Total pages in book: 59
Estimated words: 55756 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 279(@200wpm)___ 223(@250wpm)___ 186(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 55756 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 279(@200wpm)___ 223(@250wpm)___ 186(@300wpm)
But I can't just walk away. Even though I want to, and even though it is what she deserves. My hammer is back in my possession, and now so is she. I don’t intend on letting either of them go.
“Clean yourself up,” I say.
She doesn’t move. She just sits there, covered in the detritus of her victim. I forget, sometimes, that normal people, whatever that phrase means, have breaking points. I saw Bryn’s young wife reach hers, and now I am afraid I have caused this girl to hit hers. We claim to protect the innocent, but it has never escaped me how much innocence we destroy.
This, however, has to be on her. She stole my hammer and taunted me. She engaged in deception and greed and she… she's shaking like a leaf.
She doesn’t deserve a warm shower. She deserves a cold, harsh dose of reality. So why am I opening the door of her cell and lifting her out? Why aren’t I leaving her to sob on the floor like she deserves? Why am I coating myself in DNA and guilt and taking her upstairs to my own personal bathroom?
I tell myself it is because I am a gentleman, but really, it is because I feel sorry for her. She’s pitiful. Completely out of her depth. She thought she was stealing a pretty trinket and instead she has changed the course of her life forever.
She’s going to have to have a bath. She doesn’t have the self-possession to take a shower. I suppose I do not blame her. What she has done is terrible beyond words and it breaks stronger men who are more prepared than she.
I have yet to tell anybody she is here. I do not think they imagined I’d actually find her when I went to look for her. I didn’t think I would either, to be fair.
Fortunately, I do not encounter anybody on the stairway I choose to take up, one of the quieter ones in the West Wing of the abbey. The worst thing that could happen right now would be to run into Nina with a blood-covered, near-catatonic girl in my arms. It might tip her over the edge again, and then we’ll have two damaged angels in our possession.
Looking down at this misfit, the term angel is a misnomer. She's a little devil, if anything.
My room at the abbey has an ensuite, which is nicer because it means I have a place to clean up murderous dates. Once she’s safely contained in the privacy of my bathroom, I sit her on the edge of the bath and strip her of her clothing. She likes tight, black, bloody things, though the blood is generally secondary to the entire experience.
She struggles, making soft little sounds of complaint, but ultimately allows me to get her undressed. She’s too overwhelmed to put up a real front of resistance. Her naked form is adorable and delicious. She's soft and curvy in all the right places. Generously built and not made for the sort of heinous acts she's just undertaken. I cannot help but admire her. She is nubile and inviting. She wraps her arms around herself, hiding parts of herself unsuccessfully. She can’t hide the marks on her arse, though. The welts are still very much in evidence, little spots where the birch branch met her deserving flesh. I should have thrashed her harder and kept her then, even if Bryn tried to stop me. Letting her go back out into the world was a mistake on many levels.
“It’s going to be okay,” I murmur. Dammit. I am comforting her. I’m not supposed to be comforting her. She's still semi-catatonic. Dissociated. The bath should help to bring her back.
I lift her up and put her in the bath. She’s adorably naked. Soft and curvy and perfect. Before I can run a bath, I have to shower her off, but she can sit there for that, while I tease gray matter out of her curls.
Soon I have hot water coursing over her, warming her, and sending little bits of man down the drain. I attempt conversation while I work to distract from the ongoing grisliness of the situation.
“What’s your name?”
“Astrid,” she mumbles.
“Pretty name. Norse name,” I add.
“Yeah,” she says. “Wait. My name’s Anita. I was going to lie to you. Tell you it was Astrid. I don’t know why.”
“Because you’re a liar.”
“That's probably why,” she agrees.
She's a funny little wretch. It takes everything I have not to snort with laughter. I do have some pity for her, even though I don’t want to. This is exactly the kind of personality the hammer is drawn to, reckless, bold, brave, and with an incredibly limited understanding of consequences. The weapon chooses its wielder. Very few people understand that. They like to imagine that they are in control, that they have preferences, and that they are making choices. What absolute nonsense. People are acted upon, blown in the wind, and what little choice they have is usually perverted to the point it is made absolutely useless.