Page 43 of The Duke's Auctioned Virgin
“Was that yer husband?” Edward asked, though he already knew the answer.
She nodded, shuddering.
He looked at the brushes littering the floor, at the paint pots and the rags, and the look on his face was not anger. It was not pity, either. It was the look of a man who had just found a target.
CHAPTER 16
Without a word, Edward bent down and picked up one of the brushes. He turned it in his fingers. Then he reached up and drew a crude flower on Gordon’s forehead. One stroke. Pink paint. Lopsided petals. A stem that dripped.
“He does not deserve a clean forehead.” He held the brush out to her.
Valeria stared at him. She stared at the brush. She stared at the portrait, at Gordon’s painted face, with a pink flower drooping between his eyes. His painted expression had not changed, but the flower made it look absurd. A tyrant with a daisy on his brow. A monster in a nursery.
The incongruity of it hit her in a place she had not expected.
A laugh bubbled up in her chest before she could stop it, rising past the tears she did not have, the anger she was done carrying, and the careful nothing she had trained herself to feel.
She took the brush.
“Well, he does not deserve flowers either,” she drawled, before smearing black paint all over his forehead.
The next ten minutes were not dignified.
They did not use brushes for most of it. The brushes were too small and too precise, and precision was not what this was about. This was aboutobliteration.
Valeria smeared green across Gordon’s waistcoat with her palm. The paint was cold and thick, and it spread across the canvas with a satisfying sound, like mud on a wall. She pressed her hand flat against his painted chest and dragged it down, watching the green obliterate the careful buttons and the careful cravat and the careful posture of a man who had spent his entire life making sure everything about him was controlled, correct, and beyond reproach.
Edward smeared blue paint down his nose. A thick, uneven line that turned his aquiline profile into something comical. He did it without hesitation. No pause. No asking permission. Just painton canvas, quick and certain, the way a man crossed out a word he had decided to delete.
Valeria found the red paint and covered Gordon’s hands with it. Those painted hands. The ones that had never touched her, not once, not in three years of marriage.
Gordon had controlled her with words, silences, and the withholding of food, freedom, and human interaction. He had not needed to touch her. His hands had stayed in his lap, or on his desk, or around a glass of brandy. They had never reached for her, and that was its own kind of violence. The violence of a man who made you understand that you were not worth reaching for.
She covered them in red. Every finger. Every knuckle. She pressed her stained hands over his painted ones and left prints of her palms on the canvas. It looked like blood, or like roses. She did not care which.
Edward put yellow in his hair. A bright, absurd shock of color that turned the carefully painted brown curls into something a child might have done.
Valeria blacked out his eyes. Both of them. She pressed her thumbs into the painted pupils and dragged them outward. The black spread across his face and erased his gaze, and she felt the weight of three years of being watched lift from her shoulders like a coat she had finally been allowed to take off.
They used their fingers. Their palms. At one point, Valeria picked up an entire pot of ochre, upended it over the canvas,and watched it run down Gordon’s painted chest like mud after a storm. It dripped onto the frame, the wall, and the floor, but she did not care.
Edward found white paint and drew a large X across his face, slow and deliberate, two strokes that crossed over his nose.
The finality of it made her heart flip.
She stood back, breathing hard. Her hands were covered in paint. Blue, green, red, yellow, black, and ochre. There was blue in her hair, green on her wrists, red under her fingernails, and ochre on her dress.
She looked like a mess. She looked like a woman who had just destroyed the last remnants of a man who had tried to destroy her.
And she was laughing.
Not the polite laugh she let out in company. Not the careful, measured laugh she had perfected over three years of Gordon, the laugh that was loud enough to seem genuine but not so loud that it attracted attention or punishment. Not the practice laugh. Not the performance.
But the real laugh.
It shook her whole body. It started in her belly, bubbled up in her chest, and burst out of her mouth. It was too loud and too much. It made her eyes water, and it did not stop.
She laughed, and the sound filled the drawing room and bounced off the walls. She could not control it, and she did not want to. She laughed until her ribs hurt, and then she laughed some more.
