Chapter 16 #2
A man, young and bull strong catching her alone and making advances that her usual humor and diplomacy couldn’t dissuade. Reule closed his eyes as she began to tremble against him with the memory.
“Sylva, you’re so pretty …”
“I’m busy,” she said, slapping his hand away from her hair. The hand returned and touched the back of her neck. “Do you need healing or not?”
“Oh, yes. I have an ache for you to cure.”
He grabbed her hand and shoved it against his bulging crotch.
She jerked back with all her might, and his hold released so she came free and spilled back onto the floor while male laughter echoed around her.
She glared with icy fury at Harrell and his two attendants as she hastily picked herself up.
“Never touch me again!” she spat to the wealthy, spoiled whelp. “I don’t care who your father is, I’ll cut your balls off and use the tiny little things for doll’s eyes!”
Harrell went purple with fury when his men stifled snickers at the insult. “Why, you little bitch whore!”
He lunged for her and she, being the lighter and smarter, dodged him easily and shoved him ass over teakettle onto the floor. She stood over him, hands on her hips, grinning.
“Come now, Harrell. Let me cure your toothache and then you can be on your way. Stop behaving like an ass. We grew up together! I know all your tricks! Now give over and let me go back to work.”
But they weren’t children anymore. He’d grown into a boorish man used to getting his way in everything.
She saw that the minute his small slate eyes narrowed on her and his teeth bared.
He lurched off the floor, grabbed her, and shoved her into his men.
Apparently the maneuver was well rehearsed.
Her Intuition told her, as they caught her under an arm each, that they’d done this to women Harrell had wanted before.
They wouldn’t lose their jobs so long as they went along, and they often were given the leftovers as a bonus.
She hadn’t taken the instinctive warnings seriously enough and now she was trapped, held up taut and tight as Harrell came up swinging.
The brutal impact of a fist the size of half her head sent her braid whipping and blood spraying.
Her brain shifted, her perception fogged, and bright painful lights burned bright behind her lids.
As she reeled between levels of consciousness, thick fists closed around the front of her dress and tore the fabric apart.
Her breasts spilled free, baring her to leers and laughter, goading and crude appreciation.
It all blended badly in her spinning brain.
A brutal, sickly wet mouth clamped onto one of her exposed nipples, and a rough hand squeezed her with bruising force on the opposite side.
Reule jerked himself free of the memory with a ragged gasp, his arms locking around her in an iron embrace.
He’d been right. She never should have remembered this.
She would have been better to live free of it forever.
She was panting in short, panicky spurts and he knew that the memory went on without him.
He couldn’t bear to watch what was coming, to be inside her mind as she was raped and violated, but neither could he let her remember it alone.
He couldn’t spare her, so he’d learn what it meant to be a woman in a moment like that.
What it meant to be the woman he loved in a moment like that.
He swallowed back all of his emotions, his rage most of all, and reopened himself to being in her mind, in her memory, in her moment.
Finally her mind righted itself to impress upon her the real danger she was in, that she’d already lost a part of herself she’d never be able to regain.
Her body stung with bruises, welts, and the bite of dirty nails into her delicate skin.
She was wet on both breasts from saliva and she’d been bitten more than once.
At the moment, her assailant was fondling her bottom and simultaneously trying to rip away the rest of her dress.
She was grateful that she had, as was her habit, worn breeches under her skirts.
Besides the added warmth, she enjoyed the option of dropping her skirts to get them out of her way when she worked on busy, strenuous days.
She waited, bearing the assault on her body with gritted teeth and closed eyes, until Harrell succeeded and sent her entire dress into a puddle on the floor around her legs.
He stepped back to see his handiwork, his surprise at her unexpected trousers barely registering before she dropped all of her weight onto the hands supporting her.
They instantly tightened to hold her up and her feet flew up from the floor.
She struck hard and fast, once in Harrell’s crotch, and then again in his face as he doubled over in pain and shock.
