“Rue and Amabel Büchel, Father Derrik,” says Mother Anna, giving us both a push. Ama and I both stumble curtsying awkwardly.
He steps out of the pew, coming to examine us both closely. I feel like a little mouse, being surveyed by a hawk. Will I be dinner? Or will the hawk not even think that I am nearly enough to fill his belly?
Father Derrik barely looks at Ama, but me… he strolls over and grasps my shoulder, giving it a hard squeeze. I let my head fall back, swallowing as I meet his gaze.
A shiver passes through me at what I see there, hidden away in his gaze. Something dark lurks there, that is for sure.
“You’ve done well to bring them to me,” he says, looking directly down at me. “This one is just on the brink of womanhood. A tender time for young ladies, a time in which they might be led astray. Hmm?”
I bite my lip, not sure if I should respond or not. I’m chilled to the bone just by being in his presence. But what should I say?
Should I tell the adults staring at me that I don’t trust him? Beggars cannot be choosers, after all…
He smiles at me, then looks up at the nuns.
“Go and get Amabel settled. I think I should hear Rue’s confession, right now. Cut off the snake’s head before it bites you, is that not so?”
The nuns both curtsy and grab Ama’s hands. They guide her out, leaving me behind with the priest. His hand never leaves my shoulder as he steers me toward the confessional.
The first tears of so many gather in the corners of my eyes.
5
Rue
Time passes. The sun sets, then rises again, throwing its glorious colors against the door. I’m aware of the passage of time as a fact, but not per se how much of it goes by.
In my cold little cell, I spend a good deal of it asleep. Or sometimes half sleeping, half awake, trapped in a world of my dreams. I eat what little food Dryas has left out for me within the first day. He brings me bottles of water for the first two days, then stops. Whatever I’m expecting, it doesn’t come.
No one comes to my cell and nothing happens.
Am I supposed to be punished, then? I feel disciplined for sure.
Not that it matters a lot to me, because I’m so tired. For days after Dryas drags me back, I sleep. Although I dutifully drink the bottles of water left for me while I’m asleep, I’m too out of it to really do much else. I have a pounding headache for the first day, but mercifully it fades, leaving only the desire to sleep behind.
By the time that he stops bringing me water, I’m too out of it to really notice. My whole body feels strange, weak and hot. I’m thirsty constantly, dying for water, but I don’t even put it together to look across the room for water.
There is no ignoring the pain in my wrist, though. When I close my eyes, I can visualize it. It starts out white hot at my wrist, then it’s bright red on my fingers and my forearm. Then in my visualization, the color fades to a bright orange, where it joins the rest of my body as an ache that won’t go away.
The splint on my wrist is crude, but it does help keep it immobilized. Trying to keep it still and cradled is my main preoccupation when I’m conscious.
My other injury doesn’t fare as well. Examining my ankle wound, I can’t help but worry at how red it is, how unhealthy the color is at the center. Is it me, or is it turning a hair green?
While usually, it would be a good thing that the skin had knitted together, now I’m worried about it. Without any witch hazel to purify the wound, I can’t do much about it other than try to keep it uncovered.
And pray, of course. I pray as hard as I can, out of habit more than anything else. I can’t say that I’m being heard, but I still close my eyes and form my lips into the comforting words that form my common prayers.
O God who
are the only source of health and healing,
the Spirit of calm and the central peace of this universe,
grant to me such a consciousness of Your indwelling and surrounding presence that I may permit You to give me health and strength and peace, through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Amen.
Prayers feel hollow right now though, here in this tiny room. I curl toward the wall, weeping for no reason. Well, no reason other than the fact that I am certain that I have been abandoned by God.
Honestly, I am certain that when I gave myself to Dryas last week, God decided to stop listening to me altogether. Or maybe it started before that, back when I decided to run away from my own wedding.
When I think about that too much, my eyes mist over. Either way, I am pretty sure that my prayers fall on deaf ears. Shame and misery are my only friends as I drift in and out of consciousness.
