Chapter Six #3
“You are not in any danger, my lady, I swear it,” he said, forcing her to focus on him. “Look at me—you know me. I am Sir Addax. We met earlier today. I sat with you, and together we watched Max compete in the joust. Do you remember?”
Emmeline was positively ashen. She stared at him with those beautiful, gem-colored eyes for several long moments before she finally recognized him. That seemed to calm her down a little.
“A-aye,” she stammered. Her blue lips were beginning to quiver because she was so cold. “I remember.”
Addax smiled. “Good,” he said. “You are safe, I swear it. How do you feel?”
She wasn’t sure what he meant, at least not right away. She looked at herself, noting that she was soaked, before realizing where she was. It all came back to her in a flood of despair and disappointment.
“How?” she said, gasping. “How did I end up here?”
“We pulled you out,” Addax said. “Do you think you can stand? Let me return you to the keep and—”
Emmeline jerked back from him, looking up at Berwick, lit up with torches against the dark night, and she began shaking her head frantically.
“Nay,” she breathed. “Go away and leave me alone! I am not going back!”
Addax had hold of her as she tried to pull away. “Calm yourself, lady,” he said. “All will be well.”
Her features were tight with distress. “You had no right to pull me out,” she said, her voice dull and trembling. “You should have left me there!”
Addax didn’t respond to the fact that she had clearly wanted to die. “Come,” he said, trying to coax her with him. “Let me take you back so you can change into dry clothing. It’s very cold out tonight.”
“Let me go,” she demanded. “Did you not hear me? I told you that I am not going back!”
Kieran chose that moment to reappear with an armful of dusty blankets that the guards had found in the small room at the top of the steep wall.
He went to sling a blanket around her shoulders, but she balked, bolting like a new colt, as Addax held her fast. She didn’t want the blanket, and she didn’t want to go back to Berwick.
She didn’t want to be helped, and she only wanted to die, but she was spouting it out for all to hear.
She was panicked by so many men she didn’t know.
This wasn’t even his problem.
Addax knew that none of this was his problem.
He shouldn’t even be involved. But there was something about the lady that he felt a connection to.
Perhaps it was the fact that her life was so out of control, as his had once been.
As a child, he understood that lack of control, and he understood it now.
It was terrifying and gutting. Before Christopher de Lohr found him and Essien in the olive grove, he had often thought he might be better off dead.
Perhaps he needed to reach the lady in a way no one else could.
He certainly couldn’t hold on to her all night.
“Leave us for a moment, please,” he said, glancing at his brother as he spoke. “All of you. Leave us. But do not go far.”
Essien, William, Paris, and Kieran did as he asked and wandered away, back toward the stair turret, as Addax continued to hold Emmeline in a viselike grip. He was afraid of what would happen if he let her go, so he held on as she tried to pull away.
“My lady, I want you to listen to me,” he said steadily, hoping to break through her haze of fear. “Will you do that? If you do not like what I have said by the time I am finished, then I will let you go, and you can go back into the river if you wish. Do we have a bargain?”
She wouldn’t look at him. “I will not bargain.”
“Is your life not worth a few minutes before you end it?”
She closed her eyes, and he could see that she was starting to weep. “Just leave me alone,” she whispered. “I am begging you.”
Since she wouldn’t bargain with him, Addax didn’t let her go. “In a moment,” he said. “But first, you are going to hear me out.”
“I have heard all I wish to hear from you, Sir Addax,” she said. “I know you believe you are being chivalrous, but trust me when I tell you that death is the best possible outcome for me. There is no alternative.”
“Because Max consummated your marriage in a storeroom?”
Her head snapped to him, and the tears overflowed. “My God,” she breathed, hanging her head. “You know.”
“He told me.”
She sobbed softly. “He probably told everyone,” she said. “Did he tell you that he pushed me against a wall and grabbed my breasts before sticking his fingers into my body? Did he tell you that he shoved his dirty hand into my mouth to silence me until it was over?”
