Page 19 of His Disobedient Bride

I run so fast that each breath is a painful rasp in my chest, my lungs burning as my legs struggle to outrun my bigger, faster, deadlier husband.

The leaves on the forest floor were slippery and I suddenly stumbled and tripped.

You know how you have nightmares where the monsters are chasing you, but you always wake up before they catch you?

My monster always catches me.

I heard him behind me, so close now. I kept running anyway, my chest and side burning with pain, trying to dart between the trees.

Then Andrei grabbed me with one hand, shoving me up against a tree and knocking the breath out of my lungs.

His eyes were furious, glittering at me with rage.

With one hand he pinned me to the tree. With the other, he grabbed my arm and flipped it out. The blood from my cut was pooled and smeared all over it.

My husband made a low, strangled noise, and started ripping at his shirt, tearing chunks and strips of it off to wind around my arm.

“It’s fine, it’s fine,” I said breathlessly, my voice sounding unnaturally high to my own ears.

He ignored me and wrapped up my arm with the strips of cloth. When the blood began to soak through the first layer, he made another noise, so eerie and painful that the hairs on the back of my neck stood up.

But by the second layer the bleeding had begun to stop.

By the third layer it was done completely.

He stood looking at my arm, his hard fingers around my hand, watching my injury. We stood there for several minutes, both immobile and frozen. I was too frightened to move. I could hear the distant sounds of birds in the forest, but nothing else. We were alone out there.

I did not bleed through the third layer.

Then he looked up and I met his eyes.

They looked like chipped ice.

I hastily turned to one side to try to run away from him, ripping my hand out of his grip, but he grabbed me around the waist, and we fell to the forest floor.

He turned and shoved me into the ground on my belly, his knee trapping me in place. With one hand he ripped up my skirt. He made a quick noise of impatience, and he put both knees under my thighs, forcing them to spread painfully wide. Then he tore my panties off, the rending of the cloth making me squeak in alarm.

His knees kept me pinned and I heard the ominous metallic click as he yanked his belt out.

“How fucking dare you do that to me!” he said, his voice tight and furious. “How dared you disobey me!”

My face was shoved into dirt and leaves so far that I couldn’t have answered even if I wanted to.

I heard him grip the buckle in his palm, readying the flexible end of the belt, then I felt the stinging crack of the first blow on my ass.

Tears immediately sprung to my eyes. Fuck, that hurt.

He moved his hand to my upper back, pinning me in place as he settled between my spread legs.

Crack! His wrist moved again, and I howled.

Then a third time, and a fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth, alternating between both cheeks.

I startled wriggling around, trying to avoid the blows, and they landed painfully on my upper thighs and the backs of my knees.

“Stop moving,” said Andrei grimly. “You’ll get tired of wiggling way before my arm does.”

Another blow made me yelp with dismay.

---