and hurt that Lord Brigayne had used her like his whore. But when he discovered that she had lost the baby…Victoria felt dizzy. This was when Jack had earned his scar. She put her hand to her throat and she knew he had confronted Lord Brigayne. She knew he had killed him. She knew it had not even been a dual, but a fierce pummeling fist fight. She saw it in her mind, for she had not been there when it happened. She had been lying back in their cottage, bleeding on their bed and weeping, weeping for days. She saw this. And she saw Jack hanging from a gibbet. Executed for murder.
“Do you want to see it now?” She looked up. Jasper stood by the bed looking up at her with sad eyes. “I need to take you back. You brought yourself back too soon. It wasn’t over yet. Once you start you have to finish. I warned you not to start. But now…”
“Fuck, Jasper. Damn. Why would I want to see it?” She reached for the tissues and blew her nose. “I can see it all now in my head.”
Jasper put a tiny monkey hand on her knee. “But you are getting the wrong idea, and you are making it worse.”
“Making it worse?” She slid form the bed and towered over the little monkey demon. “How can it get any fucking worse? It seems that I am responsible for the deaths of three good men. The only men I have ever loved…and I killed him. Three times.” She picked up the whole box of tissues and headed for the bathroom.
“Don’t take the sedative, Victoria.” Jasper leaped ahead of her and blocked the door to the bathroom. “It will make you lose control. You will not be able to think clearly and will be at the mercy of your imagination. You don’t need that right now.”
She stopped mid-kick and put her foot back on the floor. “Why do you even care, demon? Isn’t it your job to torment the living? No wonder you want to take me back to watch him die. Bastard.” She reached for the doorknob.
“Don’t do it, Victoria.”
She kicked at him again and he darted away from her foot to stand by the window. She went into the bathroom and with shaking hands opened the medicine cabinet and fumbled through the prescription bottles for the Valium. She wanted to sleep. To sleep with no dreams, no nothing. She shook out two of them and swallowed them without water and then set the bottle on the sink while she drew a bath. She could still feel the blood and cum dripping down her thighs and only hot water and bubbles could take that away. Bubbles and sedatives.
Jasper’s little face peeked around the doorway. “Victoria. You need to go back.”
“Go to Hell, monkey demon. Go back to Hell and leave me alone.”
He disappeared and she was glad. The warm fuzzies started to take the edge off the pain in her mind. The warm water would ease the pain in her arms and legs, but nothing could ease the pain in her heart. She had killed him. She had killed him as if she had thrust a sword through his heart or squeezed the life from his throat. And Marcus. She blinked the vision of her dark lover from two thousand years ago. He had earned a little farm as retirement bonus for surviving twenty years of marching for Rome. Marcus grinned as he chucked her chin and kissed her ear as he told her about it. He was ready to take up farming. He would grow grapes and olives and spend his last years basking in the kind of peace he had never known in his life.
Then she saw the door open. She saw the faces silhouetted in the opening. Marcus withdrew his cock from her body and turned to look over his shoulder. She saw the look on his face when he turned back to her, and on the faces of the servants at the door. Two of the intruders fled immediately, and Victoria knew they were running to tell Cestius that his favorite concubine was being fucked by one of his men.
She and Marcus locked eyes. There were no words. She knew she would never see him again. His eyes told her that. Her eyes told him how her heart was lost and she was now dead inside. Victoria sobbed in her bath. He had been