Addax sighed faintly. “He did not.”
She used her free hand to wipe the mucus that was running from her nose.
“I’ve only ever been with a man twice in my life,” she said, her words hardly recognizable because she was sobbing through them.
“I know enough to know that a woman must be ready for her husband. Her body must be ready. I was obedient and compliant with him because he is now my husband, but… it was a horrible experience. My humiliation cannot even be my secret, because he has told you about it. God knows who else he has told.”
Hearing about the situation from her perspective made him think that perhaps Maximilian really wasn’t the man Addax had thought he was.
He’d always suspected that Maximilian had a streak of integrity and honor in him, even if it wasn’t something he’d really shown to Addax, but now he wasn’t so sure if Maximilian had any integrity at all.
Men with honor didn’t treat women so poorly. Certainly not their wives.
He wasn’t sure what he could say to her about that.
“Humiliation is not worth your life, my lady,” he said quietly. “You spoke of wanting children. Would you truly deny yourself that?”
She looked at him as if he’d gone mad. “Give birth to children with a father like that?” she said, incredulous.
Then she shook her head. “It would be better if they were not born at all rather than brought into the world to suffer through a father like Maximilian de Grey. I could not give them life, knowing how they would suffer. It is not fair to them. Nay, Sir Knight… I have found my hell, and I do not want to live here.”
She was off sobbing again, but not as loudly. Now her cries were mournful. Painful. She was working through something that had changed her life forever, knowing she’d married a man who cared nothing for the way she felt and who clearly had no respect for her.
What could Addax possibly say to her?
He could only think of one thing.
“When I was five years of age, I watched my father pass into legend,” he said softly.
“He was King of Kitara, my country. Unfortunately, his younger brother believed he should rule, and he betrayed my father with one of our greatest enemies. My father managed to send his family to safety while he remained behind to burn the largest city in the kingdom so his brother would only have ashes to rule over. The last I saw of my father was as he waved farewell to me and my brother, my mother, and my sister. We thought we were running to safety, but we were running to hell. My brother and I were separated from my mother and sister. At five years of age, I was responsible for my three-year-old brother. I was responsible for myself. I ended up on the streets of a faraway city where I did not speak the language. You have said that you’ve found your hell.
I know the place well, because I found it when I was only five. ”
Emmeline had stopped sobbing openly, but the tears were still flowing as she listened to him speak of something deeply personal and deeply painful.
Even in her distraught state, she realized that.
But it also made her realize that if he understood hell, as he described it, then he should very well understand her desire to end the situation she had no hope of leaving.
“But you’re here,” she murmured. “You found your way out of it.”
“I did.”
“But did you ever consider the permanent solution to it all?”
“Death?”
“It is the only choice some of us have.”
He let go of her. If she was going to run to the river, there was nothing he could do about it. If she really wanted to kill herself, he couldn’t prevent it by physically restraining her. But he was hoping she would at least stay long enough to hear what he had to say.
It was important.
“I do not believe that death is ever the right choice,” he said.
“I will explain why. You see, the beginning of my hell was in that strange city. I begged for food for my brother and me. I found a holy man who was willing to help us. He gave me little jobs that he thought I could accomplish, and paid me a coin or two. But then a merchant came to town, and the holy man told me and my brother to go with him, that he would give us a better life. A greater lie was never told, not to anyone, because the merchant starved us and beat us. We were cold and hungry and injured all the time, but there were moments of hope and light that kept us going. Brief moments, but they were there. However, when those moments faded, Essien and I decided to flee the merchant. Running was our only choice if we wanted to live, and we did, very badly. But we were dying. Of lack of food, shelter, love… everything. We were dying. We made our way to an olive grove, where a column of English knights found us. And that was the beginning of my way out of hell.”
Shivering and wet, Emmeline was nonetheless listening to him. He had her attention. “The knights saved you?” she asked.