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“I just want you to be safe,” he said, my stomach turning over at the way he looked when he raised eyes from my skin, and I was too frozen to protest when he turned back toward the settlement or scream at how my nipples tightened until they were so hard they felt like little wicked slivers of glass scraping against my filthy dress and the last remnants of my prior life in the cities.



















Chapter 9

Rhyder strode up tothe table and threw the bloody dick he had just cut from a corpse in front of Osric.

“Is this the kind of discipline in your Congregation?” he spat coldly. “This man touched what’s mine.”

Then there were apologies and shock, angry denunciations of the deceased man, and I felt Eli watching me.

What if I told Rhyder that Eli had been the one to give permission? Would it make things more dangerous for me?

“I will get the dogs,” Osric said. “He will be torn limb from limb as Holy Writ decrees.”

I felt a little shiver go through me.

“Go wait for me there,” Rhyder instructed, pointing out to where he had pitched a heavy canvas tent.

The urge to refuse to sleep with him was on the tip of my tongue, but what good would it do?

Rhyder wouldn’t allow it, and I should be smart enough to know next to him was the safest place in camp.

But it burned my gut to have to be so dependent on him.

Sometimes when we were kids I had raged at Rhyder for always stepping in for me.

Everyone in the Congregation had to carry heavy packs to make winter camp?

Not me. Rhyder would carry mine.

Everyone have to pull their weight with a barn building, catch 4 pounds of fish, stand in the holy waters to purge our sins?

Rhyder was always there pulling weight for me too, catching extra fish to count for mine, holding me up in the holy waters so I wouldn’t fall into the frozen, icy rapids.

“Let me do things myself!” I would cry.

“No,” was all Rhyder said. “I am big and you are small.”