Still, I pray when I’m not sleeping, my eyes traveling up to the slotted window. Having no one to talk to, I try to talk to the Lord, though I am sure he can’t hear me. Being locked down here is worse than it was when I arrived in some ways because I know all the beauty that lies outside these cool stone walls.
Imagining the sunrises and sunsets is its own special kind of Hell because I am not sure that I will ever see them again.
I am awakened by a reverberating clang, the sound of the door to my cell being thrown wide open. Dryas darkens the doorframe, looking impossibly tall and utterly wicked. Sitting up, I blink and rub my face with my good hand.
Storming over to where I’m resting, he glares at me, his lip curling. I can smell the whiskey coming off him as though he’s been bathing in it, even before he speaks.
“You look terrible,” he says, his gaze raking me up and down. Blushing, I lower my head, but he reaches out and grabs my chin. “Don’t look away from me. Don’t you ever look away.”
My lower lip begins to tremble as he raises my chin. Looking at me with those jungle cat’s eyes of his, standing so much larger than me, he intimidates me both psychologically and physically.
He leans down and brushes a kiss across my mouth, his lips a burning brand. His grip on my chin hurts, enough so that I know that he’s left five perfect marks in the shape of his fingers.
I don’t want him. I don’t want his whiskey-soaked mouth to press against mine. Nor do I want to my cheeks to color. I don’t want to sigh into the kiss, or to clutch at his neck with my uninjured hand.
He’s not interested in what I want or don’t want, though. Dryas slides his hand around into my long hair, fisting the long red locks. He grips my hair tightly, so tightly that I gasp.
Then he chuckles at my reaction, kneeling on the floor of my cell and placing hungry kisses down the milky column of my throat. His touch is brutal, his kiss unasked for.
And yet my body flowers under that savage touch. I can feel a growing dampness between my legs, see my nipples tightening beneath the burlap material I am still wearing.
He rips at the material, tearing it away from my chest. He’s got a hand wrapped in my hair, so he uses it as leverage to lift my breasts to his eager mouth.
Heat envelops my nipple as it slides into his mouth. He kisses it, then bites my breast hard enough to elicit a pained sound from me.
He releases my breast from his mouth with a pop. “You stupid little girl. Don’t pretend that you don’t want me. You’ll always want me, Rue.”
I am too out of it to even know what he’s talking about. Dryas shifts me on the cot so that my hips are almost off the bed. My head is against the wall, awkwardly bent, but that doesn’t seem to matter.
He rips away the last of the burlap and fumbles with his zipper. I close my eyes for a second, dizzy. The next thing I know, he’s pressing his cock into my core. No warning, no preparation.
It’s big. It hurts.
“Ow,” I murmur, swatting weakly at his face. But of course, he isn’t paying attention to me. He’s looking at his cock as he works it in and out with difficulty, gritting his teeth.
“This isn’t right,” he mutters. He makes eye contact with me. “You think you don’t want me? Huh?”
His fingers slide down between us, feel
ing roughly around for my clit. His fingers graze my clit, sending a stinging lash of pleasure across my senses. He does it again and again as he works his cock in and out of my tight opening.
I’ll admit, as poorly as I feel, I start to enjoy his crude touch. As soon as I start to feel turned on, he stops his fumbling, focusing like a laser on jackhammering his cock home.
Despite his focus, it takes him twenty minutes of driving his cock into me with brutal strokes before he comes. I have the distinct displeasure of experiencing his total lack of care for me; my… lady parts… dry up long before he’s done. When he does finally come, he’s nearly falling over with the sheer effort of it all.
Afterward, I feel a heavy weight pressing on me again. For those few minutes before, I could forget that God hasn’t been answering my prayers. I could pretend that I’m not cold all the time, locked down in this dungeon. I could act as though I hadn’t been hurt terribly by the strange man and the fall from the cliff.
