Death Bliss
I press my palm harder against the watch, and I feel his pulse beneath the gold, and I close my eyes, and I let myself be held by a man who is my captor, a man who is my keeper, a man who is something else now, something neither of us has a word for yet.
I fall asleep with his watch under my hand and his breath against my hair and the first grey light of dawn threading through the shutters like a question the morning has not yet decided how to ask.
When I wake, the room is full of pale yellow light and the bed beside me is empty. For one cold moment I think he has left, that he has gone to the archive room or the chapel vault or somewhere else in this house where I cannot follow, and that la