Deprivation- The Feast and the Famine

Chapter 33- Where Love Takes Us

Cleaned and asleep, Bennett looked something like himself. Other than a freshly broken nose his bones showed little sign of the fractures she knew he had suffered. Claudia watched him, kneeling beside him on the bed. Not daring to touch Bennett, even in his sleep he cried out in terror at her touch.

After two days in her care, she still couldn’t believe in his resurrection.

Everything in the world had twisted. She had no way to right it. Nor did she doubt it was her who would have to make their way in the world now.

She had him back, and it opened her to a revelation. She was not the same girl that entered the dungeon. The same girl that ignored all the warnings she was given and drove ahead. In an instant, she’d given her soul away.  That girl had been his, like a dog or a pen, as a proper woman should belong to a man. That girl didn’t exist now. No. She didn’t belong to him now. She wasn’t his.

He was hers. She was the hunter and could not be bent to the form of fleeing prey.

Her devotion was unchanged. There was nothing she wouldn’t do for the life and sanity of her Bennett.

A servant passed through the room bringing in a tray with lunch. The girl’s hateful gaze reminded Claudia of the urgency in their situation. They had to get out of here. Even if there were no more men involved in this endeavour, which she doubted, the servants would soon find a way to be rid of them.

Leaning down, Claudia kissed Bennett with a new tenderness.

Bennett opened his eyes and dragged himself away from her until he pressed against the headboard. When the empty terror began to fade, he lifted his hand to cover his face. Shielding his eye from seeing her and her from seeing him.

“You weren’t a dream,” he croaked. The raspy quality of his voice hurt her, and she resisted reaching out and touching the marks the stitches left behind around his mouth.

“I’m here,” She said.

“Dead?”

“We are alive. I killed Victor, Roderick and the other one.” She lied with the tongue of Eden’s snake. But she could hardly say the truth, that she hadn’t killed anyone. It was Bennett’s hands that she used to plunge the knife into Victor and to aim and throw a blade at their prey. It was Eudora’s soul that demanded death. Eudora’s will that drove her. Claudia was only a vessel. To say this would only confuse Bennett.

Keeping her sanity to herself was the best way she knew not to seem crazy.

“Kill me, please…I don’t want to go back,” Bennett said.

“You’re safe with me. I killed them. I will protect you, my love.”

He allowed her to cradle his head as he drifted back to sleep. For another hour, she held him. She lived in his beating heart. Her own heart, which she’d ceased to believe in, remembered how to beat.

The next time, when he woke, his voice was stable. And it was only his utterance that alerted her he was awake. “Where is Eudora?”

“How do you know about Dora?”

“Victor bragged about the two of you.”

“She’s gone.” I killed her, Claudia thought. That had been her hand and no other. Her mouth couldn’t form the words. There was only a howling void where those words would dwell.

“Dead.” There was no room for question in his voice. He sat up and looked at Claudia. A dark laugh emitted from him. “She deserved better than this. By God, if I could . . .”

“You knew her?” Claudia said and even before he answered the pieces began to fall into place. Understanding was agony.

“A lot of men knew her. Doing the dirty things she did, somehow she was still pure. Got a reputation. Muck just rolled off her. I visited her, liked her. Took her brother on to be my driver. That was before Victor met her.”

“You loved her.”

“Maybe, what does it matter? Never thought to offer to take care of her. That was Victor. First time I ever left town was when I heard that. It wasn’t even that I wanted to have her, just thinking of him having her. The world felt wrong. Never should have come back to the city. We wouldn’t be here . . . You would be safe.”

“And married to him. No. You are not to blame, my love. But you knew about him? How? Does everyone know about this place?”

“Very few know, but yes, I did.”

“Why didn’t you warn me!”

Bennett flinched away at her shout, and Claudia immediately regretted it. She knew why. How could he have?

“Were you part of it?” she whispered.

“No, not me. The whole idea of ‘reformation dungeon’ for women is disgusting.” He paused looking at the stump that had once been his hand. “You would have thought I was telling crazy lies. In the beginning, that’s where I should have stopped it. But what did you matter to me? And it was unlikely he’d ever find out. In a way, I liked defiling something that was his . . . hurt him back for what I knew he did to Eudora. But then, you were so different from anything I knew. I didn’t want him to destroy you. I tried to get you to come with me. A few broken contracts and a censure from society, I thought that would be better than a life with him. But you wouldn’t come with me. So I tried to end it…At least if he thought you honorable, your life with him might be pleasant.”

“How did they get to us so quickly? No one even knew about us but . . .”

“Phil. She worked with them. It’s how I knew about Victor. We never kept secrets from each other. I never thought she’d tell, but she must have. My sister.”

Claudia pressed her hand to his heart and ignored his involuntary flinch. “I love you. This is not your fault.”

“Then kill me . . . death is better than this.”

Claudia felt the knife pressed against her hip. She was never without one now. It would be simple to do as he wished. To end his misery.

Her one-time demon shivered, reduced to a quivering husk. His lucid moment was apparently ended, and his eye fastened on nothing in the distance.

After she freed Eudora, the feel of warm blood trickling down her fingers stayed with her. Now the angel’s corpse rotted in an underground torture chamber shaped like a dining room. Even if he preferred that fate, Claudia couldn’t deliver it. Not again.

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