Ivan Press

[Hilary] Home, he lies, like mine is in some ways a lie. She should laugh at him, but the thing is, Hilary doesn't associate anything strongly with 'home'. The word is just another word for a house, an apartment, a penthouse, the place you're staying when you're in Lausanne, the villa you rent out on a trip to Rome. She doesn't think of it, but swimming amongst the dark, grotesque things inside of her are fleeting, darting fish, bolts of silver in the blackness. Things like the thought that if Ivan loves her, then she supposes that what she feels for him might be love, too. And things like the reality that with him, when he brings her back inside herself, it's something like the way 'home' is supposed to feel.

They're just glimmers of light though, too small and too quick for Hilary to see clearly, much less understand.


Sitting beside her doesn't earn Ivan her sudden ire. Nor does touching her, or putting his arm around her, or drawing her close to his side. She lays her head on his shoulder as easily as she did in the Bentley on the way from the airport to his penthouse while she was still pregnant, and she remembers that day and says quietly, out of nowhere: "...I think I might miss the hacienda a little." It's little more than a whisper, and it's possible that it gives him thoughts of I'll buy you one. I'll buy you a dozen. I'll buy you a villa in the south of Spain, I'll build you an exact replica anywhere you like --

More than likely, right now, he doesn't say a word of it. She closes her eyes moment, not yet stirring, and then rises to her feet, letting him aid her so she doesn't lose her balance. Not that she would; the gesture of holding to him is ladylike and symbolic more than needful. She has better balance than plenty of those fresh young ballerinas from Joffrey.

The door to the stairwell is pushed open a bit later, and the sun still hasn't come out, but the lobby is full of raindrop-shadowed gray light. Hilary pauses instinctively at the door, because somehow or other someone's going to come with an umbrella, the car will be pulled around presently, etcetera. She's stepped away from him, walks as though they're acquaintances or less.

An umbrella is produced, and the car, and she lets him take her away.

[Ivan] While they're still in that stairwell, which is a windowless concrete chimney of stacked and staggered steps, so claustrophobic, so far from the natural that the animal part of him twists in revulsion -- he holds her a while, sitting beside her. She rests her head on his shoulder. He kisses her temple like she means something to him, like they mean something to each other,

and she speaks of that hacienda in the heart of mexico.

He's quiet a moment. He doesn't promise to buy her a hacienda, or a dozen, or a villa in the south of Spain. A little later he says, "I miss our room in the hotel. It was nice, having a fountain in the courtyard. Lunch outside with you. Being able to open the windows at night without freezing to death."

Maybe he'll have a house built somewhere, he thinks. Somewhere warm and foreign, where no one knows them. Maybe they can go there sometimes and be away from it all. Sometimes it's easier if they just go away from it all.


Later, they walk out of her building like acquaintances, less. Perhaps she has an umbrella. He certainly doesn't, though if she waits long enough the doorman will show up with one. The doorman likes her; she's lovely and polite and carries an old-world elegance about her, something he can't put his finger on but is drawn to nonetheless. She reminds him of silver screen stars, and what he imagines foreign royalty to be like.

He has no idea who she really is. He's never yet had the dubious honor of being torn to shreds by her coolly barbed tongue.

So eventually they end up in Ivan's car, and it's the Lamborghini -- the new one -- and it's just as muscular and showy as the last one. More so. The seatbelts swing over both shoulders. The seats hug the form. It sounds like a goddamn race car starting up. Or a jet. That's what this particular car is designed after, anyway: it even has a HUD. Absurd; boys and their toys.

He doesn't drive sedately, but at least he doesn't throw them around a light post. They get to his penthouse in a matter of minutes. He thought about taking her to his lakehouse, but she hates it there if he's not with her, and he's not sure he's up to the challenge of being with her every moment. They disappear into the underground garage, slide into the private parking where his road machines are kept. When the engine shuts off, he unbuckles his seatbelt and comes around to swing the characteristic scissor door upward. He hands her out the way he handed her into the low vehicle, even though she doesn't need it.

She has more grace than some of those Joffrey hopefuls, after all.

