Epilogue: Meaning
Years later found Odesa, Ukraine much unchanged.
Two of its residents had fallen into an easy existence under new names and identities.
In the privacy of their cozy home and at night as their bodies moved as one, they called each other by their true names.
Lena was known in the small village as Katya, a live-in caregiver for a hulking burn victim, who'd sustained his injuries in service to his country.
During the day, the large man was swathed in layers of muslin, heavily scented with eucalyptus and myrrh.
Every night, when they returned home with their purchases, Lena ran them a bath in an oversized copper tub. Bane would hold his breath as Lena unwrapped him, revealing his dense musculature as the layers fell away.
Talia never visited Bane again and his thoughts never once returned to her.
One evening after a mint-scented soak in a tub full of near-scalding water, Bane and Lena put the lid on a stockpot and set the stove to a low flame to allow the stew to begin its slow simmer.
They'd wrapped towels around themselves after they'd gotten out of the tub before rinsing and chopping fibrous vegetables and fatty meat side by side.
Bane pulled Lena to the tiny living room to sit on the sofa together after the kitchen was cleaned up, a stack of oak logs was burning in the large stone fireplace and cast warmth on Lena as Bane tugged her towel free, exposing her nudity to his penetrating gaze.
"Did you really have to do that?" Lena asked as Bane smoothed his hand along her inner thigh and the raised scar tissue of her branded skin.
"Yes," he offered benignly as he insinuated himself closer.
"Why?"
"It pleases me to see this on you," Bane murmured. "Feeling it," he added as he pushed her thighs further apart.
"You've never told me what it means," Lena managed as Bane squeezed her supple flesh until he forced a gasp to escape from between her lips.
"It's my true name, original family and primitive heritage. My father rivaled Horus and was the god of the sky and light I longed for as I laid dormant in The Pit. I needed to keep from rotting in the darkness, I turned suffering into an ally," Bane grunted in a harsh tone as he traced the rough pad of his fingertips along the scarred flesh as he added. "I was stronger than the three brothers I ate at birth, not allowing my father to have four sons like that of the god who likened his image to that of a falcon," he growled as he danced his fingertips up her inner thigh to tease her soft, pink intimate folds apart, seeking to brush her clit to life.
"Do you remember the vow you made to me?" Bane groaned as he forced a gasp from Lena. He forced the shell-pink lips of her slit to grow wet as they hid her tight center from his eyes.
"I vow to stay next to you until you die," Lena started and arched her back as Bane tugged her lower in the bed and pulled his towel free, his cock impossibly hard and throbbing in time with the beating of his heart.
"To share your life," Lena moaned as he bobbed his cock just inside her tight center, shallowly fucking her until her thighs were shaking.
"Bed and soul," she whispered before Bane allowed himself to slide himself inside her until he couldn't fill her any further.
"I had to see it on your body, to place it there myself," Bane admitted as his mechanical breathing grew into a ragged, uneven rhythm as his deep thrusts were only stopped when their intimate flesh wetly kissed. He squeezed his large palm over her scarred, supple flesh, forcing a gasp from her at the end of each stab of his cock. "It brings me pleasure to be the only one who knows it's here," Bane rasped as he pushed her into a climatic abyss and quickly followed her over the edge.
Bane and Lena's lives would continue in an easy, predictable cycle, until they each succumbed to neurological and cardiac death, all centered around copper tubs full of bountiful, opalescent bubble baths.
My heartfelt thanks to Cassie_Hart who asked me what the brand in Lena's flesh meant. Such a question that I took to Odesa to ask and get answered.