The Vampire & Her Witch-Chapter 1202: Getting Physical (Part Three)
Samlet’s face was streaked with tears and snot, his body trembling from pain and cold and terror as Owain gripped his hair and stared into his eyes from just inches away. When he hid the truth or held back, Owain’s fists pummeled his body, but when he told the truth, he was slapped mercilessly with the brass rings that made simple slaps almost as bad as the body blows.
He didn’t know what to say to make the madness stop, but he tried his best. After all, he didn’t really know why Lady Jocelynn cared so much about her distant cousin, but he could at least guess...
"Lady Eleanor, she... she saved Lady Jocelynn," he gasped out, trying to say something that would please the new Marquis before he struck out with his fists again.
"The Marquis, your father, he... he attacked Lady Jocelynn with a knife. Cut her here," he said, using his chin to gesture to the spot high on his chest where Bors’ knife had cut Lady Jocelynn, just an inch or two short of inflicting a deadly wound to her neck. "The Confessor, Lady Eleanor, she used a miracle to save Lady Jocelynn, but it... It took everything from her. She was already sick, already weak, from the miracle when we threw her in a cell..."
"And then Percivus did what?" Owain prompted, his grip on Samlet’s hair tightening. "What did he do to her after putting her in a cell? You aren’t saying that she was so weak that the cold and damp killed her, are you?" Owain raged, spittle flying from his lips as he imagined his father nearly killing Jocelynn.
If the annoying housefly had saved her life, then it was no wonder Jocelynn was deeply disturbed by the other woman’s death. Owing a life debt was a heavy thing, and Owain had seen plenty of men on the battlefield who would fly into a rage when something happened to the person who had once saved their life. Women’s hearts were even softer... it must have been devastating, and these fools had let it happen!
"He burned her robes," Niklas answered, his voice barely above a whisper. "Cut them from her body and burned them with Holy Fire in her cell. He said she’d profaned her calling by siding with heretics over the Church. He said it was a taste of the Holy Lord of Light’s judgment that awaited her."
"And then?" Owain prompted, flexing his fingers as he glared at the man.
"And then he... he used her," Samlet said, his voice breaking. "Used her suffering to try to break Lady Jocelynn. He tied everything together, he told Lady Jocelynn that her cousin was dying because she wouldn’t cooperate, that if she wanted to save her cousin, she needed to confess to the conspiracy to poison your father..."
Owain released Samlet’s hair and stepped back, his body trembling in rage as he processed what they’d told him. His Jocelynn, forced to choose between confession and watching her cousin die. His Jocelynn, trading her jewels for scraps just to survive, forced to eat the tongues of other men. His Jocelynn, embroidering altar cloths for these cowardly thieves with frozen, bleeding fingers, while these two watched and judged and forced her to redo her work.
He’d heard enough. At this point, he no longer cared what else had happened while these lunatics delighted in their attempts to destroy the most beautiful, elegant, and attentive woman that Owain had ever had the good fortune to encounter. They profaned her body with their eyes, they defiled her mouth with the tongues of other men....
They had all but desecrated a temple, and if Owain hadn’t killed his father to seize the throne, they might have gotten away with it.
He drove his fist into Niklas’s stomach again, then his ribs from the other side. Another crack. Another scream. He worked systematically, methodically, landing blows with practiced precision as he vented his fury on the acolyte’s body. He never struck the face, never the head, always the body. Ribs, kidneys, solar plexus, liver. Each strike was carefully calculated to cause maximum pain without ending things too quickly.
Blood began to flow more freely, splattering Owain’s face and tunic as he worked, leaving Niklas to dangle from his shackles as he returned to Samlet, pounding the same spot in the man’s chest over and over and over again until he could hear the sickening crunch and grinding of splinters of bone as they tore through the other man’s flesh.
Back and forth he went, giving each man just enough of a reprieve while he worked on the other one that neither passed out from the pain. Passing out meant running away, fleeing into blessed unconsciousness in order to escape their tormentor, and Owain would never let them escape. Not after what they’d done.
The acolytes screamed and sobbed and begged, swinging from their chains as Owain’s fists rose and fell with mechanical regularity. And between the blows, they began volunteering even more information, hoping that if they confessed to more, the beating would stop. They told him about the food they’d denied her, and how they withheld a spoonful of soup for every mistake she made in her embroidery.
They confessed to dousing her with a bucket of water before leaving her in the cold cell overnight, and about the blankets they’d taken away to give to Eleanor when she began to confess.
He’d stopped asking questions, but they told him anyway. They told him everything.
And in the cold, dark cell, with only a sliver of winter light creeping through the narrow window, their screaming and pleading continued until it turned into curses. Curses that they’d ever followed Percivus. Curses that they’d joined the Inquisition.
Curses at the Holy Lord of Light for abandoning them until finally, they began to understand that it wasn’t the Holy Lord of Light who had abandoned them, but they who had strayed from the path. Percivus was a temptation. A path to power paved with wickedness, and they’d sold their souls to him eagerly. And Owain...
Owain was the Holy Lord of Light’s retribution for failing to meet their struggle. But that realization came far, far too late to save either man from the young lord’s wrath.
"Enough," Owain said, stopping the beating when the pair of acolytes finally ran out of sobs and prayers for the end. "You’ve done well," he said with a smile that never touched his eyes.
"You’ve earned your lives, such as they are. There’s just one, no, two last things to take care of before I let you go," he said, walking over to the table to retrieve an odd tool. It was similar to the one used by refined noblemen in Keating and the Royal Capital when they dined on delicately prepared snails, curved in just such a way that it made it easier to scoop the small bits of meat out of a snail’s curved shell.
"You’ve gazed on my Jocelynn," Owain said as he turned back to face the terrified pair of acolytes. "I’d carve the image of her perfection from your minds if I could, but since I can’t," he said, raising the tool menacingly as he strode back towards them. "This will have to do..."
