Page 51 of Upon Buried Embers (Upon Buried Embers #1)

Elf

Pressure on my arms has my eyes blinking open as my head is turned to the side. I try to figure out where it’s coming from.

“What…” I mumble, sleep clearing.

“Still, Elf, it’ll only take a moment.”

Vision clearing, I’m instantly alert when I see the red-hot blade from the corner of my eye. I start to panic, thrashing in their hands.

Calian and Kaldar.

“No, wait, please. I’m sorry!” My voice is frantic as I try to get them off of me.

They must be angry at me.

“Still.”

“I’m sorry, I won’t do it again.” My voice is hysterical. I don’t want to be in pain. “I’m sorry, please forgive me. I’m sorry. I’m really sorry, please don’t hurt me please, please, please.”

“What the fuck.”

“I don’t know.”

I’m sobbing now, body shaking. Someone curses before the hands are removed and I’m on a lap.

“I’m… sor…sorry.” I hiccup.

“Hush, you haven’t done anything wrong.”

“No, no, please.”

“Elf, calm down.”

“I didn’t do anything, please, please, please.”

“Elf!”

“Whatever I did, I’ll make it better! Rohan, please.”

“Hey, it’s me, I’m here.” My face is pressed into a neck. “Shh. It’s just me.”

He’s here.

I deflate instantly, breathing in his scent. I hear someone cursing, but I huddle as close as I can to Rohan. He holds the back of my head, his other arm around me, safe. Warm.

“Rohan,” I whimper, and his fingers in my hair tighten for a moment.

“I’m here.”

I slowly relax, my fingers softening against his arms where they were digging in.

“You okay?” he asks, his breath against my ear.

His voice is gentle, like he’s trying not to spook me.

I nod against him.

“Look at me.” The order registers, and I pull my face away from Rohan’s neck and look up into dark eyes.

“I was trying to take the collar off.”

I still, hiccups coming from me as he wipes my tears with his thumbs.

“My axe will melt the metal, but I will not hurt you? Understand? I was hesitant to do it this way, but I’ll make sure it won’t touch you.”

“The collar?” I say, my hand coming up to feel it.

“You wanted it off, right?”

I look into the dark eyes I’ve come to know so well, and nod. “I do. I… I don’t want to be me anymore.”

Another tear falls. “Oh, Elf, that collar on your neck does not define you,” he murmurs, placing a soft kiss to my forehead, and I soak it up.

It’s so soft, so… caring that I want to cry for another reason.

“We’re ready when you are, but I need to know what happened before you got in here,” he says. I remember coming back from Sigrid, what I told her. Darcia…

I swallow, nausea rising.

“I want it off,” I croak, lifting my hands on either side of his neck, tracing the bump in his throat. “I want to finally breathe, Rohan.” My eyes lock with his. “Help me breathe.”

He cups my face, jaw ticking. “I will, but I need you to trust me. One wrong move, and it will go badly.”

I stare at him as his words penetrate through my mind, and he lets me.

“You can see my eyes, Little Whisperer, tell me, what do you see?”

The eyes do not lie, that’s what he once told me, and there are no lies in his eyes now.

“No lies?”

“No lies,” he repeats. “Trust me, be brave.”

I inhale shakily. “Okay.”

“My brave girl.”

They lay me back down, and a cloth is placed under my collar.

“To protect your skin,” Calian murmurs.

Calian holds my hand as Kaldar moves my hair out of the way, and I turn my head to the side.

I whimper, body trembling.

“Just stay still.” Rohan’s words calm me, and I feel the heat getting closer and closer, warmth hitting my face. “That’s all you have to do, okay?”

“Okay,” I whisper, and a wet cloth is put on half of my face to protect me.

I close my eyes, squeezing Calian’s hand, and he lets me as the tip of the axe’s blade presses against the metal.

A sizzling sound follows, but I don’t feel any pain as someone—Kaldar, pours water over my neck, and steam rises.

“The bed,” I say. “It’s going to get wet.”

“I don’t give a fuck about the bed, Elf.” Rohan growls.

“Just keep breathing,” Calian says.

“More water.” Rohan asks.

“A little to the left.” That’s Kaldar.

It continues like this. More water being poured, more hand squeezing and collar moving, and then… it stops.

“It’s done.”

I’m sat up, my hair being gently moved and I stare at Rohan as his hand comes to my neck.

I don’t look away, don’t dare to, but when his eyes lock with mine, the weight on my neck disappears and tears gather in my eyes.

“It’s off, Elf,” he says gruffly, and I hear the others leaving.

“Truly?” My words tremble, and I don’t care to hide it.

He nods. “Truly.”

Rohan places the collar on the ground that I don’t care to look at, and he lifts his fingers to my throat, stroking there.

I suck in a breath when he makes contact, and my own hand lifts. Rohan clasps it in his, moving it up and down my fully exposed neck for the first time in years.

“I’m… free,” I breathe, tears spilling over.

“You have been since you met me,” he says gruffly.

I launch myself at him, and he freezes for a moment as I bury my face in his neck. But then his arms wrap around me, a rumble vibrating his chest.

“Thank you.”

He holds me tighter, burying his nose in my hair. “You don’t have to thank me.”

I look up at him. “Of course I do.” I feel my neck again, and I realize there are some scars there.

I follow the lines, brows furrowed. Rohan removes my hand and tilts my chin to the left with the other before placing his mouth against my neck.

He doesn’t kiss them, just rests his lips there.

“No, you don’t have to thank me,” he mumbles into my skin as my breathing picks up. “Just live.”

“Dragonbond, the bath is here,” someone calls, and I jump, startled at the sudden sound.

I climb off Rohan’s lap when he calls them in, and he eyes me as my cheeks heat.

