Page 79 of Lost in the Dark

A lady would take a deep breath and quietly turn the other cheek—Anna knew that. But days of cleaning and poor meals and spirits wailing at her seemed to bubble inside her chest, as if she were a kettle boiling over the hearth.

The ruby burned against her chest. Her vision seemed to darken.

“How dare you!” She picked up a broom and charged down the hall. “How dare you tell me so much and yet conceal the truth. I would have given you anything. My bloody heart. Do you not—”

He vanished into the stairwell.

“Argh!” She threw the broom after him.

Here she’d thought Enulf her ally—something precious—and he’d merely been playing some sick game. Did he seek to torment her, as Gude and the mora did? Or did he have other reasons for what he’d done?

Doesn’t matter.

It was all tricks and lies, just like the mora. And she was done with all of it.

Pure rage carried Anna through the night and into the cold, winter morning.

The mora wailed and moaned and scratched around her bed, promising death and destruction, asking for favors that could never be granted. For once, instead of cowering beneath her sheets, Anna let their fury bolster her own. Rolling over her in waves and building her resolve.

Lord Rathbytten didn’t want her.

Enulf didn’t care for her.

And she was bound to this… thishouse.

This dark, dirty nightmare of stones and sorrow, built two days' travel from the nearest village, seemed determined to grind her into dust. Well, she wasn’t going to let it. If her contract was with this house, and if the men of this house were determined to value the hunt above all else, then it was high time she joined that hunt.

For herself.

Which is why she’d gotten up before dawn—before the trials of the breakfast table—and headed into the castle grounds.

The wind bit at her cheeks, tugged at the fabric of her cloak and cut through the thin fabric of her gown. Frosted earth crunched beneath her boots. If she just kept walking north, she’d follow the winding creek to her village. Oh, how wonderful it would be to go home. To see her sisters…

How long would it take for her to walk a distance traveled over two days by carriage?

Too long.

She shivered, breath puffing in the air before her, and looked down at her clothes.

Her oldest skirt and chemise, barely respectable for cleaning. She should return to her room, gather up her belongings. No one would stop her—for no one seemed to care what she did with herself. At least her best dress, the one that had formed her dowry, would keep her warm, made as it was from the drapes in the room she’d once shared with her sisters. She’d take their paltry offering this morning, and find better along the road.

She stopped, toes on the edge of where tended land sloped into tendrils of forest.

She could just… leave.

Except, there wasn’t truly a home to return to. After her father had torn the curtains from the wall, he’d shoved the fabric into her middle. Told her it was the last covering he’d ever give her.

No. There was no home for her to the north.

She had nowhere to go other than the house behind her. Lord Rathbytten’scastle, which watched over no village, provided no protection to a neighboring town. It simply stood alone on a hill in a tree-stripped stretch of land. More prison than a guardian. No wonder its residents gave nothing back.

Swallowing a cry of mourning, she wrapped her arms around her middle.

Powerless. Weak.

She was everything Rathbytten had accused Enulf of being—everything the mora cried about in the night. This was why she’d sought solace in his touch—and why he’d ultimately rejected her.

Tears slid down her cheeks, near singing her skin in the frigid air.

---