Page 159 of Alchemised
He grabbed her hand in his, his eyes glinting. She tried to pull away, but he squeezed tighter. Pain shot down her right arm, the metacarpals grinding against one another.
“Don’t break my hand! You can’t—hurt my hands!” She screamed the words at him in pure panic.
He leaned closer. “Then fight me off.”
Both of her arms were on fire. She could barely breathe. He was seconds from caving her chest in. Struggle again and she was certain all the bones in her right hand would snap.
She went limp.
He held her for several more seconds, as if expecting her to suddenly spring into action. Confusion flashed across his face for a moment as he exhaled, then his expression hardened again.
“You’re pathetic,” he said, adding more weight to her chest. Her eyes watered but she didn’t make a sound. “I could do anything I wanted to you, hurt you in ways you cannot even imagine, and you couldn’t do anything to stop me. I wouldn’t even need my resonance. I could do it with my bare hands. That’s how weak you are.”
He sneered and let go. His hands were streaked with blood, but the marks she’d gouged were already gone. He stood, pulling out a handkerchief to wipe the blood, straightening his clothes.
Helena remained gasping on the floor. Her spine and the back of her head throbbed. When she tried to brace herself into a sitting position with her right hand, she nearly cried.
Pain was radiating through her hands. There was blood and skin under her fingernails, staining her fingertips.
Her left wrist was beginning to swell. Her right hand was hardly better: When she tried to curl her fingers into a fist, pain burst like a halo up to her elbow.
“For the record,” she said, struggling to keep her voice steady, “this qualifies as interfering with my work. If you want to hurt me”—her jaw trembled uncontrollably—“it can’t be my hands.”
So much for claiming she could say no to things.
Ferron said nothing, just walked over and pulled his cloak back on without looking at her again.
Helena stayed where she was. She’d known this was a possibility, but he’d lulled her into a false sense of security, waiting until she let her guard down to finally hurt her.
It was crueller than if he’d done it from the start.
“Do I get to know why?” she asked, still staring dully at the floor, ribs aching with every breath. “Did I—did I d-do something?”
“You exist, Marino. I think that’s reason enough.”
She had no response to that. She got up slowly. “Do you have any information today?”
He gave a thin smile. “No. That was all.”
She retrieved her satchel without a word, gingerly hooking an arm through the strap. She couldn’t get it up to her shoulder. Broken glass tinkled inside.
She’d added an emergency kit after last week, thinking that if Ferron was ever hurt again, she would come prepared. The waste of medicine it represented was almost as painful as her ribs, and the broken glass and contents would have contaminated everything she’d foraged that day. Hours wasted.
She went to the door and tried to flex her fingers enough to open it, but all she could feel was pain.
“Will you”—her voice finally betrayed her and shook—“will you let me out?”
IF SHE’D HURT ANYTHING BUT her hands, it would have been easy to follow Crowther’s instructions and hide the bruises before she returned to Headquarters, but there hadn’t been any contingency plans made beyond that.
Once she was off the Outpost, Helena wandered up and down along the dam. She was functionally useless without her hands. If she tried to get back to Headquarters looking as bruised as she was, there could be questions that she couldn’t answer.
Finally, in desperation, she scrambled down the embankment towards the marshes. Without her hands, she was clumsy, quickly covered with dirt. She crawled back to the firm ground, drenched and muddy, smearing at her face and throat so that any bruises would be covered.
At the checkpoint, they recognised her and pitied her enough that they didn’t ask many questions. When she reached Headquarters, she was forced to go to the hospital because she couldn’t use the lift.
“What happened?” Matron Pace came to meet Helena as she arrived at the doors.
“I fell in the marsh,” Helena said without meeting her eyes. “Sprained my wrists.”
