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“Yes,” I say. “Yes, like that.”

“Shut up,” she orders.

“There’s my girl.”

“I said shut up!” She hits me again, harder. My head snaps to the side and blood warms the corner of my mouth.

I grin through it. “Just like that. Take it out on me.”

Her eyes fill, with tears, with fury, with months of swallowed screams. With every no she could not say because a hand covered her mouth, because a threat waited at her men’s throats, because a blade hovered near her mind.

“All of it,” I whisper.

She shoves me. I let myself stumble. “Take it out on me.”

Another shove. Another strike. Not graceful. Not trained. Not the Widow’s elegant violence. This is uglier. A woman clawing her way back through dirt.

“You think I wanted to live like that?” she screams.

“No.”

“You think I wanted to freeze?” she yells.

“No,” I state.

“You think I wanted to stop fighting?”

“No.”

Her fists strike my chest now. Again and again. And again.

“I could not move!” She slaps my face.

“I know,” I murmur politely.

“I could not breathe!”

“I know.”

“I could not make them stop!” She shouts.

“I know.”

The last answer breaks something. She makes a sound that is more animal than human and crashes into me, striking, shoving, sobbing so violently her body can barely hold it. I take it. Every blow, every word as Alcott is screaming beneath my skull. Edward will likely try to kill me when he finds out. Lazarus may help him. Let them, this is not for them, this is not even for me, this is for the woman who has been sitting inside her own skin like a locked room, believing the silence meant she had become the thing he named her. Doll.

No, never. She is not delicate porcelain, not an object, nor is she a tragedy arranged in silk. She is fury with a pulse, and she only needed somewhere to put it.

“I hate him!” she screams.

Finally, there, those words. Not fear. Not shame. Hate, pure and clean and holy hatred.

“I hate him!”

“Yes,” I say.

“I hate what he did to me!”

“Yes.”