Page 25 of Sinner’s Brand

The next one goes deeper. The one after that hits her cracked ribs. She winces, but she doesn't stop.

She keeps her eyes on me, and I hold the voice right where it is, low and steady and unhurried, like I've got all night.

"In. That's it. Out."

Her shoulders come down. Color comes back into her lips. Her left hand opens and lies flat against the wood.

"Keep going," I tell her. "Same as before. You don't need me for this part."

She keeps going on her own, and I don't move.

The last time she looked at me like this, she was nineteen, sitting in my fight barn in a sundress that had no business being anywhere near Devil's Acre. I spotted her across a room full of men who'd come to watch somebody bleed. She wasn't watching the fighters. She was watching me, with a look I knew damn well I ought to ignore.

Two men had kept swinging after the bell. I walked through the ropes and told them it had rung, and the whole barn shut up. One of them swung at me anyway, and I dropped him with one punch.

When I turned around, she was looking at me exactly the way she is now, quiet and waiting on the next thing I'd say.

I knew what she wanted then. She wanted me to tell her what to do and watch her do it. I'd seen the same look on other women who wanted exactly that.

I turned my back on her and kept it turned all night. She was the preacher's girl, and she was nineteen. I was the man running illegal fights on my family's land.

Tonight I didn't turn my back. I used that voice on her without asking, and it worked.

I wasn't trying to dominate her. She couldn't breathe, and I gave her the simplest orders I know. But I didn't use just any voice. I used the one I know men and women obey before they've thought about it, and she obeyed it before she could decide to.

At the Farrier, a woman says yes to that voice out loud, with her limits on the table, before I ever use it on her. Delilah never got the chance to say yes to anything tonight. That's the part that sits wrong in my gut.

If she stopped breathing on my porch tomorrow night, I'd do it again without blinking. I'd still be giving her orders she never agreed to take.

I learned something else tonight, too. My voice reaches her when nothing else does, and she goes still under it.

She lets go of the rail and stares down at her hands, opening and closing them.

Her feet are soaked from the grass, and she's shivering hard enough that her teeth click.

My canvas coat hangs on the hook inside the back door. I go up the steps and past her to the door, take it down, and come back to the grass so I can hold it out to her across the rail. I don't put it on her.

It's a long moment before she takes it, and she has to work her wrapped hand into the sleeve one careful inch at a time. The coat swallows her to the knees.