Then it's the private elevator up, all the way up. He's carrying her bag again, leaning against the wall. Their ears pop on the way up. It's a long way up, and he looks at her when they're halfway there.

"I'll send the staff home for the night. And maybe tomorrow we can go somewhere warmer. Spend a few days."

[Hilary] Some kinfolk, particularly the well-bred, seem half-wolf themselves sometimes. Cunning, loyal to their blood, protective, whatever traits they may have kept from the long ancestral memories that sing in their veins. Hilary is feral sometimes, furtive often, but if there is a true touch of the wolf inside of her, it never seems to surface. Were she a wolf, she would be a lone one, outcast from the pack and left to slink along, picking at whatever they might leave behind in the snow. She would fight flies for her dinner.

Wolves sense madness, sense weakness, far better than human beings. A wolf pack in the wild might turn on something like her, kill her, and better for them to do so -- she might do the same. Might eat their cubs, might infect them with her sicknesses. She would never be an alpha female. Even among humans.

Ivan mentions the hotel they stayed at, and Hilary looks at him, but says nothing. They leave the stairwell, and she moves away from his side.


No one brings her a goddamn umbrella. She waits, but Ivan doesn't have one, and neither does she, and it's not Dmitri with the Bentley but this garish, crude thing of his, which she rolls her eyes at vaguely just to see him drive up in it. The entryway to the parking garage four floors above is covered, and she finds that low as well. Renewalist Dion may have been, but they all have ancient blood. She is used to things like the Bentley, the yachts, the country clubs.

Ugh, is the soft utterance she releases as he scissors up the door for her and helps her into the thing. She looks positively appalled at the dual seatbelt and quite uncomfortable sitting there, waiting to be driven somewhere with at least some modicum of class.

Ivan doesn't drive sedately. Hilary is white as sheet by the time they get back to his place, and there are slight crescent moons from her fingernails in the armrest of the door. He moves that armrest when he opens the door for her and she swats at his hands at first, as though to punish him for... well, for all of it. Silly, young man with his silly new toys and his driving, which she grouses about in the elevator for the first couple of floors.

She is quite open about how the Lamborghini is garish, and gaudy, and that his driving is absolutely unnecessary and next time he can just send Dmitri, good lord.

When she is done, she exhales, and some of the tension finally leaves her shoulders as though purged. She has nothing to hold onto in here, and she isn't holding onto him. She's staring at the numbers, shaken from the ride over. This is not a woman who is ever going to cling around his midsection while he's on a jetski, that's for sure.

Hilary turns to look at him when he speaks. "But what if we need something?" she asks him, more startled that he would be willing to send away his staff than anything else.

[Ivan] And to think, he wasn't even driving that wildly. Once upon a time, Cordelia got ripped through the streets of the windy city. Kristiana got thrown around hard turns where the g-force made her hair swing out sideways. Compared to that, his driving today was positively civil.

Not civil enough, it seems. It wasn't even the speed; it was simply the acceleration. The human body isn't used to the sort of force required to send several thousand pounds of machinery from zero to sixty in three seconds. Or zero to forty in one and a half, which is what happens most of the way back. When he opens the door for her she swats at his hands, which startles him. It reminds him a little of how she struck out wildly, hitting for the sake of hitting, during her fit. She berates him for the first few floors and he stands quietly through it, either genuinely remorseful or simply ignoring her. Once or twice he cuts a glance toward her and decides to hold his tongue.

Somewhere halfway up her steam runs out, or her tension abates. Sometime later, he mentions sending the servants away. Going away for a while. What if we need something, she asks. He huffs.

"Restaurants deliver." The doors open. The penthouse is as she remembers it: vast, minimalist, saved from sterility only by careful choice of art and materials and furnishings. "If disaster strikes and we simply can't cope, we can always call them back."

It's not Dmitri greeting them where the gallery opens into the living room; it's one of his many young and interchangeable maids. She starts to curtsey; he snaps his fingers at her and sends her away with a crisp twofingered wave, like gesturing to a well-trained dog. Off she goes.

[Hilary] It isn't even Ivan's driving. It's Hilary.

