Page 3 of The Duke of Swords (The Highwaymen #4)

OUTSIDE FATEUX’S BEDCHAMBER , she nearly ran into the man himself, who was coming back up the hallway. The marquis took her by the arm and dragged her towards another doorway. “There,” he snarled. “You can sleep there.”

He hurled her inside and shut the door.

She waited, leaning against the wall, until his footfalls faded. After she heard the sound of his door shutting, she carefully tried her own door.

It opened.

She let out a breath and then slowly stepped out into the hall.

Pain splintered up her leg as she put weight on her hurt foot again.

She winced, swallowing her cry. She stayed still as the pain faded.

She tried another step.

God, the pain.

Another. Then another.

The pain increased.

She clutched the wall, taking deep breaths.

Well, what did she think she was going to do?

Hadn’t the Duke of Rutchester pointed it out already?

She had nowhere to go and no one to help her.

Even if she could get out of the house (which seemed impossible since it hurt to walk), she would be all on her own out there.

If she found someone to help her, what were the odds they’d rape her, too?

I can handle the rape part, she thought firmly.

Yes, it was awful, but it was less awful than she’d thought.

The way people talked about it, using words like being ravaged or ravished, she’d always come away with some idea that it was going to reach inside her and scrape something essential away, as if—after it was done—she wouldn’t quite be a person anymore.

But.

It was nothing.

Not truly nothing, of course. It had been unpleasant and embarrassing and painful. She would rather not do it again if she could help it. However, she was still whole. It had not touched her soul, not in the way she had thought it would.

So, nothing, then.

She would tell herself it was nothing and it would make it easier.

She began to limp back to her room.

This isn’t defeat, she told herself. This is a negotiation with the given circumstances.

She shut the door to the bedchamber and limped over to the bed. She hadn’t had anything except a threadbare and mouse-eaten blanket to sleep on for some time. Her mattress had been lumpy and possibly growing mold. The keep itself was drafty and clammy inside.

This was an improvement in some ways. There would probably be food, too, real food, maybe meat, not just beans all the time. Yes, an improvement.

This is not a defeat, she assured herself.

She lay down on the bed. Lord in heaven, it was soft .

FATEUX WAS HOLDING the leg of a chair. “Another of my chairs, Rutchester?”

Rutchester eyed him from the other side of the room, a torn bit of a curtain at his feet. “You promised to help me get control of this.”

“Well, you are stubborn and won’t take my advice,” said Fateux. “I have told you that you attempt too hard to control yourself, and this is the result. You explode.”

Rutchester was sick of this argument.

“As it is, however, this is more you owe me,” said Fateux.

“I shall buy you another chair,” muttered Rutchester. “More curtains. All of it. I shall pay you everything I owe. Then, perhaps, we need not continue on together.”

Fateux folded his arms over his chest. “Truly? What is it about this girl? You’ve seen me with women before.”

“Courtesans and bawds,” said Rutchester.

“That’s what she is now,” said Fateux.

Rutchester shook his head.

“Oh, what did you think was going to happen to her? Her father had already gone through every penny of her dowry. He certainly wasn’t going to be able to broker a marriage for her.

She was going to turn to it eventually.” He shrugged.

“Of course, she’s cold and frigid, I must say.

Isn’t much good at it. I shall need to teach her how to better please men. ”

Rutchester eyed him. “Did you hurt her?”

“She whinges and screeches a lot,” said Fateux. “No one likes whinging women.”

Rutchester leaned down, picked up the piece of curtain fabric and tugged on each end of it, making his fists tighter and tighter.

“Oh, except you, I suppose,” said Fateux. He laughed. “I’ve been saying that you must let go a bit, Rutchester. Once I get her well trained, I shall let you have a crack at her, hmm?”

“No,” said Rutchester, stretching the fabric taut. “Never.”

Fateux sighed. “I have heard your arguments about it all, how you think women cannot really agree to such things given the fact they are dependent upon men. But I said that it is just the natural order of things. Women are meant to depend on men. Men are meant to get some reward for looking after them.”

Rutchester thought too much sometimes, but he could not help but feel as if women were in a situation as to be perpetually like children to men, and he felt this meant they were always coerced to some degree.

He had never told anyone this in so many words.

