He brushes her hair over her shoulder. An act I might consider tender if I could not see the dark thoughts lingering behind his eyes when his gaze falls upon me in the same moment.
He brings his fangs to her ear and whispers, “Would you like to watch,mi’ajna?”
She glances back at me, a mournful look on her face as she offers him a single nod.
“Good,” he says, sweeping wide around the female as he stridestoward me.
His eyes cross over my wounds, and he frowns. “You were told to heal her.”
The female shrinks from the wrathful pitch of his tone.
“She fought me,” she says, the timbre of her voice wavering.
“Bring the surgeon,” he demands, waving her away, a chilling smile spreading across his face. “If you think my sister will allow your life to end so easily, you are mistaken,” he says, wrapping a thick, calloused hand around my throat. He drags me off the floor, and I suck in a gasp as the weight of my body tears at my broken flesh. “And if you think the damaged state of your form is anything but appealing to me, allow me to correct that assumption.”
I can’t help the whimper that escapes my lips when he pins me against the wall of the ship with his hips. The promise of every desire the male harbors within him pressed between my legs.
“Your mate should have marked you when he had the chance.” It’s the only warning he gives before breaking my necklace in his fist and casting it to the floor as his fangs find purchase in the fragile skin at my throat.
His tongue laps at the blood, a contented rumble in his chest. I claw at his face. A sad and desperate attempt to part him from my flesh. He bats my hands away before raking his fingers through the open skin of my side and I loose a scream of utter agony and rage that makes the male smile against my throat.
“Enough!” Vos shouts from the doorway and he drops me back to the bloody deck beneath his feet.
I stifle a sob, the feeling of the male’s fangs beneath my skin more repulsive and violating than could ever be put into words.
I don’t hear the harsh words exchanged between them when the surgeon pours a vile smelling solution on my wounds. My eyes grow wide when he produces a small wire brush from a black bag and takes it to my side. I heave up bile as he scrubs the exposed muscle at my ribs, surely scraping the bones that lay beneath.
The waking world shutters as my vision blurs. I watch the small female drenched in my blood fall to her knees and pocket the necklace. If only the void calling to me were death, I would have peace when it finallycomes to take me.
If the frequency of my meals is any indication of the passing time, it’s been a week since I came to in the brig. A week of near solitude, save for the surgeon who attends me daily. He had washed my wounds that first day, stitched and bound them, before I woke in the darkness and wept.
Two days later I woke with a fever and a dreadful ache in my side. I screamed when he broke the sutures and washed the wound again, much more thoroughly than he had the first time. He wrapped my ribs in a poultice after that, the green of the herbs melding with the fresh flow of my blood to stain the bandages.
My fever broke three days later, and today Vos joined the surgeon to see for herself the state of my condition. Though the surgeon assured her it is too soon to continue my torture, it’s clear the female’s patience is at its end. I can only hope it will be the blade and not her brother that leaves its mark upon my body when we begin again.
Long after the surgeon’s visit this morning, laying in the near dark of the brig, I note the creaking of the ship as it begins to tilt at the whim of the harsh gusts overhead. Large waves batter the sides, and my stomach has wound itself into a tangle of knots.
I’ve hardly moved from where my blood has dried into the deep grooves of the wooden floor. With only my thoughts to keep me company, my days are filled with misery as I ponder the mess I have made of my life. The solitude of the dark and the memories I cannot purge from my mind are perhaps a more acute torture than what Vos laid bare upon my flesh.
Ask.
An echo resounding within me day and night. The sound of his voice, the first thing I hear upon every waking. I am a fool, for not asking the male who offered me so much, for not trusting all he laid at my feet. And I am a coward, for running from a truth that would have shattered all that I am, asmuch as it would have freed me from the shackles of my upbringing.
A tear falls from my eye, wetting the crimson stain beneath me. It isn’t the first. There have been many, and I have no doubt there are more to come. Where once there were numerous paths I might have tread, now it seems only one remains. One that I find no pleasure in pondering.
My palm rests on my chest, a futile attempt to soothe the ache I fear will plague me for the rest of my life. What little might remain of it. Another tear falls, and I wonder if the male I am bound to will find a way to shed the bond between us. I would, if I were him, just as I tried to shed the ties of my past life when I set foot upon the shores of A’kori.
I eye the poultice, wishing to strip the mesh from my skin and let the wounds fester until I meet death at last. But they would only be replaced, and I have little doubt I would find myself shackled to the wall for my efforts. Another tear falls to the floor, and I wince at the pain in my side when I jump at the voice coming from the dark.
“Foolish,” she rasps from the shadows, “You or I, I know not which.”
My eyes strain to find the source, hidden in the darkness.
“Bagya.” I suck in her name on a painful and shallow breath.
Unchanged since last I saw her, the crone sits atop a box of cargo, hidden in a dark corner across the room. Wrapped in tattered rags, a large hood further obscuring her face, she cracks a hideous and broken smile.
“I suppose,Bagyawill do for now,” she says simply.