Who he would never think of taking to a strip club and pouring vodka onto. Who he never could have treated the way he treated Kristiana, simply because Hilary is miles and miles away from the young woman Kristiana is. One wonders if she's been mated yet. If her mate beat her for being a whore when he discovered she wasn't a virgin. If she's been disgraced, dishonored, ruined. Or if she's learned how to lie well enough. Or if anyone even cares anymore, as long as she's fertile.

In the elevator, Ivan can read her tension, her nerves rattled by his driving and her sensibilities offended by the car itself, and it might occur to him -- a rare thing, this -- that he's fucking and has sired an heir on a woman who is closer to forty than thirty, who is several years older than he is, who was born to a House that doesn't even exist anymore. She was once a delicate young virgin like Kristiana, and she was once a new bride to an older, higher-ranked Silver Fang, and she was once the doted-upon child who had no family but servants who could not replace dead mother, dead father, dead brother.

And yet: that is not what she is now. She's no cute young thing to be corrupted, surprised, left gasping for air after a startle so that her adrenaline makes her more willing to get fucked any which way he pleases. She's not even like the other married women looking for a ride, looking to feel young again. She's like no one he's ever met. She's made him into someone he doesn't recognize when he looks in the mirror.

Hilary pauses when he mentions restaurants. She almost looks at him, but doesn't. Strides forward out of the elevator. "I was going to cook," she says, passing by the maid without looking at her.

[Ivan] The hard truth is, Ivan doesn't really obsess over Hilary when he can't see her. Fickle, foolish young man that he is, out of sight is out of mind. At least that's brutally, mercilessly true for most of his women. Once they walk out the door, they're forgotten until he sees them again,

on some fashion catwalk, on some ballet stage, on some dazzled dancefloor, in some lounge bar. And even then: maybe a hint of recognition. Maybe, maybe another drive through the streets, another tumble in one of his guest rooms, another servant serving them breakfast in bed before hustling them out the door.

Like whores, really. He has no lasting peer relationships at all.

But Hilary's different. He doesn't obsess over her when he can't see her, but he does think about her now and then. Sometimes he passes a restaurant and the scent of cayenne and habaneros reminds him of the fish she cooked him in Mexico. The other day he went down to the docks to watch his people get his yacht out of winter storage, and the gleam of the spring sun off the smooth white hull reminded him of the last time he sailed it out on the lake to watch fireworks.

Sometimes, unbidden, he simply thinks of her. When he's stepping out of his shower. When he's looking in the mirror. And in those stark, naked moments, he sees so clearly. She's fifteen years older than he is. She bore his son. She is incapable of love. She is a cold, dark, dead-eyed thing, like some mermaid out of the arctic depths come to drag him under, and for all that,

she's the closest thing to a real, human relationship he's ever had.

Sometimes he sees himself in the mirror. Young and beautiful and golden and utterly, utterly alone. He wonders how he can stand it. He wonders how anyone else can stand not being alone.


He's not alone now, though. And god, but that's hard too: that of all the people in the world, this is the one he's become so attached to. This is the one that he keeps begging to stay when everyone else he wants to go. Go away, leave him away, don't stick around, don't bother him unless they have something to give him, something he actually wants, ugh. This is the one exception, and she

bore his son

and wants to cook for him.

Some twisted little bubble of humor rises through him and curdles to ache. He looks at her, though she doesn't look at him. Through the vast, silent penthouse, there are the faintest stirrings: the heating, the soft soft footsteps of servants moving away, the hum of the service elevator descending. Twenty, thirty seconds after the order is given, they are alone.

"Dinner too?" he asks, surprised, and cautiously pleased. "I'd like that."

[Hilary] It is a hard truth, a bitter one, a painful one, that Hilary hardly exists to Ivan when she isn't right in front of him. Many other women would ache over it, realize that she matters very little to him in the long run, that he will never give her back what she needs or wants from him. Hilary, however, does not need him to think about her when she's gone. She, oddly, does not expect him to think much of her. Or love her. She's not quite sure what love is. Others have professed it. They all act differently towards her, regardless of their claims.

