Exiled (A Madame X Novel) Read Free

vacant expression is gone. The mask is back in place. “Anything else you wish to know?”
    “Where is Logan?”
    You do not even bother to glance at me. “The morgue, I would presume.”
    “I don’t believe you.”
    You shrug. “No matter to me whether you believe it or not. He’s dead and you’re mine.”
    “I am not yours.”
    You gesture at the door. “Then leave.”
    I am at the door in three strides. The knob is in my hand, twisted. The door opens. But I cannot leave. Not because I am yours, but because there are still so many questions.
    “If Jakob Kasparek vanished, then how is it he signed me out of the hospital, rather than Caleb Indigo?”
    A silence greets that question.
    Something else you said has been percolating.
    “You said I have been yours since I was sixteen, Caleb. What did that mean?”
    More silence.
    “How old am I? Why did you tell me I was mugged, when I was really in a car accident? Why did you tell me I was eighteen when I went into the coma? How long was I in the coma?” I’m stalking closer to you with each question. My voice rises with each question. “What is the truth? What is the truth about me, Caleb? Or Jakob, should I say?”
    You fly across the intervening space in the blink of an eye. Your huge powerful hand grips my chin, my throat. Tips my head backward. Your other hand curls around the base of my spine and jerks me flush against your body.
    “Jakob Kasparek is no more. He is no one. He does not exist. My
name
 . . . is
Caleb
.” Your voice is ice, sharp as razors and deadly as a viper’s venom.
    Your fingers crush my jaw, pinch my windpipe. I am pinioned against you. Helpless. And then your lips crash against mine. Roughly, at first. Angrily. Violently. With shocking, lip-bruising force . . .
    You
kiss
me.
    With mesmerizing, hypnotic passion, you kiss me. Rough becomes gentle. This, perhaps more than the kiss itself, stuns me. The tenderness, it is exquisite. You kiss me delicately. Skillfully. Youkiss me, and you kiss me, and I am breathless. Your tongue whispers against my lips, slips graceful between my teeth and tangles with my tongue. Your palms play against my back. Fingertips dimple my flesh, and slide lower.
    What is happening?
    Your sorcery, it is not this affection. This is some new magic. Some new witchcraft.
    The kiss, your kiss, Caleb, it is like nothing I have ever felt in my life. You kiss me as if you’ve been waiting for all of eternity to kiss me thus, as if you are starved for my lips, thirsting for my mouth. You clutch my back and hold me to you as if you are terrified to lose me. And your hand, clutching and crushing my jaw, loosens. Gentles. Glides up, over my cheek, past my ear, and into my hair. You lean into me, until I am bent backward over your palm, and I am held up by your strength alone.
    There is no breath, with this kiss. No thought. Nothing. Just this kiss.
    “God, Isabel. Isabel.” You whisper this against my lower lip. It is a breath only, so low I might have imagined it.
    It is a plea, that whisper. A broken, pain-barbed plea.
    What does it mean? I cannot begin to understand.
    You break the kiss. Stagger backward as if wounded. Your eyes are shadows. Haunted. As if for the first time in all the years I’ve known you, a curtain has been pulled aside, and I am suddenly truly seeing the contents of your soul.
    For a moment then, you are Jakob. A young boy abandoned to fate, abandoned to the cruel streets of New York. I see the truth in the tale you told. You wipe your mouth with your wrist, brow wrinkled in confusion. Eyes coruscating with agony. You are sixteen-year-old Jakob, the whore-boy. The drug addict. The plaything.
    And it is Jakob who kisses me once more. Who with hesitancyand tenderness unzips my dress. Plucks open my bra. Slides off my panties. It is Jakob who divests himself of his clothes. Who presses his skin against mine.
    I am wrapped up, woven into a spell, tangled in the fabric of a lie engineered out of