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Trembling fingers took hold of the thin cord of beads and pressed one of the brass stars into the tender flesh with every ounce of my strength.
Please. Please help me. I screamed into the howling tempest of my mind and kept repeating it.
The brass star began to collapse under the weight of my grip and then crumbled between my fingers.
The boots were returning. The Ard Rí was returning.
Terror filled my eyes and spilled down my cheeks as the boots appeared again in the doorway.
“Cricket,” a masculine voice called, twisted and muffled by my own heart slamming against my eardrums and seeking an escape from my destiny.
“Cricket,” the voice called again with more authority and insistence.
I gripped another brass star, crushing it as I pleaded in my mind for help. I pleaded so hard that my silent prayer slipped from my mute, shaking lips.
“Sóna Mac Raith!” bellowed the voice as the star collapsed in my fingers.
It was wild with urgency, making me jump as the boots drew a foot deeper into the room and closer to me.
He must have heard the soft tink of the dagger striking the stonework below me when I jumped. The boots rushed toward me, and I squeezed my eyes closed as fear ripped all sense from me. I didn’t want to see what was coming. I didn’t want to see the way my blood spattered across his face as he beat me. I didn’t want to see it pool around me. I didn’t want to see my bones break under his hand.
The bed above me exploded. The futon-style mattress flipped up and over. The expertly carved walnut wood frame was ripped to shreds. Every last one of the ropes that held the mattress off of the floor snapped. And amid all this carnage, not a single shard of wood, feather, or rope touched me.
It wasn’t until two arms were snatching me bodily from my fetal position that I felt anything at all. And when they did, I was slashing, the blade a living extension of my arm. I was determined not to let the King find me as easy a prey thing as he had found me last.
I felt the blade slashing, felt it meet hard leather and score a deep hungry gash into it. Felt it kiss flesh and split it wide. I felt it sing across bone sheathed in flesh. The arms did not let me go, though, and I lashed out like a wild animal, striking out with fist and feet and blade, screaming with every cell in my body the sound drowning out anything else around me.
The arms wrapped around me, folded me against slick hard leather, and pressed my head gently against the sound of a steady heartbeat. I thrashed and screamed, fighting against the man holding me. He was speaking, saying something I could not translate into words. But my skin knew the words, felt the warmth of liquid seeping into it going to war against the rabid fear that lanced through me.
The sound of my heart began to slow, to die in its intensity, matching the one that pounded against my ear in a steady rhythm. The rumble of the masculine voice began to pair with the sensation of a chin pressing into my scalp, the warmth of a body pressed tight to mine. All along, the sensation of comfort dripping like an IV into my veins soothed me from feral cat to house cat. Slowly, I felt the need to purr, to curl deeper into the body.
As the sensation of comfort, hot chocolate next to a fireplace, won the battle against the fear the dam my tears broke, and I buried my face into the discomfort of the warm hard leather and sobbed. A flood of tears streamed, hot and brutal, from my eyes into it, soaking through.
The grip of the arms around me eased for a moment but returned, crushing me with a terrifying strength against him, and I felt us rocking.
“Ssshh . . . It’s okay, Cricket. Shhh . . . You’re safe.”
The warm thunder of his voice, The Raven, cooed. Each word rumbled through me and shook the last bits of my resolve, of my strength, free, and I went slack against him.
I didn’t feel like I had to be strong. I didn’t feel like I needed to guard myself. I felt at ease. I had never felt this sensation before. I had always been on guard. I had always been anticipating the next attack, no matter what form it would have taken. But here, in his arms, I felt his words were true.
I was safe. At least for this moment.
He rocked me and held me until the sea of tears dried up and boiled into a dry lakebed. Lifting my head from his chest, I surveyed the damage.
The King’s bed was utterly destroyed. Pieces of it lay in tatters all over the room. Sheets were torn. Bedding blistered and shredded. Feathers dusted every surface. What once was a triumph of craftsmanship was barely suitable to be kindling.
When I looked back to The Raven, I realized that he was not much better off than the King’s bed. The dagger I had attacked him with was buried hilt deep into the meat of his trapezius, blood welling lazily around the steel. His face had a slash that ran from the high arch of one cheek, across his nose, splitting his eyebrow, and fading into his hairline. His lip had been split on the edge of his bottom lip, and the gloves he always wore were in tatters.
Yet he did not push me away, did not react to his pain at all. He merely held me, even though, every time I shifted in his arms or he adjusted his grip on me, the dagger bounced and ate at the skin to either side of its blade. He must have been in agony. Yet he didn’t show even a single flinch.
The gloved hand of his uninjured arm rose and brushed away the deep fissures of my tears from my cheeks with the pad of his thumb.
“There you are, hell cat. Safe. As I promised.” A soft smile was given to me as he tipped my chin up to look me over. “Yes? Safe? Are you okay?”
His eyes took quick inventory of me, searching for any hair out of place, let alone any injuries. We both knew that the injuries he was asking about were unseen grotesque things that squirmed beneath the surface of my mind.
The fucked thing about emotional wounds that cut down to the bone and spilled your squishy intestines all over the floor was that they never showed on the outside. If they did, I would be a walking scar. A giant, festering keloid made sentient purely by the power of my stubbornness.