When she is away from Ivan, she thinks of him often. Misses him, even, though she doesn't always recognize it as such. She's not pregnant anymore. When she doesn't want to think about something -- or think at all -- and when she doesn't want to feel something, she can take a certain number of pills and drink a certain amount of something-or-other, and all the thoughts and the feelings go away, melting into feverish dreams that do not trouble her, and which she forgets easily.

It has always been so. She hardly even exists when she is alone. She's never quite sure she misses existing, or mattering, or feeling. Floating away from the world on a clinically prescribed cloud is much easier than all of that. Very rarely, very occasionally, she does something she loves to do -- to dance, to cook -- and in her solitude she pauses, realizing it means next to nothing when it isn't shared.

Once, she felt the very foot that had been kicking her internal organs for several months and held it tight in her hand, and recognizing her inability to think and feel and exist normally bothered her quite a lot. Once, she saw her madness and detachment for what it is and was horrified. Once, she saw herself clearly, and nearly drowned in her own loneliness.

Ironically, his arms closing around her and trying to help her contain her pain, it was the only time she might have said she believed what Ivan once said to her about how he might actually feel for her.


Once upon a time, she was almost human, and it nearly killed her. She was loved, and she did not know how to bear it.


Hilary is walking down the gallery, her body and grace framed by the art to either side of her, her body once again a work of art, itself. She looks over her shoulder at him, finds him looking at her. "It's... the only way I know how to take care of you," she says quietly. Love you, she might have said, for the way the words sound. She probably doesn't understand the difference in her own voice.

Doesn't, even, recognize the significance of telling him she wants to take care of him.

[Ivan] Love is a word that was spoken exactly once between the two of them. It was not a fervent vow. It was not accepted with shining eyes. They were in a dark room, night carved out of day, and when he said it he was quietly wracked, very uncertain. And she only looked at him with her black eyes and asked him how he would know.

He wouldn't. But perhaps that's why he doesn't throw this in her teeth, when she says this is the only way she has to take care of him. He only knows a few ways, too. His money was one of them. Look how that turned out.

That line of argument doesn't even occur to him, though. When she turns like that, stands there lovely and poised, a work of art again -- when she looks at him over her shoulder like that and tells him what she does, his face pulls with something like pain. He stands still a moment. Then he comes to her, a little more swiftly than he might have otherwise, wraps his arm around her shoulders and pulls her back against him, her spine to the axis of his body, his head lowering, though not so far: those heels are so high, after all.

Like an animal that knows no other way of conveying its emotion, its instinct, he seizes her in his teeth. Bites her firmly, almost hard, on the shoulder. Holds a moment, then lifts his head and kisses her neck, her cheek.

"I'd like that," he says again, quieter. "And then maybe we can just have a quiet night in. I'll try not to ... be so demanding."

[Hilary] Neither of them have much knowledge of what it means to feel rejected. To reject, certainly, all the people that beg and clamor for their attention. It's only the borderline self-loathing who would throw themselves at a man like Ivan after one good look in his eyes -- fortunately for him, self-loathing is the primary characteristic of most young women in general. It's only the most twisted -- or foolish -- who would end up begging for scraps of attention from someone like Hilary after she's pushed them to the brink. Fortunately for her, most pretty young men have dammed up their intelligence with easy arousal and the rest have enough of a streak of cruelty that she gets what she wants, too.

Certainly some women and men have cried and stamped their feet and cast Hilary and Ivan off like old baggage. The truth is, though, by that point Hilary and Ivan have usually rejected them, either forcefully or dismissively, and sent them packing. The tears and panic and outcry and howling only serve to amuse or annoy them, little more.

Ivan does not cope well with the one way he knows he can take care of Hilary being rejected. One can imagine shutters and doors closing, lights going off inside if she wanted to cook for him and he criticized it, refused it, asked her what the goddamn point was. Not that she wants to serve as his new personal chef or never go to those lovely restaurants he takes her to sometimes -- far from it. Just as Ivan wouldn't necessarily lose his temper if he wanted to go out and blow some cash and she wasn't feeling like it.

But sometimes, when there's nothing else, that's what they're going to try. They can't take care of each other. Truthfully, they can't. He can pick up the bill. And she can make coq au vin and lamb tajine.


