AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Then if you can’t, no one can.”
Endelle held her gaze steadily “What about you wrecker-killer?”
“Don’t call me that.”
“But you liked it, didn’t you? Killing those bastards.”
Rachel was completely unwilling to go there, so she picked up her mug and rose to her feet. “I need to warm up my coffee.”
She left Endelle’s private suite and crossed through the electronic Command Center, surprised to see Warrior Thorne present and conferring with his tech-team. Mostly, he stayed in North Africa.
She passed by the landing platforms that were near the kitchen. But once inside, Endelle was already there, having folded directly from her suite. She was also blocking the coffee pot.
“You sure it’s coffee you want, not some tea made from boiled turnips or something?”
Rachel chose not to rise to the fly. “Impotence sucks,” she said, trying to open up a little.
Endelle’s lips twisted into a wry grin. “I know there’s a perverted oxymoron in there somewhere.”
“Bit of a stretch.” But Rachel smiled. “Yet somehow funny.”
Endelle folded a cup of coffee into her hand, but kept blocking the machine. “So what happened to you, Miss Queen of the Potatoes? I mean seriously. Luken told me you used a wrecking gun like a Third Earth pro your first time firing and you took out two of those warriors when you could have just hauled Duncan beneath your shield or even folded him straight away. Which is my next question; why didn’t you do either of these things?”
“I thought about it. And maybe I could have created a shield over Duncan, but I still have no idea whether the shield offers protection from anything physical or whether it just makes us both disappear. As for folding, I don’t know. I got mad, I guess, and I wanted to do something. So, I chose to face the wreckers instead.”
“Well, all of that makes sense and it shows a real warrior-type head in the field. So, I have to ask, why, if you have these obvious gifts coupled with so much inherent power, do you keep pursuing a zucchini-growing life? And I know you liked offing those wreckers, so don’t even pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about.”
Rachel drew a deep breath. “I won’t deny that the experience fired something up inside me. But since you’ve been honest with me about Thorne and the mind-links, I’ll return the favor.”
She drew another lung-invasive breath before continuing. “I’ve already told you that Grieg hit me, but I want you to get the full picture. The truth is, he beat the shit out of me off and on the first couple of years we were married, then almost every morning at dawn the entire last three months of our oh-so-joyful union. And I tried everything I could think of to either conform to what he wanted so he wouldn’t hit me – a strategy that had only marginal success – or to fight him. So, I guess you could say he beat the war out of me. He’s the biggest reason I’ve chosen my zucchini-potato life as you like to say.”
“But why didn’t you just leave Grieg?”
Rachel huffed a sigh. “Everyone asks that question of women caught in domestic abuse. We’re seen as weak and unable to stand up for ourselves. But getting trapped in abuse isn’t a quick process at all, but one of psychological seduction usually beginning with a wonderful courtship period. Then the man begins to undermine the woman’s self-esteem, just a little bit at first, but always escalating. Grieg liked to suggest I was stupid, clumsy, boring, anything to help me feel bad about myself on a steady, regular basis.
“From there, it’s maybe a slap at first, then tears and remorse. And begging. The man always begs to stay, to be forgiven, promising it will never happen again. And the woman forgives because she’s hooked in deep. At the worst point, when the beatings are regular, the man will threaten his woman’s life, especially if she makes the smallest move to leave him. By that time, she’s had enough evidence that he will do exactly what he says.
“By the time I escaped into a woman’s shelter, where I stayed for several years, I wanted nothing to do with Militia Warriors or preternatural power or anything. If Grieg and Carlyon were examples of how advanced we were as ascended vampires, then I decided I’d live a life more in keeping with Mortal earth.”
Endelle was frowning. “Well, I guess that explains a lot. I take it you were good at hiding the abuse.”
“I was. But let me ask you this, in all these thousands of years you’ve lived in our world, did you never fall into an abusive relationship? Not even once?”
“No. Never. But I’ve known enough abused women to understand it’s never simple. The honeymoon period does a real number on the woman’s mind.”
“It does,” Rachel said. “It makes you always want to believe the best of your man, even when he does the unthinkable.”
Rachel had examined her life and her mind a thousand times, trying to understand how she’d let the abuse happen. But Grieg had been such a sweetheart in the beginning and told her of his own really difficult childhood so that all her sympathies had been plucked. In the early courtship days, there had been a few signs that something wasn’t right, but nothing that she could ever look back on as a real red flag. Grieg had been loving and attentive.
The first slap, however, had taken place on their honeymoon. He’d wept afterwards and blamed his momentary never-to-be-repeated loss of control on his childhood issues, so of course she’d forgiven him.
And forgiven him.
And forgiven him.
There would be presents and begging after those early beatings, and lots of tears dripping down his cheeks. But after a time, when her mind had become bent by his abuse, the gifts and sobbing had stopped to be replaced by an unequalled cruelty and always the words: you make me do this to you.
It had taken years to extricate herself both psychologically and physically from what had grown into a life-threatening relationship. And a good decade to become free of the nightmares.
