She was here. She took my weapons. Why?
I straighten and turn, put my back to the wall. The room is small with no place to hide, but I can’t shake the feeling I’m not alone. Is it merely the feeling of her left behind? A whisper of bare foot on wood floor outside my door tells me no. I creep to the door and wait.
The latch rattles-someone testing to see if it’s locked. It’s not. A pause no longer than two breaths passes and the latch lifts, the door swings inward slowly on hinges creaking despite the intruder’s care. The sound makes me remember the man and myself as a small child; I suppress a shiver of angry hatred and raise my hands, ready to attack. Scenarios I wouldn’t have imagined in my previous life run through my mind: what to do if it’s a single man with a sword, or an axe, or if my attackers number two or more. Each ends with me killing with my bare hands. I struggle back a grin.
The door swings fully open and a person steps through. A quick glance shows me there’s only one and I pounce, grasping his hands and riding the intruder to the floor. Several observations come at once as I land atop the trespasser: neither hand holds a weapon nor the calluses of hands used to holding weapons; the smell is more perfume than sweat, though there is certainly both; and the grunt of air forced from lungs isn’t the sound made by a man.
The interloper is a woman.
I roll the woman over and look into one of the few faces I know in this Gods-forsaken city. The whore’s expression twists with pain and panic; she struggles to draw breath. She’s not injured, only the air is knocked out of her chest. I made sure not to strike a killing blow because, had it been him, I wouldn’t have wanted him to die without seeing the look on his face as his life fled. It’s what I live for.
“Breathe. You’ll be okay.”
I sit on her hips, her wrists pinned to the floor. Inches separate my face from hers as she struggles to fill her lungs. After a moment, I hear the squeak of air squeezing through. I wait until she can fill her chest with breath before bothering to question her.
“Why are you here?” I keep my voice low. If she brought others who haven’t revealed themselves, I want to hear them before they sink their steel into my back.
“I don’t know,” she says, words ragged. “I’ve never met no one like you.”
She wriggles her hips beneath me; the tingling it creates distracts me for half a second.
“Who sent you?”
She shakes her head and her hair brushes against the floor. “No one. I wanted to see you.”
I stare into her eyes, looking for the lie they contain, but all I see is an emotion resembling desire. I don’t know what to think. I’m confused, indecisive, and don’t like the way being so makes me feel. Before I can do anything, she strains her neck, pushes her head up, and her lips brush against mine like a feather caressing them.
Again, the tingle.
I release her hands and sit up looking down at her hair splayed across the floor. Curly and brown, the knots in it the last time I saw her are gone. She washed and groomed herself in anticipation of visiting me.
“I…I came to see you,” she says, hands reaching up to rub my chest.
My leather is thick, but I feel the pressure of her touch on my breasts. Her hips grind against me and my breath shortens. The time with the man in the meadow felt good but a desire to kill him, to protect myself, underlay the physical desire. I feel no need for violence at her touch.
I close my eyes as her hands trail down my torso to my thighs, her touch gentle but firm. She rubs my legs, her fingers reaching higher with each stroke. Behind closed lids I see the face of another woman, a young blond who giggles easily and is eager to learn.
Aryann.
She was my friend, one of the women the man named Khirro murdered. I open my eyes to avoid thinking about him. There are more pleasant things to think about as her fingers no longer rub my legs but somewhere higher, pressing desperately against my breeches. A moan escapes my lips, surprising me, and she smiles. I can’t help myself. I lean forward and press my lips to hers. Her tongue darts out eagerly, searching my lips, finding my tongue. The feel of it takes me to another time when I was a different person, when I wasn’t so unlike this woman. I felt in control of my destiny then, and of the things I did, but ended up dead as surely as this woman will.
My mind wanders through other times while her fingers fumble with the fastenings on my leather. Her breath is loud as our mouths eat hungrily of each other’s passion and I think of those women, and of man after man, but they feel wrong. Physically I was with them, but without emotion-as it must be for this woman as she leans against the rail outside a public house and gets fucked for money. Then I think of him, but it’s not the same as before.
I realize for the first time that I loved the man called Khirro once. And it increases the hate I feel for him.
My leather is on the floor beside us, her hands on my breasts. This time only my thin cotton shirt separates her flesh and mine. Her fingers pinch my nipples and the groan comes again, almost loud enough to disguise the creak of a footstep on a wooden floor. My eyes snap open and, without thought, I roll off her and away, my shoulder thumping painfully on the knotty floorboards. I’m on my feet in an instant facing the two men who crept through the door while I was foolishly engaged in the throes of passion. Both hold bare steel in their hands.
“What do you think you’re doing, whore?” one of the men growls and throws a kick toward the woman. She scrambles away and his boot misses. “How many times do I has to tell you no one rides for free?”
The second man snorts and faces me. His eyes seek my chest first, then move up. When he sees my face, he elbows his friend and gestures at me.
“Hey! Ain’t she the wench what killed Mart last night?”
The first man looks at me, also. A grin spreads across his face.
“Yeah. That’s her all right. Killed more than just Mart, I hear.”
“She don’t look so tough.”
“Mmm. Kinda pretty, really.”
The whore has positioned herself against the wall. She makes a comment I don’t hear, focused as I am on the two men. The first man scowls and spits a curse, then they advance on me. The second man has one hand on his belt, loosening his breeches. Why do men think they have the right to fuck anything they want?
He’ll be disappointed with how this turns out for him.
The first man doesn’t have such designs. He swings his sword halfheartedly at me, to scare me and keep me in my place, but I have other plans. As the blade sweeps past, I dart in and spin him around, changing the path of his sword. The steel slashes his friend’s arm and he’s suddenly not so concerned with getting his cock free of his pants. I push the man into his companion. They both yell-one in pain, one in anger-but recover quickly and face me across the room again.
“Whore,” says the second man, the one with the fresh cut on his arm.
“Not anymore,” I growl back. The only whore in the room is behind me; I remain aware of that, but I don’t think I need be concerned about her. Not yet.
The two men rush me, but they’re disorganized and untrained. I dive between them, snagging the dagger from the first man’s belt. Before he can turn, it’s buried in his left side. He gurgles, falls to his knees, then tumbles face first on the floor at the whore’s feet.
The second man comes at me more slowly, the look of rage on his face tempered with fear as blood drips from the fingertips of his left hand. He prods the sword tip at me and I jump back a step. The door is close beside me. He swings his sword and I open the rickety wooden door; the blade crashes into it instead of my side. While he’s off balance, my boot finds his ball sack. The sword hits the floor and my fingers wrap around his windpipe. He thrashes, but I’m behind him, listening to his last breaths rasp down his throat. I dig my nails into his flesh, feel the blood begin to flow, then I tear his esophagus out. He slumps to the floor, blood pooling beneath him.