The baby is gone. She was pregnant when he told her he might love her, waiting for a calm and 'elegant' divorce when he said he wanted to take care of her. Her body is not back exactly as it was, but it is quite different now from how it's been for months on end. It feels almost, but not quite, the same as it did before when he crosses to her, grabs her, holds her to his body and grabs her in his teeth.

Hilary awaits this, and accepts this, as though -- just maybe -- there are other things he does to 'take care' of her than pay for her life. She closes her eyes, receiving that locking, binding bite. He can feel the pull of muscle beneath her fair skin, a flicker of tension or a response, and he can feel and hear her intake of breath at the hardness of it. When he takes his mouth away, there's red imprints where his teeth dug into her porcelain skin; he's marred her, always marks her, and though she can't see it, Hilary can feel it. She seems so very calm now, to be changed like that.

To not be so perfect.

When Ivan kisses her throat and her cheek, she turns her head and nuzzles it against him, the way she did in her own entryway when they managed to find this animalistic side of each other before. She nods, eyes closed and head resting near his. "I'd still like to play," she says softly. "We've never really played here before."

Which is true: at his lake house, in hotel rooms, on his yacht, but not here. The times they've fucked here -- on that couch, in his bed, against that wall -- have been the closest things to gentle and tender that they ever get.

[Ivan] Play, she calls it. Another woman would use it as a coy euphemism. Ivan suspects it's not for her. It's something close to the truth, as though this is play for her. A recreation. A pastime.

Something quite pleasant, really.

He's left bite marks on her white shoulder. She's such a soft, lovely thing, and he keeps marking her, marring her, as though somehow this will make her his. And afterwards he's always gentle with her like this, nuzzling her, kissing the marks. He draws a breath in. She's right. They've never played here before, and

he doesn't know if he wants to play with her, not today, not now, not after everything that's happened, but

he suspects he might need to. He might need it as much as she does.

"Okay," he whispers. And he lets her go, and comes to walk beside her. The greyness of the day is only amplified by how well they can see it from his penthouse. Nothing but glass and sky out there. He looks up for a moment, those stormy skies, and then to her again. "We'll cook. And eat. And then we'll play."

[Hilary] On those concrete floors of his, the gleaming chrome heels of her black-strapped shoes tap with consistent sharpness, no matter how delicate her step. And she can be, in fat, so delicate, so lithe. She walks like a gazelle, with impossible surety on long and slender legs, her body held as though always prepared to bolt and run. Prey animal, this one, at least with him.

They walk a bit, past the gallery and towards the vast panes of glass that make up most of his apartment. Just keeping this place at a reasonable temperature costs about as much as some people's rent. The view is worth it. The expense, the extravagance, just having the best. He can have anything he wants. Daddy's jet at his leisure, mommy's family's money, any woman, any servant. New art when he gets bored of the walls, or when whatever servant who handles that sort of thing thinks its time. He can have anything with a snap of his fingers.

He wants her.

She looks out at Chicago, at the dark clouds and the attempts at sunlight beyond them, her head tipped a little to the side. She thinks about Ivan's parents on the rooftop with him, and how if his father could be stirred to care for anything at all, he would cover Ivan's ears with his hands because the fireworks were so loud. She thinks about Anton's ears. How incredibly tiny they were, like his toes and fingers were tiny, how he was so tender, and fragile, and the entire world felt like a bomb going off around her, and how she wanted to wrap herself around him, hold him between her body and the earth, shield him from the debris somehow. Cover his ears so that the noise wouldn't deafen him.

Even if, deep down, she also knew she was the bomb going off. And that if she held him that tightly, she'd open her arms to find him cold and still and blue.


Hilary reaches down and brushes her hand against Ivan's, laces her fingers into his, thinking about things that don't play across her face. To some extent, playing is a coy euphemism indeed. It's pleasant, to be true. But it's so much deeper than playing. It's a violent, desperate thing, but it's needful, too. And strange as it may be, it lets them take care of each other. Lets her make him happy. Lets him make her feel safe. Gives them each some of what they need.

She holds his hand lightly, her shoulder red where he bit her, the entire penthouse silent as a temple except for the raindrops hitting his balconies, his windowed walls. "I'd like that," she echoes back to him.