Page 82 of Of Beasts & Vengeance

Real? Or in my mind?

Everything hurts. My head is pounding like the night I drank too much whiskey, but I haven’t had anything more than tea in weeks.

The voices sound again, and clarity slips slowly in.

Then panic.

My heart races, but I will myself not to stir, not to even open my eyes until I have regained more of my senses, more than the blinding pain overtaking me now.

The metallic tang of blood fills my mouth as I try to remember what happened.

I was in our bed. Mine. And Einar’s. There was broken glass.

I run my tongue along the roof of my mouth and realize where the blood is coming from. Small, sharp shards are stuck in the roof of my mouth. Glass. Broken glass.

Anthracite.

For the poison in my tea...

Then, there was laughter.

That same oily voice sounds now, merely a few feet away, but I refuse to force my dry eyes open. Before I give away my consciousness, I need to evaluate my surroundings, where I am and who has taken me.

“When do we leave?” This sounds like the oily voice from when I blacked out, but I can’t be certain.

Then a more impatient one responds, and my blood freezes in my veins.

“I told you, first we have to be sure that no one suspects. I will send word in a week's time so that the message isn’t intercepted. Then, we will wait to see what she says.”

It is all I can do to keep my breathing even. This is a nightmare. It has to be. Even my life could not be so cruel as to put me back in that vile man’s clutches.

But Dvain speaks again, erasing all doubt along with whatever fragile sense of calm I’ve managed to wrangle.

“I really didn’t believe she was alive,” he says.

Even with my eyes closed, I can feel the weight of his lewd gaze on my scantily clad form.

“Itoldyou she was. That’s why I was following the frog for so long,” the other man says irritably. “I knew something was off. It didn’t take long to figure out where they were keeping her.”

Frog?

I conjure an image of Leif’s round amphibian eyes, so much more familiar than his human ones now. Someone was watching Leif, and they followed him to me.

My heart sinks.Is he alright? Did they kill him?

A shadow looms closer, assaulting me with the odor of peppermint failing to mask rancid breath. My stomach seizes at the smell that is straight from a decade’s worth of nightmares, and I fight to keep myself perfectly still.

Warm, putrid air glides along my skin. Bile creeps up my throat, and I have a moment to realize I would rather choke to death on my own vomit than let Dvain claim me again.

Cold steel runs along the length of my thigh until it reaches the hem of Einar’s shirt. I don’t even need to open my eyes to recognize the blade that is threatening to pierce my skin.

Even without looking, I am certain that it has a gold and emerald handle with a sharply curved blade. I am certain that there is no dagger in the world that is its equal, in craftsmanship or in the misery it has inflicted. I’m also certain that it is the same one he used to cut into my flesh when I was a defenseless young girl, chained for his protection just as I am now.

Over and over, he dragged that blade down my skin, watching the rivulets of blood trail down the sides of my body before healing the cuts with one of his concoctions. All I could do was watch in horror as my wounds healed only to have him split them back open. It was part of his foreplay. His build up. Before he took his satisfaction in other ways.

I imagine if I hadn’t been so valuable to Madame, I wouldn’t have walked away from that night at all. He knew he had to return me to her relatively intact. She would have killed him otherwise.

The scars on my abdomen were my souvenir, his special gift of our time together. The only marks he left so that I could never forget our night.

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