Dunrose once, when Dunrose was drunk. Dunrose might have agreed, even, saying that everything in life was a transaction or something of that nature. But this was before Dunrose had gotten married.

Surely, if he said to Dunrose now that his wife could not truly ever be his equal, so therefore could not ever consent to his ministrations in bed, so Dunrose was always and forever forcing himself on his duchess… well, Dunrose would not like that.

Arthford had made a valiant attempt to change it. His wife had an estate in her name, he knew.

Nothshire had put properties in his wife’s name also, Rutchester knew.

Attempts, he thought, but it wasn’t enough.

Especially when love came into it. When you loved someone and that someone was physically stronger than you and that someone wanted you to do things to their erect penis…

Anyway.

He wasn’t going to do anything with a woman. Ever. He couldn’t find any way to look at it and make it seem like anything other than coercion.

He’d given Fateux a sort of version of this, and Fateux had laughed at him, but then that was all Fateux ever did.

“You could have at least been gentler with her,” muttered Rutchester.

“Well, when I’m done with her, you can have your shot, and you can be as gentle as you like,” said Fateux.

Rutchester shook his head. “No, I’m done. I’m done with all of this.” He tossed the fabric over his shoulder and stalked toward the door.

“Oliver, you can’t be done with me,” said Fateux as Rutchester left the room. “You know you can’t.”

Rutchester walked faster.

THERE WAS FOOD .

Smoked kippers at breakfast along with big, fluffy white rolls, butter, and four different kinds of jams.

A chocolate pot too, full of chocolate and with actual egg white foam on top, not just a grated bar mixed with hot water—which was what Rae’d had for a year or so before the bar of chocolate had been used up at the keep.

Tea, also, and milk and sugar.

She may have stuffed herself quite entirely full.

Fateux was nowhere to be seen in the breakfast parlor that morning, but there were a set of ill-fitting clothes laid out for her when she went upstairs afterward and also a hot bath that had been drawn for her.

When she got out of the bath, a maid helped her dress and a surgeon was there to examine her hurt foot.

He bound it tightly with linen, told her to stay off of it, and said he didn’t think it was broken, but that was difficult to know.

At any rate, if it was, the bones seemed lined up against each other and she should not do anything to push them out of alignment.

So, later, when a servant called her to dinner, she replied that she was to stay off her foot by order of the surgeon.

Food was sent up to her.

Hours later, Fateux appeared. He apologized for the state of her foot, saying that the surgeon had told him she would need some time to heal.

“Luckily, lying on your back won’t hurt your foot,” he said.

Then he raped her again.

It was easier this time and it didn’t hurt as much.

This might have been because he had come with a tin of grease, though he told her that she must learn to get herself wet if she wished to make men enjoy it with her.

“Think of something that arouses you, if you must,” he told her as he was working his prick inside her.

It went easier with the grease. “But men don’t like a dry and shriveled-up thing, and you must please men from now on if you wish to survive. Eventually, I shall tire of you.”

“You’re not going to keep me?” she said faintly. She was looking up at a crack in the ceiling as he fucked her.

“Well, for a time, I shall,” he said. “I have plans to take you around the country and parade you around as a cautionary tale to others who owe me. This is what I do to men who cannot pay. You could be their daughters, their wives, their sisters. It will be effective, I think.”

“And then you’ll let me go,” she said.

He slapped her across the face, but not very hard. It was more of a tap really. “Next time, I shall really hit you,” he said. “Your job is to make me think you like it, whore. You do not wish for me to let you go.”

She stared at him blandly.

He withdrew, sighing. “Second time you’ve made me lose my cockstand, girl. Don’t think I’m going to forget that.”

Not only didn’t she like it, she couldn’t understand how anyone could like it. It was uncomfortable and strange, and not only that, it involved the most uncleanly parts of the human body. She thought it was disgusting.

She refused to pretend to like it. She argued, as he was raping her again several nights hence, that since she was supposed to be a cautionary tale, she should be miserable, shouldn’t she?

He glared at her.

“Well, I am being ravished,” she said tartly.

He slapped her. Harder this time. But he stopped again.

After that, he paced in front of the bed, raging about how he never managed to actually spend with her, that she was the least appealing fuck he’d ever had, that all she did was make him limp.

He shook his prick at her, and this was the first time she really got a good look at it. It looked like a short, pink snake. It was limp.