Page 157 of A Vow of Blood and Tears

Miro reached for my arm, and I struck at him, clawing with my nails. A scratch opened on his hand, blood welling, but Miro was quicker, stronger, faster.

“A fight it is, then.”

He twisted my arm behind my back, forcing me back into the empty stall.

“Feisty,” he muttered, pushing my chest and stomach to the rear stone wall and keeping me pinned there. “You’re such a little mouse, I didn’t think you had it in you.”

His weight forced the air from my lungs, and even if I could have screamed, there was no air to scream with.

He was fumbling with something with his other hand, and an awful thought struck, that he would rape me right here in the stables and no one would know until it was over.

I kicked, raising my heel, but Miro drove his knee into the back of my thigh, sending a sharp jolt of pain through my entire leg before the muscle went dead. Dark splotches spread across my vision, painting patterns like bloodstains across the wall. By the Light, I neededair...

“You fought and you lost, no great surprise,” he said, his other arm snaking around me. “By this time tomorrow, we’ll be in Foria. Good night, Lady Silence.”

He pressed a cloth over my face, smothering close, covering my mouth and nose. Despite my thrashing, it didn’t dislodge.

Most of his weight drew back and my lungs filled against my will, desperate for air, but the sweet, acrid stench of the cloth burned down my throat instead.

The dark splotches grew. Blossomed into shadows, the imaginary bloodstains becoming bloodroses. I heaved against Miro one last time, but I could no longer feel him, even as he dragged me across the stable.

He laid me on a saddle blanket, lowering the rear hatch of a supply wagon. I could no longer feel my own limbs. I was floating, the shadows deepening, my mind numb.

The bloodroses flowered into an endless night.

Chapter 38

Bane

Gods. I had screamed at her.

I had bared my claws, my fangs, showing the truth of what lived under my skin to the one I loved the most in this world.

My Cirri, my lover. She hadrunfrom me.

I curled in on myself, covering my face with my bloody hands.

Now she knew the truth, that there was nothing good inside me. Everything I had been, everything I once was… was now subsumed by the beast in my heart and mind. The creature that drove me to violence, that begged and fought for blood, that had no remorse and no care for life itself.

I was evil, and now she had seen it, in its most raw and open form.

The body was cooling. I smelled its thick, meaty stench in the air, the iron tang of blood, now congealing.

I could have offered a trial. Judgment by those who might have heard her out, rather than a death sentence at my hands. From the moment she had walked in through that door, that damning letter in Visca’s hand, she had been doomed.

But I didn’t regret what I’d done.

That was the worst part. Knowing that Cirri was right to fear me, because I had torn apart a woman she knew without an ounce of remorse. What was one woman after the hundreds that had come before?

Perhaps I had been a fool to think this would work in the end. To promise that I’d give her my blood, keep her by my side forever.

What kind of life would that be? To be trapped in the cage of a vicious fiend, afraid enough to run, yet too terrified to leave?

And still, even with that knowledge, I wouldn’t release her. I would give her my blood and keep her, evil or not. Brutal or not. As terrible as I was, I belonged to her, and she to me.

And of course I believed that, because I was evil.

I drew my hands away and looked at them, really looked at them.

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