She trusted me, I came to understand. Not only with information but with her own body. She must have known what happened in this cell, and if she didn’t, the mangled body parts across the iron room must have given the information she needed, yet the woman did not flinch once under my touch, did not move away when I grabbed her and did not struggle to escape. Whatever it was about me, it gave her a feeling ofsafety.
“I won’t call you baby anymore,” she apologised, “It’s what I kept saying in my dreams and memories of you, so it came to me as a habit, but I understand if you don't like it,” she tried to smile, her lips curving just slightly as I continued to caress her cheek.
Whatever possessed my face to do so, I did the same, copying her gesture and smiled back, which made her shy grin extend wider and become plastered across her face, while both her hands touched mine, hanging onto me with desperation.
“I apologise for hurting you,” I whispered and closed the space between us. I allowed my other hand to reach her cheek and I now found myself grabbing her face fully and dragging it towards my own. I stopped a couple of inches away.
“It’s ok, it’s not like it’s the first time you try to choke me,” she giggled. Observing my frown, Anwen added. “That time you almost made me pass out when we had sex in the shower because Vikram told you women like to be choked?” she raised her brows, like it would help to pinpoint the memory in my head. When I maintained my confused expression, her pupils suddenly widened. “Of course, you don’t remember that. I'm an idiot, I’m sorry,” she shook her head, as much as she could without making me lose the hold on her face.
My eyes widened at the lightness with which she mentioned such things, as though our joining happened as often as taking breath and no regard had to be devoted to it. Yet that smile abruptly faded when her gaze shifted from me and around the cell, scanning, understanding, realising. At once, her pupils shrank, panic mirroring her eyes. Surprisingly, her voice remained sharp enough to continue communicating.
“I know it’s wrong of me to ask you for anything right now, but the shock of seeing you alive must have passed and I can't help but start to look around us,” she said, grabbing me back from dirty thoughts that had involuntarily penetrated my mind.
“I apologise,” I admitted, but removed both my hands from her face, escaping the hold she had on me. I did not want to be too brass and vex the woman, so I released my hold on her and allowed her to escape my touch and retreat if that was what she asked for. She did not. To my surprise and confusion, she stepped even closer to me, her chest so near to mine that every time it drew breath, a union of warmth was created between my bare skin and her breasts.
“I want to say it’s okay but I am really freaking out, Ansgar. I feel like I’m gonna be sick soon and I’m very panicky, my hands are starting to shake.” She raised both her hands to demonstrate shaking fingers I had not found during her hold. Was it my touch that had held them in place?
“What do you need?”
“For us to get out of here, but that's not gonna happen for hours. And I can't be looking around and seeing all of these parts of...people,” shewhimpered, tears forming in her eyes and immediately trailing down her cheek. Her muscles started shiveringand her eyes moved from place to place, taking in the massacre I had lived through these past few days.
“It was not my intention for you to see this, to create this—it was them or me,” I tried to ease her but my words had the opposite effect.
“Oh my god,” she wept, her body dropping to the floor as she covered her head with both her hands, shaking uncontrollably. She looked like an injured animal, waiting for whatever beast came first to finish her off.
I dropped to the ground by her side and tried to grab hold of her face again, but her own grip was too strong and all her messy waves entangled with shivering fingers.
Grabbing the shirt she had removed from my back, which remained discarded a few steps away, I tied a sleeve around my wrist and used it as a lash to put off the torch. If seeing the dead bodies caused her to become like this, my reasoning said that darkness could be better. I did not welcome it myself, I’d lived in the darkness and the only source of light came with an attempt on my life, but if that's what would help the woman I had to stick it out.
Once a curtain of blackness draped across the cell, I walked in the direction I had left her in and crouched on the floor, blindly searching for the woman.
I touched part of her leg and felt my way across her body until I found her torso and head, which I grabbed hold of and splayed her across my chest, squeezing her tightly.
She immediately accepted the connection and curled into me, forming a ball with her own body at my side, one hand holding onto my shoulder and the other gripping her knees to her chest. The shaking hadn’t stopped, but the sobs became less frequent after a few minutes.
“It’s alright, it’s just us now. Just you and me. Think about nothing else but this. You and me,” I repeated until her brain started to accept the information and allowed her muscles to stop spasming with dreadful intensity. She wasn’t completely calm, but it had vastly improved from the trembling mess she had become.
“That door is going to open soon and we'll get out of here,” I promised her, deciding to kill whoever came through next time and shove her out.
“I know, it’s only a few hours away.” She said it more to herself than to me, but it confirmed her words once more. That we would get out of here. Both of us.
I held her for what seemed like hours, gently caressing the sides of her body that I could reach in the darkness in soothing long strokes. I never thought I would feel this lightness again, the uncanny way her fragility and need for protection pierced through me, foregoing hatred and revenge. I did not know how long it would last, but one thing was certain. I knew this woman, and whatever we'd been in the past managed to transform me.
I thought she had fallen asleep a few times, she hadn't said a word and her sobs and shivering visibly calmed, but the trail of constant wetness pouring down my chest told me that she kept crying, only doing so slowly, barely audible.
I did not know when those doors would open if that truly was the case, but I focused all my attention on the female. Even though I could not protect her body from the atrocities she must have seen, I could care for her mind.
“How did we meet?” I asked, a question that would transport her into another world, one that she could feel safe in, one I knew nothing about.
Anwen took a few moments, giving her brain a chance to take in the question and made the jump down the path of memories I had pushed her onto.
A slow exhale, a shadow of a laugh came out of her. “I stabbed you,” she said, the voice that sounded raspy with whimpers now a soft clink. “I was attacked in the woods and you came to save me. You took me to your home and cared for me, but I was unconscious so I didn't know who you were. When I woke up, I thought you wanted to rape me so I stabbed you and ran away,” she shifted, trying to see my expression through the darkness, but only the direction of her voice and her touch pointed me to where she sat by my side.
“Are you a warrior?” The question made her actually laugh and the sound cut through dark webs in my mind, offering unexpected solace.
“Gods no,” Anwen replied, settling on my shoulder in a more comfortable position. “I still don't know how I managed to do such a cold-blooded thing.” She inhaled sharply, realising how the words matched my particular situation. I did not take offence; she spoke the truth. What I had done in this cell, what I had been doing since I woke up in that chamber with the male that kept injecting me, was just that. Cold-blooded attacks.
“Tell me about the woods,” I urged, shifting from violent memories.