Chapter Sixteen #3
Her scrubbing paused, though only briefly, as she washed his back. A latticework of scars stared at her. A cross-hatching of pale welts and fissures left in the wake of claws, the arched imprints of beastly teeth. A map of a lifetime of horror.
And I’ve added yet another mark.
A forefinger traced over a particularly brutal scar that slashed down the length of his shoulder.
She bit her lip as she wondered how Terence had gotten such scars, how young or old he had been, and which skin he was wearing when he got them—beast or man.
His skin jumped beneath her touch, but he otherwise remained deathly still.
Jane sighed and replaced her fingers with the cloth. “I’m sorry I shot you,” she murmured.
He gave no response. He only stared ahead with a numb gaze.
“This blood isn’t mine,” she tried again. “It’s yours.”
A flush rose in her cheeks as she’d grown increasingly aware of the naked man beneath her hands. She shivered. She needed to remind herself she was washing a dirty dog—and a bad one, at that—not a human man.
Terence grumbled and winced as she lightly dabbed around the bullet wound.
“I’m sorry,” she repeated in a hushed murmur and pressed the rag over the shallow hole.
“I needed to do something to save myself. You ought to count yourself lucky that I am a horrible shot.” She laughed at her joke, mostly for her own sake, but the laughter softened into stiff silence again once she realized Terence wasn’t laughing with her.
His gaze was still firmly fixated on the opposing wall, his mouth set in a thin line.
“This was how my brothers died,” he mumbled instead. He raised a hand from the water to cover hers that’d been tending to him. “They killed themselves, one by ingesting lye as a boy and the other asking to be shot in the night—hunted like an animal.”
Jane went still, unsure of how else to respond to him. She thought of Matthew’s grave, of the bullet wound that marked both man and beast, not too dissimilar to Terence’s own wound.
“I refuse to die like an animal,” Terence said firmly, his grip tightening over hers. “If I die by its hand—because of it… then that means it has consumed me, and that it has won. And I refuse to let it hold that sort of sway over me.”
Jane worried her lip between her teeth as she traced her gaze over the scars all across his back.
His skin was etched with his efforts. Hidden beneath pressed clothes, high collars, perfumes, and charms. In her hands, she held a gentleman in wolf’s clothing.
She was on the cusp of understanding it—wholly.
His hand abandoned hers to cup his brow. His shoulders slumped and a thin whine pealed from between his lips. “It’s hopeless.”
“For now,” Jane whispered, daring to reach and tuck loose hair away from his face. The touch was featherlight and hesitant. She placed the cloth on the edge of the tub and rose to her feet. “In the meantime, I’m sure cleaning yourself and getting some rest isn’t too hopeless a task.”
She left Terence to soak in the tub, closing the door behind her. It wasn’t until she was on the other side that she realized how steeped in blood and misery’s coppery scent the washroom’s steam was.
She lingered at the door, though, her hand cradling the knob as she rested her forehead against the wood with a low sigh.
Rain pounded against the roof and she hissed a seething, “fuck” into the air before her.
Hopeless, all of it hopeless, just as Terence said.
The marshes were hellbent on killing her, it seemed, and she doubted that she’d ever make it back to Cambridge, if not in one piece.
“Thank you, Miss Sterling,” Jane jumped and saw Mrs. Foster standing beside her, still holding the chains.
She sighed as, with a free hand, she returned a stray hair beneath her bonnet.
She then laughed, a mirthless, breathy sound, as she shook the chains.
“You know, the blacksmith in town used to be on the Hayes’ salary. ”
The dry laugh and jangling of chains continued as Mrs. Foster turned to walk down the stairs, leaving Jane alone in the hall.
Jane couldn’t place if it was the exhaustion in her bones, the pain she felt everywhere, the irritation of wearing stale, understyled dresses continuously stained with blood, or just a growing desire to give up and let her body be claimed by the marshes, but she somehow mustered the strength to limp back to her room.
The echo of bloody chains chafing followed after her.
Jane left the guest room for tea and enrichment sometime around the noon hour, but she paused before she even descended the first step of the main stair. In the entryway Terence and Mrs. Foster were crouched together on the floor, sweeping up wooden bits and stains of the beast’s muddy blood.
His sleeves were rolled up to reveal arms corded with muscle and marred by even more of those pale scars as he continued picking up splinters of wood he cradled in a large palm.
Like a fossil with battle scars, waiting to be deciphered.
Their silence was heavy and tense; Jane sensed that this wasn’t the first time Terence needed to assist in cleaning up a mess, though it was the first time in a long while.
Deciding she could go without tea, she quietly turned on the stairs and returned to her room.