Disclaimer: I claim no ownership of Stephenie Meyer's work.
Chapter Fifteen
"You are not my sisters."
The words strike the heavy air with violence, heralding the first rumble of thunder that brings a summer storm closer to the horizon.
Athenodora and Didyme are lounging with Sulpicia in a dusky grotto near the western wall of their private garden. The place is a small Eden, lush with midsummer promise. Didyme sits on her knees pruning her favorite rosebushes with silver shears. Athenodora is curled around the lip of a fountain, the spray of which casts dew into her flaxen hair.
And Sulpicia, crouched beneath a willow tree, is pitiful in her discontent. She stirs like a rabbit in a hutch. Ever restless. Wary in her perfected malcontent.
Didyme pauses and places her shears on the grass, unaware of the thumb-sized soil stains that trail across the hem of her gown. "Sulpicia." She says the name only for fear of startling her silent sister.
Athenodora lifts her head. Her eyes are grey and her expression delicately dovish. She tries to smile for Sulpicia, but her lips tighten around her teeth and she finds her reflection in the rippling waters distasteful.
Sulpicia watches them both and feels disgust rise within her, swelling in her breast until it threatens to crush her heart. Tactfully, she chooses to ignore the jealousy that pools in her mouth like venom.
A shadow of maternal emotion ages Didyme's ever-youthful face. She reaches for a rose and leaning forward, tucks the stem into Sulpicia's hair. "I know what my brother says," she muses, smoothing the petals with her long fingers. "He wishes us to be a family-but you must not expect so much of yourself, darling Sulpicia. We are not slighted by your indifference."
But Sulpicia cannot help herself. She cringes at Didyme's sympathy. At once, her fingers find the rose and she pulls it from her hair, crushing it.
Didyme sighs. "This will take time."
Athenodora, who has been observing the exchange with gentle reverence, sighs and gains her feet. She is an exquisite creature, soft and sinewy in gowns of white and gold and lavender. And she loves her husband.
Sulpicia is viciously jealous.
"It was your sister's child that you killed," Athenodora trills, her vibrato matching the careful trickle of water on marble, "or so Caius has told me. Do you hate us both because of it?"
Prickly fear and doubt creep along Sulpicia's neck. Of course Aro would tell his brothers all of her secrets. And the brothers would tell their wives. And the wives their guards.
Over her shoulder, she notices Demetri lingering on the garden path.
"Immortality does not suit all of us," Didyme says wisely, reminding Sulpicia too much of her husband. "Perhaps it is not us you detest, but yourself."
Sulpicia rolls her back along the bole of the willow, wondering if she should be insulted. "I am content with my life."
"That is a lie." Didyme does not flinch and her eyes betray serene compassion.
But Sulpicia will not be pitied.
Her nails find the mossy grass and pierce the soil. Moisture gathers beneath her fingertips. "I will not have either of you for sisters."
The pain on Didyme's face is shattering, matched only by Athenodora's songbird wailing.
Sulpicia's memories of her sister are dusty with time. Ungainly trinkets that she likes to examine in quiet moments, when she knows that Aro will not pry into her mind with his practiced curiosity. What she remembers is disgraceful. A woman married young to an old man. A woman accustomed to the pain of childbirth and a lecherous husband and the marble columns of an unforgiving Roman villa that barred the spirit as effectively as the body.
It was natural, of course, for such a woman to welcome her young sister, her darling Sulpicia, lately come from a settlement beyond the Rubicon to live in Rome after a strange illness swept through the Gaulish outpost. An illness that left centurions bloodless and weeping, and Sulpicia pale and dazed.
And starving.
Sulpicia thinks she will never forgive herself for sundering her sister's family, a poor family though it was. In the household of her brother-in-law, she fed on the lean slaves by night, sucking them dry and leaving them to rot in the stable yard behind the villa for the street urchins to find. And by day, she sang lullabies to her green-eyed niece. Lullabies tainted with carrion breath.
There was only one thing Sulpicia wanted from her life and that was her sister's forgiveness. But the woman is dead now and her ashes color the plains of the underworld.
Two nights later, Sulpicia finds Didyme in the library amidst scrolls and ink and the stale dreams of a thousand poets.
"I am sorry." The words form a hard knob in her throat.
Didyme extends her hand and grasps Sulpicia's wrist with a thoughtful smile. "My brother need not have cajoled you into apologizing."
But Sulpicia only feels a sharpness behind her eyes and she remembers that it was Didyme, after all, who tried to shield her from Aro. "I assure you," she manages, swallowing against the pain, "he did not."
Author's Note: The next chapter might be a little delayed since I'm going to attempt to update both A Faint Reprise and Epitaph in the next few weeks. Keep your fingers crossed for me!
As for chapter sixteen, here's a sneak peek; How do you solve a problem like Sulpicia? After a decade of marriage, Aro must face the hard truth that his wife simply wasn't made for coven life. The brothers and their wives (excluding the lady in question) gather to discuss Sulpicia's unsuccessful period of adjustment from Volturi guard to wife.
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