Then she pushed off from his bulky body, sending the surprised attendants sprawling into a table full of glass and ceramic flasks and tubs.
They let go, spilling her to the floor as they landed in the minefield of shards they were creating.
She scrambled to her feet and bolted for the door.
Instead of running into the ice and snow, into the humiliation of the crowded town, she grabbed the jacket she wore for short trips between houses and swung into it.
She tied it tight and then grabbed at the waist of it for the double-fanged dagger she carried to protect herself from unexpected trouble when she traveled.
Never had she thought that trouble would show up in her own home.
She wrapped her fist around the center hilt, right between the fanged blades, and readied herself for a fight.
Harrell was as furious as anyone shed ever seen in her life.
He’d always had a temper and a nasty mean streak, but she’d never realized how truly evil he was until now.
He charged her, a towering wall of muscle and wrath that dwarfed her petite frame and strength.
Regardless, there was no hesitation as her blade caught Harrell up under his bottom ribs … only the purest sorrow shed ever felt.
“Ah, damn, baby,” Reule said roughly, pulling her up to his lips and snapping the flow of the memory to a halt just as she recalled the surprising ease with which sharp metal slid through boneless belly, allowing Harrell’s momentum and his own weight to send her nearly elbow deep into his gut.
Mystique took his kiss with greed and desperation.
Feeling his affection in that moment, after knowing what she’d done, was like water at the end of a desert.
His culture, his role in life, made the taking of a life in defense of himself and his people a practiced experience.
Justified and principled in its fashion.
It hadn’t been like that for her. She’d spent her life saving and healing others.
It had been a psychic tragedy to be forced into that position. It should never have happened.
“But he was a prince. The son of the Middle King, Knar, and he was used to having his way,” she said with soft, hitching words against his lips.
“I was in shock and couldn’t move from the scene of my crime.
An act of high treason. They dragged me into the square, stripped me, whipped me, and hung me by my ankles for two days, exposed to the populace and the elements.
On the third night, someone, I don’t know who, cut me down, threw something on me, and flung me over the back of a horse.
They led me beyond the village and sent the horse running.
All I remember of him was what he said just before he slapped the horse forward: ‘Only fools kill a child of the gods.’ I guess he thought killing me would anger our gods. ”
“Damn right it would have,” he said fiercely as he rolled her beneath his weight and kissed her deep enough to burn fast fire over her face and throat.
He did it to drag her back hard into the present.
He did it to remind her that she was his now, under his body and under his protection.
Reule forced her to recall every nuance of all she’d achieved and earned, how that past was as good as a world away, and how deeply she was loved.
She’d survived insurmountable odds. Passing out of the mountain range untracked, reaching the wilderness, losing her horse in a moment of exhaustion and crawling into a cold shelter where she had, no doubt, intended to die.
How she’d done it, Reule would never know.
He didn’t think she’d ever truly know either.
And it no longer mattered. She’d clarified what was important. The difficulty would be in helping her cope with the trauma of the memories. It was no wonder at all that she’d repressed so much.
“Now what do we do?” she asked him softly, her wide diamond eyes haunted once more with the weight of sorrow. “Knar ordered me beaten, humiliated, and exposed, but I was also …” She swallowed hard. “To entertain the guards for a week before I’d lose my head.”
“Lord damn me to hell,” Reule swore, his long, dark lashes closing against the imagery those words stirred up with violent vividness.
How close he’d come to never knowing her!
Never loving her! Somewhere, he realized, there was a Yesu man to whom he owed his entire future.
A man who had stood against a bloodthirsty town and an irrational king, risking death to set an innocent free.
To send Reule a gift precious beyond all mortal measure.
“What will we do now?” he repeated hoarsely.
“Now, my foundling love, you will close your eyes.”
She drew her brows down in perplexity, making him smile gently as he rubbed the wrinkled knot away into smoothness with affectionate fingers.