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Five
Eoghan
The sunlight filteredthrough the bedroom, and while Inessa was curled up at my side like she’d been for the past six nights of our marriage, my focus wasn’t on her, on the smooth skin of her shoulders and upper back that were revealed to me with her camisole. If I sat up, and peered over her, I could even see her braless tits which were smushed together now that she was lying on her side. I didn’t look at the long legs which were curled up, thanks to her fetal position, and her feet, the soles of which were pressed against my calves like she was either trying to keep them warm or trying to connect with me.
She was an odd thing.
That was what I’d learned in six days of marriage.
So young in some things, so ancient in others.
The cut on my palm could have been childish. After all, blood oaths died out when you passed eleven, didn’t they?
But the intention behind it? Yeah, it did more than she realized.
It also told me her capacity for pain was high. That she wasn’t unaccustomed to bloodshed—either her own or someone else’s. And, as a result, that violence was as much a part of her upbringing as it had been in mine.
The only trouble was, if Ma had had a girl child, that girl would have been cosseted from the womb to her coffin.
Not just by Da, but by all her brothers.
We’d have done more than spill blood to keep her safe. Didn’t matter whether it was because of some little fucker in kindergarten threatening to pull her pigtails, or a husband who thought he could get handy with his fists.
Any sister of mine would have been shielded from the Devil himself.
That Inessa hadn’t pissed me off.
So, the gesture, while childlike, interested me. I often found myself staring at it through the day, and when I woke up, the scabbed over wound was the first thing I looked at after I’d checked Inessa was asleep.
Her presence in my bed wasn’t something I’d anticipated.
But, at the time, it had seemed natural to let her get into bed with me. After we’d stripped her out of the dress—leaving her in nothing more than a teddy that had my dick hardening, even as the bruises on her limbs had it softening faster than if she’d kneed me in the balls—and had set fire to the gown, letting it burn on the shower floor before I doused it with water to stop the alarms from blaring to life. She’d stood there, smirking at the destroyed dress which was partially in tatters, somewhat blood-soaked, and mostly burned to smithereens, and something about the moment had gotten to me.
Especially when, a few seconds later, she’d yawned.
I’d grabbed her hand, tugged her out of the bathroom and over to the side of the bed I didn’t sleep on, and said, “Let’s get some sleep.”
She’d blinked up at me, showing her true exhaustion now that she was bare from the makeup she’d been wearing all day, and hadn’t demurred. Climbing, like a good girl, into bed, and cuddling up on her side.
By the time I’d rounded the damn mattress, she was already fast asleep.
Me?
I’d been left wondering how the day had derailed so much. And six days on, I was still confused as fuck.
I had a bride who was barely legal, my bed was full when I always slept alone, I was technically on my honeymoon and I hadn’t had sex once, and I’d be going back to work shortly.
The past week had been spent acclimating ourselves to one another. Almost like she was a lioness who’d been tossed into a cage with a lion, we’d been sniffing around each other, trying to work out the other’s limitations and the way we rolled.
For the most part, I figured I’d done pretty goddamn well for myself.
She didn’t talk all the fucking time, in fact, I often found her glued to her phone—not because she was on social media, pulling duck faces into the camera every twenty fucking minutes, nor because she was doing irritating shit for TikTok, but because she was reading.
She’d even shushed me.Shushed mewhen I interrupted her.
What the actual fuck was that about?
She wasn’t scared of me at all, either because of our wedding day or because she thought I was kinder than her father—which I wasn’t, but to her, I would be—and that had resonated when she’d ignored me until she’d read to the end of the chapter.
