But then my torturous mind shuddered into a deep, dark hole, because, no. She and Ruin would never roll in the hay on a sunny afternoon. They had no need to stoop so low.
She would welcome him to an elegant bed in a manor home.
She would cry his name from secluded shadows behind locked doors.
Or perhaps a dark room at night, skins glowing in the light of the fire.
I was going to vomit. But the thoughts wouldn’t end.
Ruin’s sun-weathered hands, dark against her pale skin, his strong fingers gripping her body, his jaw buried under her throat—herlithe body entwined in his strength,pretty face thrown back in ecstasy.
With a small cry that drew the attention of the woman and her servant, though I ducked my head to hide from them, I darted across that road and onto the rising path to the cliffs.
Pressing my hands to my belly to ease the pain, Iran.
I was a fool.
Ruin didn’t love me. He never had. He had a bigger, better life, now. I was nothing but a gnat to be swatted away. And as a poor farmgirl of marrying age, I had bestowed upon him the one item of value that might have garnered me a husband: My virtue.
I was not a pretty, porcelain woman of means, with a father who could pay to silence gossip.
I was a broodmare, already spent.
Ruined.
I shuddered as that final truth slid home like a knife between my ribs. Ruin wasn’t mine. And he’d never wanted to be.
Desperate, weeping, I looked up the path ahead, shadowed by overhanging trees, and my parched throat wanted to squeeze shut at the thought of the climb to come, but I pressed on.
It was the only answer.
I wouldn’t have to drag myself home, only to admit I’d been discarded and demeaned.
I wouldn’t have to heal.
I wouldn’t have toremember.
I would never again be forced to look a man in the eye while he spat loathing at me.
All of this would be over.
All I needed was for this to be over.
And so, as the path grew rocky and steep, I pressed on to climb to the Dragonmaw Cliffs.
Hours later, drenched in sweat and body screaming with pain so stark my knees shook, I took the final steps to the summit.
The icy wind off the ocean howled between the scraggly trees that thinned where I stood, then finally stopped, giving way to thick, rock-speckled grass that grew right up to the cliffs, bisected only by a thin, dirt trail, running parallel to the edge.
A few feet beyond that trail the land fell away in a sheer drop to the sea, where the waves thundered against the unforgiving cliff-face, and churned around the pointed rocks that speared out of the water like dragon fangs, giving the coastline its name.
I stumbled out of the forest cover into a biting wind that cut like cold knives on my skin and whipped my hair so it stung my cheeks and plastered my skirt to my legs, the thick fabric sucking against me like walking through water.
Just feet from the edge, a great gust threatened to push me backwards. I leaned into it and kept going until my toes were mere inches from the lip, where the sod swelled over the edge and left the grasses dangling over the deadly sea below.
Here, the booming of the waves against the base of the cliffs punctured even the howling wind. But what made me quaver was the sight of those massive, black cliff-faces, spanning miles to the north, curving out from below in a testament to the battering they’d taken from the ocean for millennia.
For the first time, I allowed myself to stop. To think.