But now it comes rushing back, dizzyingly fast. It overwhelms me. As high as I was pushed, now I am plummeting, in a free fall that I can’t think to control.
I just keep thinking… what if I had been braver the day I ran from the church? What if I had stayed? If I hadn’t strayed from the path that Father Derrik laid at my feet, would God be so angry with me?
Maybe… maybe…
The recriminations almost destroy me.
I roll on my side, tears already beginning to leak from my eyes. It isn’t until I break down sobbing great big ugly tears than Dryas even notices me, out of his drunken stupor.
“What are you crying for?” he asks, irritated.
I bury my face under my good arm, miserable. I’m injured, I’m godless, I’m stuck in this cell. And I’m so tired that I can barely function. Talking about it seems pointless.
Dryas stands up, getting dressed. He looks at me, his expression is stern.
“Stop crying,” he orders me, zipping his fly. “I swear to god, Rue—”
That, of course, has the opposite effect of what he says, making my tears grow into loud sobs that echo eerily throughout the stone room. I manage to get out, “God is punishing me!”
Then I dissolve into a soggy mess of tears once more. He chokes out a laugh, sneering at me.
“There is no God,” he says, as easily as one might state that the sky is in fact blue. “Don’t be a fool.”
His words fill me with an indescribable dread. He is going to Hell, in no uncertain terms. And I have tied myself to him, making myself his whore not once but twice.
If he is a sinking ship, I’m going down with him as surely as the sun sets every day.
He makes a disgusted sound and whirls, leaving my cell. As the door closes with a clank, I close my eyes. Feebly, I realize that I should have at least asked him for the supplies to clean my wound.
Now, all there is to do is sleep.
6
Dryas
I drink a lot, so much that I don’t dream often. It’s not by accident that I pass out with a whiskey bottle clutched to my chest, not even a little. But still, I get a dream here and there, in the early morning hours just before I wake.
Mostly I dream about having killed my brother Arsen.
His blood on my hands.
How my hands shook as they held the knife.
The sound he made when I slid the knife between his ribs. How sickening it was that the blade went in so smoothly, almost like I was pushing it into butter instead of my brother.
The startled look on his face when blood began to spread out across his dark shirt, a wet spot that will stick with me forever. In my dreams, I often pull away from him at that moment to find that I have the exact same wound. It’s bleeding and hurting, just the way Arsen must have felt.
I look up to find him leering down at me. Somehow in my dream, we have switched places. I stare up at him blankly, feeling a kind of horror creeping up on me.
My brother killed me. He took a knife and stabbed me, then backed away like I was doing him a disservice, bleeding to death. A flash of Arsen and I together as boys comes into my mind, laughing as we walked down some dark side street together.
That’s what I remember most. The loss of friendship, of brotherhood. It was like being untethered suddenly. As if I was a balloon cut loose from my earthly moorings.
I wake, gasping for breath. I can still feel the dampness of blood on my hands, feel the constriction of my lungs as I take in the reality of what I’ve done.
What Arsen must have felt in his final moments… no one deserves to die like that, not even the lowest criminal. Certainly not Arsen Aétos, my own flesh and blood.
Reaching for my whiskey flask, knocking over empty bottles until I find one that has a good amount still in it, I chug the liquid. The burn is so bittersweet, tasting of another failure.
Failed when I stabbed Arsen.
Failed to stay sober.
Failed in getting revenge on Derrik.
I keep chugging, thinking to drown myself in whiskey. At least when I’m drunk, I can’t hear my self-recriminations quite as loudly as when I’m stone cold sober. It’s like I’m this seething, pulsating open wound walking around, hurt by everything I touch. Every memory that I have, every time I think of how I’ve failed, I’m rubbed raw all over again.
Sober, I am a man without skin.
Liquor is a balm for my wounds, of a sort. I know that it rots me from the inside out, but it also protects me from having to feel this terrible pain.
