The first lash I barely felt. Years of this, the scar tissue ran deep.
He would get there, though. He always did.
No, at that point it was the whip whistling through the air, the crack, the sinister whisper as it snaked against my flesh that could unravel my mind.
In order to fight it, I thought of Antoine. His smile. The sound of his laughter. The change in his eyes when I’d bare even an inch of flesh to him. The touch of his fingers as they drifted over my skin.
Another lash came and I kept hold of these thoughts.
Then another. And more.
But I’d closed my eyes and I saw only Antoine. Felt only Antoine’s touch.
Until the first rivulet of blood glided over the upper swell of my hip to soak into the silk of my nightgown.
Then, suddenly, I saw Noc and the fierceness in his face when he’d said he wouldn’t even blink at turning traitor to save the woman he loved.
The next lash came, and the next, the pain intensifying with each strike, but I focused on Noc and his fierceness, focused further on something alien to me.
Hope.
In this instance it was the hope that he found a woman he could love that much, but more, a woman worthy of that kind of love.
I kept this focus through the next lash.
And the next.
It continued and I could no longer think of Noc. Or Antoine. Or anything but keeping my hands curled around that hook, trying to block out the sweat of that effort mingling with the blood trailing down my body. Attempting to force my shallow panting into deeper breaths to beat back the pain. Blinking rapidly as dull cloudbursts exploded behind my eyes threatening to blind me, take me to a blissful, painless oblivion.
There was none of that for me. Not Franka Drakkar. I’d been born to agony and, as ever, simply had to endure.
More lashes and I feared I couldn’t withstand it. It was worse than ever before. Far worse. As my transgression had been.
My hands had gone beyond clammy, they were slipping on the hook and I was terrified I’d lose hold.
I couldn’t lose hold.
Mother was close to Kristian. She could be with him in seconds.
He’d never endure.
Another lash and for the first time I cried out as it hit, tearing through my flesh, feeling like it glanced across my spine.
When it was done, my heated body all of a sudden iced over with fear that I’d lost consciousness when I heard the impossibility of a shocked feminine gasp and right on its heels an enraged, “Fucking hell. What the fuck?”
Noc’s voice.
He couldn’t be here. I had to have blacked out.
“Who are you?” my father asked.
“Get Frey.” Noc’s voice ordered.
“You’ll do no such thing!” my father snapped, his deep voice no longer astonished but annoyed.
“Fucking get Frey!” Noc demanded.
“You’ll mind your betters,” my father hissed.
A moment of nothing before, “Goddamn…get…Frey.”
The pain drove deep as I chanced looking over my shoulder and saw Josette disappear from the doorway.
I also saw Noc, fury carved in his handsome features, moving to me.
How was he there?
Why was he there?
The pain remained, I couldn’t have slipped into oblivion.
Thus he was bloody there.
“Know your place!” my father commanded on a near-shout. “Remove yourself from this room this instant!”
Noc didn’t remove himself from the room. He arrived at my front, his eyes holding mine.
His voice came as a shock, precisely the gentleness running through it that belied the look of wrath seated deep in his eyes. “Let go of the hook, baby.”
“This is beyond the pale, a servant intruding on private matters of members of the most powerful House in Lunwyn!” my father decreed loudly.
“Frannie, sweetheart,” Noc whispered, ignoring Papa, and I felt his hand touch light at my waist, “let go of the hook.”
“Intolerable!” my father bit out. “Franka, is this domestic your lover?” he demanded.
“No,” I answered my father hoarsely. “You must go, Noc,” I whispered to Noc, not wishing to whisper, but I had the strength for nothing more. “Please. You must. It will be worse if he doesn’t get to finish. I need to complete my punishment.”
A flare of rage blazed in his eyes but he simply repeated, “Let go of the hook. Hold on to me.”
“I need to endure or they’ll turn to Kristian,” I told him.
“Please, baby, let go. I got you,” Noc replied.
“Stand back,” my father ordered.
“You must go,” I went on.
“Promise, Franka, I got you,” Noc said.
“Stand bloody back!” my father commanded, his voice no longer affronted and annoyed.
No, it was much worse.
At the warning of it, sheer terror coursed through me, almost paralyzing.
“You must go,” I declared. “Now or he’ll—”
As I spoke my last, my father thundered, “Stand back!”
But through his thunder, I heard the whistle of the whip.
I knew he’d repositioned and I knew his aim.
It was not me.
Therefore I did what I did next automatically, without thinking. I did something I never did. Not since I was a youngster. Not since I’d learned how vile it was, what I had in me, what my mother gave to me, what I took great pains to hide, using intrigue and torment like weapons not only as was expected of a Drakkar, not only as a way to hold others at bay so they wouldn’t be touched by the darkness of my soul, but as a way to conceal the true power I held.