the ground and yet not knowing it, panicking at the coming pain, unable to prepare.

Now, at this exact moment, his back hit the ground. He could hear the smack. He was the smack.

Everything inside of him shuddered to a stop. His breath was gone from his body.

And then he felt everything.

He did not think of his wife, though she was somewhere in the back of his head, the hurt in her eyes riper than the juiciest of peaches. He did not hear the sounds of his own fists on the face that was close but not close enough to the woman he twistedly believed he loved. He did not think of the child that was his or her his wife's weeping as she held her hands over her flat belly. Or even of Crawley and their latest meeting.

He only thought of Mary.

Mary.

For Richard Carlisle, loving Mary Crawley had begun in his chest, as she smirked at him that first time, as if a hand had brushed itself against his heart, making it quiver. After that first meeting and first conversation–watching her head bow as she thought of a witty response, the white curve of her neck, her eyebrows raised–he had realized she quite literally held his heart in her hands, a living, breathing, beating thing. He had no defense against her except to make sure she never knew of it, never knew that in those pale and delicate hands, sat his stone cold heart, warmed by the heat of her very much alive skin.

That's why he did not tell her how he loved her–when he asked her to marry him–even knowing that she had not and may never give her heart to him, to hold in his ink stained hands, the hands that grew up in a house where dirt under the fingernails had not been noticed. Of course then, when he'd asked her, he'd had no idea that she'd already given her heart away. Though, looking back, he should have known better. He should have seen? How else could she have sat so still while she told him of Pamuk and her predicament? She was not telling her secret to the man whose hands held her heart, the man whose hands could choose to crush it or nurture it. The only thing at stake had been Richard's opinion of her, a risk that wasn't a risk at all, not when even then he would have given her everything if she only would have looked at him, looked at him and seen, seen what she meant to him, what lengths he would go to for her, all of it.

But she had kept her eyes down. She had not seen.

Sometimes that was the story Richard told himself.

Other times, it all seemed premeditated, as if the whole time she'd known she held his heart in her hands and every time she had pushed the wedding back or looked to Matthew before her own fiancé, she'd knowingly squeezed her grip a little tighter.

Even stone could bleed if squeezed hard enough by one as heartless as Mary Crawley.

She was evil and deserved everything she got. She was privileged and spoiled and did not even know what fighting for something looked like (because hadn't he fought for her?). All she knew how to do was crush hearts and flick away people's feelings like unwanted bugs. Or worse, she cut people, so deeply it took them a moment to feel it. For God's sake, he'd seen her do it to Edith enough times. And to him, by God. She was cruel and cold. And yes, of course, she was careful.

Sometimes he told himself that version instead.

He left Crawley, the familiar feeling of rage beating inside of him, like a drum, the blood at his temples throbbing, his hands fisted tight. There was an itch on his neck. He forgot his briefcase. He walked quickly with a sense of purpose but if someone would have stopped him and asked him, Where are you going? he would not have had a destination in his head, not consciously. Still, he was being dragged there all the same.

He told himself that, too.

He told himself Mary was squeezing his heart even now and even if Crawley refused to see what that woman, what that cold flesh impersonating a human had done, Richard could see. He did see. His temples continued to throb. He started to grind his teeth. His hat was pulled low, under the brim of it, his eyes saw the world in front of him, the frost on the grass and did not see it at all. They saw Mary.

Mary.

The magnet pull continued and his feet went on striding with purpose.

In the small library when she had said, as if it were so obvious, You must see we'd never be happy,he had felt as though she'd crushed his stone heart to dust, to ash. He could taste it in his throat, the aftermath of a fire that burned his very insides out and left them blackened. And then...

Well.

Sometimes, in his memory, he only coldly retorted: Well, you saw to that, didn't you, darling? and left the house.

He left the house.

He left her behind.

But at night, when his eyes opened in darkness, and he was pulled from sleep, he remembered and it repulsed and frightened him, just as what he did to his wife repulsed and frightened him. The only way to go back to sleep was to tell himself a story, to believe a lie. And if he couldn't fall asleep, because he thought of his mother, and how she had been ever so clumsy and had always been walking into doors, and how enraged he had been at her for believing her own stories, for thinking that he, Richard, would believe them too, then he took a pill and he did not dream.

In the small library, it had been as if fire were in front of his eyes, bloody and thick. Her face had been there as well, her neck in his hands. He wanted to scream: This is what it happens when you make stone bleed. But he had not known how to open his mouth. He had not known how to do anything but what came after and now the memory was blurred and distorted by that awful raging red.

Though even now, walking, he remembered buttoning his pants, seeing her there on the floor. It had confused him. How had she gotten there?

She walked into a door.

She was ever so clumsy.

Sometimes that's how he remembered it, too.

He had considered he may have gotten her pregnant; he had hoped for it, hoped that she would come to him as she had before and they would have married. He had believed she could have learned to love him but she had not wanted to try. It all came down to what Mary wanted.

All of it.