The bath is placed in an area to the right, and he orders me into it. I do so, stripping out of my tunic. Rohan usually gives me privacy, always turning his back, so I don’t care to hide my body. So when I feel his hand against my back, I freeze.

His hand against my bare skin leaves fire in its wake, but when he touches a particular spot, I whimper in pain, leaning away from his touch. He drops his hand to my hip.

“Who hurt you like this, Elf?” he asks. “This is the second time I’ve seen bruises on your body that someone has put there.” He sucks in a deep breath. “Who caused you to spiral into a panic? Who caused you to call out to me like you would die if I didn’t get to you?”

His touch is soft, a slight tremble to his fingers, but his voice is stone cold. Harsh. Deadly.

“I—”

His grip tightens. “Do not lie to me. You know who hurt you last time, don’t you?”

I nod.

“Why won’t you tell me?”

“I’m scared.”

He spins me so suddenly, I stumble against him, my hands landing on his waist to steady myself.

“You’re scared?” I nod into his chest. “Of me?” he practically growls.

“No…” I say slowly. “Not anymore, but I am scared that you won’t like what I have to say. That…”

“I won’t do anything about it because they’re in my clan,” he summarizes.

I stay silent, and he breathes, deeply, squeezing his eyes shut for a moment before opening them.

I see an internal war within them. “Come, the bath is getting cold.”

He lifts me into the tub, and before I even sit down, he’s striding away, rummaging through a chest.

I bathe silently, keeping my eye on him, but after a long while, I can’t take the silence anymore.

“Are you angry with me?”

“What?” He looks at me over his shoulder. “I’m not angry with you, Elf, I’m angry at myself for allowing you to be hurt in my own clan, once again.”

“That isn’t your fault.”

“Yes it is,” he growls, throwing more wood on the fire. “It should’ve never happened the first time, never mind the second.”

I keep the other times to myself.

“I’m going out of my mind. I can’t figure out who’s fucking doing it. I want to shake you for not telling me, and I’m trying to let you do it on your own, but I’m running out of patience.”

Silence follows, and then he takes a deep breath.

“Why did you plead when you saw the hot blade like that? It was more than fear, it was like a memory.”

“Master is cruel,” I whisper, and his eyes sharpen.

“I saw him use a hot poker once on another girl, I think I was eleven. He held her down and shoved it through her eyes.” Bile rises in my throat at the memory.

“Afterward he would taunt me with it at times, then tell me I’d be next, used in the underground with his friends. ”

“Were you…” he breathes slowly, eyes closing for a moment, seeming to get himself under control. “Did they rape you?”

“No, they didn’t, but others were in the underground.

I would hear them scream as they got passed around.

I had nightmares for months after I first heard it.

” I look away. “I was the one who they could beat whenever they wanted.” I look down at the wrist that was recently broken.

“I’ve never really scarred. Only when I was terribly injured did it leave a mark.

Even broken bones.” My thumb smooths over my wrist. “My wrist wasn’t the first bone to be broken,” I huff, but when I look over at Rohan, he’s vibrating with anger, a piece of wood held tight in both hands.

“Master liked to starve me. Manipulate and humiliate me to get food or even a sip of water. Hurt me for days over something so minor. So he didn’t rape me, or let others do so, but sometimes he…” I look away, feeling shame.

“He what?” he asks, pure threat in his tone but it isn’t for me.

I blow out a quivering breath. “He would make me touch him, them, for food. I would kneel at their feet and wait, doing whatever they asked or get a beating. That was his favorite, you know? To beat me.”

The wood in Rohan’s hands snaps in two, and I stare at it, my mind elsewhere.

“They would ask me trick questions so I would get it wrong, no matter what I answered. Nothing like a smack to the face to start their night. Or do more than was paid for. They all liked how my body would break. Or if I displeased someone by not making them… That would get me barn time.”

“What the fuck is barn time?” he asks quietly. Deadly.

His chest is heaving with his anger, his eyes alight with fury.

“I would be tied up to a hook by my wrists, and left there for days. I would be beaten, mocked, shouted at and smacked about. My bones would break and I would scream as I was laughed at. Sometimes, on quiet days, the rats would come and nibble at my feet, thinking I was dead.” I look away.

“I’m small, an easy target. Quiet. It’s so easy for them to get to me, hurt me. ”

“Just because you are those things does not mean you’re weak,” he spits, standing to come closer to the tub and kneeling before it. “Strength comes in different forms.”

“I didn’t fight back. I just let them do it.

I am weak,” I say, shame evident in my tone as I curl in on myself.

“I did whatever they asked of me, too afraid to speak up, too afraid to do… anything!” My own chest is heaving now.

“I am a disgrace, I let them turn me into nothing. I don’t even fully know who I am.

I’m just a stupid, little weak elf. A nobody. ”

“You’re not no one, you’re mine!” he fumes, face inches from mine now as he grabs my chin.

“And you are alive. It takes strength to wake up every day after surviving that. It takes strength to be beaten and abused and still wake up every, single, day. And most of all, Little Whisperer, it takes strength to still show kindness to a world when it has shown you none.”

Tears gather in my eyes at his words, and my own claw out of me. “But I wanted to die.”

He tenses, but his reply is softer now.

“But you didn’t.” His words hit me right in the chest. “You woke up every day,” he repeats, and I swallow over the lump in my throat as he holds it gently in his grasp, running his thumb over the scarring there. “Just one thing.”

His words are full of an emotion I’ve never heard from him before, and his whole body is coiled tight, like it will snap in a moment and I wonder why.

“One thing,” he repeats, staring at me intently.

And after a pause, I nod. “One thing.”

He places a kiss on my forehead. “Wash up.”