slick skin, and the sight of his six-fingered hands on her flesh.
Yet as bile rose up in her throat, she refused to give in to it. She had given him and those memories far too much weight for far too many years...
Abruptly, she pictured herself in her room at her father's manse, right before she had been abducted, ordering around the doggen, unsatisfied by everything around her.
She'd gone from madam to maid by her own choice, pitching herself between the two extremes of unqualified superiority and self-enforced inferiority. That symphath had been the binding agent, his violence linking the ends of the spectrum such that in her mind one flowed from the other, tragedy overtaking the entitlement and leaving in its wake a ruined female who had made suffering her new status quo.
Tohrment was right: She had punished herself ever since then... and denying the drugs during her needing had been part and parcel of that: She had chosen that pain, just as she had picked her low station in society, just as she had given herself to a male who could never, ever be hers.
I've been using you, and the only person it's working for is you - it's gotten me nowhere. The good news is that this whole thing is going to give you a great excuse to torture yourself even longer....
The urge to attack some manner of dirt, to scrub with her palms until sweat beaded upon her brow, to work until her back ached and her leg screamed was so strong, she had to grip the arms of the chair to keep herself where she was.
"Mahmen?"
She twisted around and tried to pull herself out of the spiral. "Daughter mine, how fare thee?"
"I'm sorry I've gotten home so late. Today was... busy."
"Oh, that is fine. May I get you something to - " She stopped herself. "I..."
The force of habit was so strong, she found herself holding on to the chair again.
"It's okay, Mahmen," Xhex murmured. "You don't need to wait on me. I don't want you to, actually."
Autumn brought a shaking hand up to the tail end of her braid. "I feel quite undone this evening."
"I can sense that." Xhex came forward, her leather-clad body strong and sure. "And I know why, so you don't have to explain. It's good to let things go. You have to if you want to move forward in your life."
Autumn focused on the dark windows, picturing the river beyond. "I don't know what to do with myself if I'm not a servant."
"That's what you need to find out - what you like, where you want to go, how you want to fill your nights. That's life - if you're lucky."
"Instead of possibility, I see only emptiness."
Especially without -
No, she would not think of him. Tohrment had made it more than clear where their relationship stood.
"There's something you should probably know," her daughter said. "About him."
"Did I speak his name?"
"You don't have to. Listen, he's - "
"No - no, do not tell me. There is nothing between us." Dearest Virgin Scribe, that hurt to say. "There never was - so there is nothing I need to know about him - "
"He's closing up his house - the one he and Wellsie stayed in. He spent all last night packing up stuff, giving her things away, getting the furniture ready to move out - he's selling the place."
"Well... good for him."
"He's going to come see you."
Autumn burst up from the chair and went to the windows, her heart thumping in her chest. "How do you know."
"He told me so just now, when I went to make a report to the king. He said he's going to apologize."
Autumn put her hands up to the cold glass, the pads of her fingers going numb quickly. "For what part, I wonder. The insight that he was right about? Or would it be the honesty with which he spoke when he said he felt nothing for me - that I was merely a vehicle to free his beloved? Both are true, and therefore, short of his tone of voice, there is naught to offer apology for."
"He hurt you."
"No greater than I have been before." She retracted her hands and began rubbing them together for warmth. "He and I have crossed paths twice now in our lives - and I can't say I wish to continue the association. Even though his assessment of my character and my flaws is correct, I need not have that elucidated again,