Richard, as a man with a real beating heart, had not mattered then and did not matter now. It was so painfully obvious and in his ears, as Richard turned the corner, he heard a sound like nails on a chalkboard, an urgency, the same type of urgency a woman in labor feels when she must bear down and push. He gave birth to every hateful thought he had, until it hit him in the head with the deadliness of a stroke, and his feet took him to Crawley House–his destination all along.

She had not wanted him. Sometimes he was able to admit that. In the small library, she had not wanted him. It was the only time he could remember ever doing what he wanted in the whole of knowing her.

Richard had imagined this–pounding on the door with his fist, forcing Mary to have her moment of reckoning and even as it happened, even as his hand hit the very real door, it seemed a dream, or perhaps a nightmare. No, definitely a nightmare with the way that blood hazed in front of his eyes again.

And it was a dream. Since even as he pounded and there was no answer, his hand reached for the doorknob and twisted it.

It was not locked.

All Richard could think as it twisted in the harshness of his grip was that this unlocked door was a sign, an omen. If he had been more himself, he might have called it fate and smirked, since self made men don't believe in such things. But he was not himself. And yet he was more himself than he had ever been before.

The door was opening for him and there was Mary, full of someone else's child, framed in the doorway, looking bewildered and beautiful.


Mary heard the hard insistent knocking on the door. "Come on," she told Baby, who ignored her instead, went on eating her treat without delicacy. Even as the knocking–pounding, really–continued, Mary was moving slowly from the back of the house to the front, her hand braced on the small of her back. She worried that something worse had gone wrong for Molesley. Even with the butler's worried face in her mind, while she was still meters from the door, it opened.

It did not just open but was fiercely swung so it hit the wall, and she knew from the sound it made, though her eyes did not leave Richard's face, that the knob had left a mark, if not a hole, in the the plaster of the wall.

He left marks everywhere.

A part of her was still the girl in the library, who even as she ended the engagement and expected him to leave like a gentleman, saw the mania in his eyes, the lion kept in a cage for over two years, and knew that at the very least this lion, this man, would not leave without taking a few pieces of herself with him. The fear had started delicately, a curl of smoke twisting into the air. It had ended like a blaze, a fire, and when he was finished taking his pound of flesh from her, she was burned and singed. It had been the type of fire that dies not because of rain but because there is simply nothing else for it to eat, to char, to kill, to devour.

Mary had survived, of course. But that only meant, right now, as she looked at Richard, so much the same as her nightmares, that she knew what to fear, what lengths he would go to. She did not have the ignorance of the Mary who had ended the engagement and watched the lion warily, some part of her sickly confident she could control him. Mary's fear, this time, did not begin delicately but slammed into her, stronger than any contraction could ever be, and flooded her so that she could not move, not even a finger. Her hand remained on the small of her back, the other on her stomach. She forgot to breathe.

And yet.

She could feel her child move within her, the aches that came with being eight months pregnant. She thought of the lion analogy again as Richard snarled her name in greeting, his eyes squinted and angry. He would rip her throat out if he could, she realized. They were alone. If she screamed and yelled, he would hurt her sooner rather than later. If she waddled towards the phone, he'd do the same. There was no way out.

The baby kicked.

If he was a lion then Mary must be a tigress, she realized, protecting her cubs fiercely and viciously. She was not an ignorant girl in a library but a mother.

"I know." He shut the door and stepped into her home and his voice was filled with rage. "I know your secret."

"What secret is that?" she replied calmly, moving–sidling, really–toward the divan; one didn't turn her back on a wild animal. "I'm sure you know, as a newspaperman, that everyone has some secrets. Perhaps it's the human condition?"

"Shut up!" His words shot from his mouth like bullets as he raised his voice. "I know," he repeated as he began to pace. "You must think I'm stupid for not realizing sooner."

"I don't think you're stupid," she told him so honestly that for a moment he paused and stared at her, recognizing the statement as truth. "I've never thought that."

He shook his head, refusing to be sucked in by her beauty, by the blush on her cheeks, and her neck, spreading down her neck and beneath her dress. His eyes did not move lower than that. He did not want to think of the child she carried so he would not think of it. "That child is mine!" he shouted instead, the veins in his neck bulging.

She forced confusion over her face. Her forehead wrinkled. "What are you talking about? I can assure you this baby," she looked down at her stomach, forcing him to see her as she was for a moment, "has nothing to do with you. Neither do I. Why are you here?"

He slapped her so quickly, she never saw it coming. There was no preparing for it. He slapped her so hard she stumbled, her hand catching herself on the divan's arm, and felt blood in her mouth. She closed her eyes and let her breath shudder out.

"Do not lie to me," he heaved, as if the slap cost him just as much as it did her. "The girl. The one that looks like you. She's mine."

"Richard, don't be ridiculous," she forced herself to scoff, and this time she was not surprised when he slapped her, this time with the back of his hand. This time, it took longer to catch her breath. This was worse than her nightmares because of the children, the children, her babies, how to protect both of them, right now, with the monster from all the stories ready to eat her and hers alive.

"For once," he yelled at her, "I want the truth from you! I want you to say it."

