Yet another warning: disturbing memories stirred in sleep
"What is the meaning of this?" a voice from the dead growled at her. A finger jammed into her vagina twisting and torquing inside her. There was no resistance over her entrance, no skin for a husband to break to fully claim his new wife. "My noble-blooded, maiden wife… revealed as nothing more than a common whore on her wedding night," his nail dug painfully across the top of her canal, scratching painfully into her most sensitive of areas.
Stifling her cries, she squirmed in torture; her breath came harshly, and her heart beat rapidly in her chest, pounding in her ears and pulsing through her veins. Her eyes frantically darted around the grand bedchamber, the roaring fire in the grate beside the bed, the dripping candelabra on the nightstand, and the flimsy, gauzy bed curtains, hovering at every angle around where she lay naked across the covers. Through her catching breaths, she spoke quickly, "I told you, Thibault. I was a foolish child. I confessed to you long ago about my girlish affair with my music tutor. I told you I loved Jehan, and that my parents had him dismissed when they knew."
Thibault, Compte de Rénauld, gouged his fingernail into her center of pleasure, watching in satisfaction as his new wife writhed and contorted in agony, "A girlish mistake that turned you into a woman," he scratched harder, making her scream this time. "How old were you when you betrayed me?"
"I... never… betrayed you," her voice trembled, hushed and frightened.
"Answer me," he pinched her clit between his fingers, digging nails into it on either side, wanting to squeeze her every chance of pleasure from it.
She cried out loud as pain shot through her, "Seventeen," she screamed in middle of her in articulate cry.
"Whore," his shadow roared from where he knelt on the bed between her legs, "Filthy slut." He grabbed her by the shoulder and pulled her to sit before him. "Small wonder that your parents arranged for your betrothal to me when they knew both their days were numbered. Pass off the used goods as quickly as they could." Her eyes glowed in the dim light—eyes that had pleased him only repulsed him now as tears streamed from their blue centers.
With a pitiless shine in his face, her husband struck her across the tear-soaked cheek, hard enough to throw her naked body crumpling to one side in recoil. Weeping and panting, her hand drew quickly to cradle the pain in her jaw, "I chose to marry you, Thibault," she managed to speak between wracking sobs, "You willingly asked me for my hand, even after I had hid nothing from you."
"Nor will you ever again, Cécelie, if you want to avoid my retribution in the future," she felt his burning hands turn her completely onto her stomach, arms wrapping around her unseen from behind. One wrestled her down at the shoulder, the other cocked her hips up towards him from under, leaning her forward on her knees. "You bring this to yourself," she felt his mouth at her ear as his hand wandered from her back to her right breast, wrenching it painfully in his grasp. "And as you already bear the sign of a married woman between your legs, I must take my pleasure from you in a different place."
"No," she whispered as her cheek pressed into the feathered mattress, unsure of his meaning, "Please, no Thibault." She turned her face into the bed, screaming at the top of her lungs as he entered her ass. It stretched, it burned, it blinded her in agony strong enough to send her senses spinning. Like he was cleaving her in two, pushing his way through her from the smallest entryway possible.
She screamed louder, begging God to make him stop, repeating her words over and over into the down beneath her face. It killed with each thrust, making her sick to her stomach, sick through her very core, sick at her heart. Her mind slipped away, going blank, and her eyes opened as they pressed into the white of the sheets. Blank white, pure white. And she began to count each time her stomach coiled in pain, numbering each of his cruel thrusts. Nothing existed beyond those numbers, she told herself between screams.
Choking and wheezing, Cécelie jolted up in her bed. In her small, boring room. In the Paris Préfecture.
She caught her breath, her trembling hands clutched tightly around fistfuls of bed sheets on either side of her. Eyes glued gaping wide, she lowered herself back down slowly.
At least she could thank God that was over. That bastard was dead and gone.
A slow gurgling growl sounded from her stomach, and so she sat up again, dressing and cleaning herself from the events of last night, the skin between her legs still red and swollen from the Inspector's forceful… attentions.
Smiling to herself, she hoped a hot croissant and steaming coffee to break her fast with waited for her down in the mess hall this morning. Then to return to work in that perfectly organized, flawlessly tidy room of an office.