It doesn’t take long before I’m drunk again. It doesn’t take long for the whiskey to wash away everything that is me, carrying the refuse with it as it goes.
Drinking doesn’t feel good. Then again, drinking doesn’t feel bad.
All it does is blunt the pain, so that I feel little or nothing. It blurs the lines of who I was and who I am, mixing them up until they all blend together in one drunken swirl.
Soon, I can sleep without dreams once more.
When I wake again, I crack my eyes open to find Ari scowling down at me. I’m wet. No, the whole top half of my body is wet.
What? Why?
Ari is holding a bucket, looking peeved. I don’t remember calling him and telling him to come here, but then again, I don’t remember most of the last few days.
I wince at the light that shines down on me when Ari shifts a little. My head is pounding. I’m also starving.
When is the last time I ate something? I can’t even remember.
“What are you doing?” I growl at Ari, still groggy.
“Only what needs doing,” he says stubbornly. He sets the bucket down. I sit up in my bed, frowning at the mess he’s made. Out of the corner of my eye, I can see twenty empty whiskey bottles cluttered beside the bed. They are all knocked over and askew, not a terribly shocking sight. Or not the first time I have seen that when I wake, I guess.
I wince, wiping at my mouth. Although my stomach is growling, I’m not entirely sure that I can hold anything down. I’m queasy and yet hungry, which is familiar to me as well.
I squint at the bottles, toppled like toy soldiers. Twenty bottles seems like a lot to go through in just a few days. I try to think about how much time has passed, but my headache roars at me. Putting my hand to my head, I sigh wretchedly.
It has been just a few days, hasn’t it?
Ari leans down and snaps his fingers in front of my face. “Look at me. Where is Rue?”
Rue? I squint at the fading sunlight coming through the curtains, trying to shade my eyes. “Fuck. Uhh…”
“Hey! Focus!” he grits out. “Rue isn’t in her rooms. Where is she?”
I lurch upwards, my footing unsteady. Ari jumps off the bed, holding out an arm toward me in case I fall. He seems unsure if I need help or not.
“Fuck.” I wince as the light stabs me in both eyes, pervasive. The pounding in my head only seems to swell, getting louder and more insistent by the second. “She’s in the dungeon.”
Ari s
crews up his face, looking as though I have personally offended him.
“There is a dungeon here?” He pauses. “I am almost afraid to ask. When is the last time you visited her?”
A vague memory floats up to me. Her face, shiny with sweat. Her naked body. Her hurt wrist still bandaged.
I glance over at the empty whiskey bottles and shrug. It’s all a blur. “It’s been a day or two.”
Ari pales, looking sickened. “Show me how to get to the dungeon. Jesu Christo, someone should have checked on her before now.”
By someone, he clearly means me.
My mind whirling, I lurch forward. I might still be a little drunk from the night before if I’m perfectly honest with myself. Staggering downstairs, catching my balance on the wall and the handrails, I head into the dungeons. Ari is right on my heels the whole way.
When we get to the dungeon level, it’s dark and dank. I see Ari shiver. It is cold in the dungeon, I will admit.
“You left her down here?” he scolds. “I thought you cared for her a little, in your own way.”
I pause, leaning on the wall. Hiccuping, I take a moment not to hurl the contents of my stomach onto the floor. My mouth waters in that weird way, precipitating being sick. I suck in a deep breath, willing it to go away.
When I am sure I am not going to vomit, I glance at Ari. “I do care for Rue.”
Ari is looking further down the hall. “You can’t say that and still be the one that put her down here. You understand that, no?”
I shake my head, pushing off the wall. “We’ll agree to disagree on that point.”
Leading Ari to her cell door, I unlock the door with the key that is already in the lock. Opening the heavy door, I step back and we both peer inside. I see a body on the cot inside, huddled underneath a thin, scratchy-looking blanket.
Is Rue really so thin? It doesn’t seem possible, looking at the body covered by an inch of wool.
Possess: Protect Book 3 Page 3