Page 13 of King of the Dawn

“Do you recognize them, Aoibheann?” Eoghan asked.

I felt my wife shuffling behind me as she peered around my arm at the men. She audibly gasped and buried her face into my back with a whimper.

“Aye, she recognizes them,” Eoghan said in confirmation. “My father’s guards.”

My heart clenched. The men who had done abominable things for a chance to rape my wife, with the blessing of her late husband. Bile rose in my throat, and I wanted to cocoon my wife and hide her from the world. To protect her from all this.

“Yes.” I heard her low whisper behind me. “That’s them.”

I turned slightly, to look down at her eyes. She peered up at me.

“What do you want to do?” I asked her.

She blinked, slowly. And it was almost as if she was erecting a wall. She was taking my strength as her own, as her eyes hardened. My little witch was coming into her own.

She slowly, purposely turned her head towards the men. Then a small, sly smile curled her purple-colored lips, and I heard that little, melancholy hum. It filled the room, echoing from the walls, and filling my brain. I felt her voice crawling up my back like her sweet hands when she massaged my skin.

The three men flinched. One started to cry. Eoghan tensed at the old, familiar tune, but didn’t remark on it. With a flick of his wrist, he dismissed his black clad guards, and they marched out of the room.

Eoghan cringed, his nose wrinkling as one of the men pissed himself. A dark, wet spot expanding on his trousers.

I followed my bride as she walked toward the men, her tulle skirts billowing behind her. I followed her, my hands clasped behind her back, standing behind her like a general stands behind their queen.

Every scar and mark that crossed her body was now a sentence for the men who whimpered in front of her, their judgment day finally upon them.

Eoghan stepped back from the three men, and without instruction, the twin assassins moved their pistols off of Eoghan, and trailed their sights on the pathetic men.

“We are your judge, jury and executioner now,” I said, below my breath. “You will die. All of you. The question is… how will you die?”

I moved away from my Queen, standing behind the men. I grabbed the first one by his hair, lifting his head toward my wife.

“Did he touch you?” I asked.

Without sparing me a glance, she nodded. I let go of his head, throwing him onto his face and he let out a high-pitched squeal, his head banging on the marble floor.

I went to the next one and repeated the gesture, pulling his hair until his face was in the light.

“Did he touch you?” I asked. The man started to deny it. He shook his head, fighting against the grip of my fingers.

My woman smiled, then with the slightest move, shook her head to deny the accusation.

“What’s your name?” I asked, and he whined.

When he was through, the heaviness of the situation settled, I asked him again, lowering my voice to an almost soothing pitch with a patience I didn’t know I had.

“What. Is. Your. Name?”

“Blaine.” He sobbed, his nose shining with snot and sweat. “Blaine Flanagan.”

Not Ryan then. This was not the guard I was looking for.

“Blaine.” I tasted his name on my lips and looked to Eve. Her eyes were cold. A confirmation that she was not his moonlight. “You’ll be given mercy.”

I drew out a knife and slit his throat. I held him up until the spurting blood ceased, then dropped him into it. The pool of blood blossomed around the corpse, the blood seeming to reach out towards my wife to touch her feet, and plead for her mercy.

No one in our reception of friends uttered a single word. There wasn’t a gasp of disapproval, not a protest of our brand of justice. The room was on my woman’s side.

At the strange look of confusion on the first man’s face, I knelt down beside him and whispered in his ear.

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