"Say what?" she asked wearily, and this time he reached forward and pulled her hair so her face was close to his. She could smell peppermint on his breath.

"That girl. Who is her father?" he whispered harshly, the words sucked from his insides.

She winced, felt tears she could not control slide from her eyes as he pulled her hair harder.

I lose.

No matter what, I lose.

If she told him the truth, that she had kept his daughter from him, she doubted she would leave this house alive. And she had made herself and Gracie a promise–that she would never tell him the truth. And what of the baby inside of her? The baby whose face she awaited with eager expectation? How to protect that baby too?

What of my babies?

So Mary let go. She made her body only a body. She surrendered to whatever would come to it. She had to think of it that way and strategize so that somehow this body, this shell continued to protect the precious cargo inside of it.

"Matthew is her father," she whispered to him and when he shoved her back, she thanked God that the divan was there to cushion her fall.

"You'll pay for that," he warned her, stepping towards her.

"Pay for what? The truth?" she asked him, feeling dizzy. "I'm pregnant, Richard. Please," she begged. She would beg, if that's what he wanted, to save her child. And yet she knew that was not what he wanted. "Please."

He did not hear her. She could see that.

"Who is that bastard girl's father?" he asked again, slowly, punctuating each word with a puff of breath.

"No matter how much you want it, she isn't yours," Mary replied wearily. I will not give her to you. She is not yours. And no matter how much you want it, I will never be yours.

I will die never belonging to you.

Her cheek accepted the slap. More blood filled her mouth. She hardly felt it. How could she feel anything other than gratitude that her baby was safe as he continued to attack her face while she was cushioned by the divan? But the second slap, in quick succession, his hand plowing into her face one way then back again, snuck under her defenses. She felt something in her cheek snap. Or perhaps she heard it. Her ears were ringing and it was too difficult to tell. And when she cowered down, making her body a cover for her belly, for the baby, he only pulled her back up by the hair and punched her, his hand fisted, his knuckles sharp. As if from a distance, she heard him growl, heard him scream, "You don't deserve to."

He didn't have to finish his sentence. In the small library it had been, you don't deserve to walk away whole. Now it was simply: you don't deserve to walk away at all.

There wasn't only madness in his voice, his eyes, his grip on her. There was a sharp sense of clarity, like the most pungent of smells, as if he'd finally figured out the riddle and was the smartest boy in the class.

Either way I lose.

She neither heard nor saw Baby run and jump, the dog's pure instinct making her jump and bite at his throat, his jugular. But Mary did hear Baby shriek (and it was a shriek) when Richard blocked her and laughed, flinging the dog against the wall. He turned back to Mary. It was exactly like her nightmares. He looked so calm and his voice was even and everything made some terrifying sort of sense. "It has to end," he said and reached for her neck. The girl in the library would have agreed. She would have acquiesced. She did not know how to endure pain like this. She'd learned how giving birth to Gracie; she'd learned that when you endure pain for someone you love, when pan brings life instead of death, it is wholly different.

How long before they find me, Mary thought. How long can a baby live inside a dead body? Will they be able to cut me open? Will this child take a first breath?

I'm just a body.

But remember, baby, Mama loved you so.

One of his ruddy hands gripped her throat.

And then there was Baby, quick and fierce, snarling viciously and biting, chomping, tearing. Mary could barely see but she heard Richard scream, "My hand!" And yet Baby did not let go, not even when his other hand left Mary's neck and hit the dog on the side of her head as hard as he could. Baby continued to chew on his hand as if it were a hunk of rope and this was the most high stake game of tug of war she would ever play.

It was only then that Mary began to weep, though she could not feel the tears on her own cheeks. She wept because Baby would not let go. Baby, the dog she'd kicked herself (playfully, of course) and grumbled over, the dog she'd been so angry at her father for giving to Gracie.

You love me and are protecting me even though I don't deserve it, even though I've never lifted a hand to you in affection, she thought towards Baby and knew she must be delirious, crazy, to weep over the grace of a dog.

Mary let her body sink back into the divan and watched through a slit in one eye–her only vision at the moment–as Richard finally tore his hand out of Baby's mouth wide open with screams Mary could not hear through the ringing of her ears.

Don't you know, she thought, you cannot get away without having pieces of you taken.

You took pieces of me. Don't you remember?

She slumped further over. She tried to focus on her baby moving even as Richard kicked the dog so hard she yelped and fell to the side, unmoving, even as he ran from the house. How very different than his once stoic buttoning of his pants in the small library. But she could not feel. She could not feel anything.

Neither Baby nor baby made a sound.

She knew she would lose consciousness. She felt it coming on slowly. Fee-fi-fo-fum. She had read it to Grace so many times, and yet that the story would come to her now seemed ridiculous. And she would give everything she owned to sit with both her children in her lap, in their beloved rocking chair, the chair that rocked miles, and read the favored story even one last time, making silly voices, smelling their hair...Fee-fi-fo-fum, she thought because to think of the smell of her children's hair hurt. She could not swallow the lump in her throat as the darkness dimmed the slit of her eye.

Fee

Fi

Fo–


A/N: Sorry. . .?