Chapter 11
Chapter 11
“I ask again. Do you need help?”
Her eyes squeezed shut, she stammered, “Help… me, please.”
“Hmm.” The man regarded her with an indifferent expression. “What shall I do?” He seemed to be pondering whether to kill his prey, captured not for sustenance, but for amusement.
“The thing is…” The man lowered his head. Hilde had to crane her neck, almost halfway breaking it, to meet his gaze. She felt her chin tremble.
“I don’t like it.” The man’s large hand suddenly gripped her jaw, and Hilde flinched.
“What…?”
“Don’t you remember?” It was a question with neither rhyme nor reason.
“Then I’ll have to help you remember.” With the soft scrape of metal against skin, a cold blade touched her neck. Hilde’s eyes widened.
Like a dam bursting, memories of a day she desperately wanted to forget came flooding back.
A trembling voice, like the rustling of aspen leaves, escaped her parted lips. “Y-you’re…”
“You begged for your life, groveling at my feet, and now you don’t even recognize your benefactor?” The sneering man was undoubtedly the stranger she’d encountered the night Crozeta fell. The one who had slipped silently into her bedroom and plunged a knife into her master, the Count, killing him instantly. ‘You… How are you here?’
Reading her silently moving lips, the man graciously provided an answer. “Well…” His well-formed lips curved into a crooked smile, devoid of any genuine mirth. “My slave dared to disobey her master’s command and try to run away.”
Hilde’s eyes fluttered like a ship caught in a storm. ‘Could it be… the one who was looking for me…?’
“If you had obediently done as you were told, that fragile shoulder of yours wouldn’t have an arrow embedded in it, would it?”
Her face paled instantly as she grasped the meaning of his words.
“Surprised?” The man laughed coldly, casually brandishing the bow and arrow that had been concealed behind his back. “I have a compulsion to hunt down anything that runs from me.”
“!” He’d deliberately shot her as she fled into the forest. And then he asked if she needed help. While toying with the fletching of the arrow lodged in her shoulder.
Hilde stared at him in disbelief, at his face so calm, as if he were merely exercising a rightful privilege.
“Slave,” the man called, his fingers lightly brushing the fletching of the arrow in the air. “I don’t like it when my belongings misbehave.” His voice was gentle, yet devoid of warmth, chilling her to the bone. “So you must endure. Don’t you agree?”
Endure what…? Before Hilde could even form the question in her mind, the man’s hand gripped the arrow near her wound.
And then, he ripped it out.
“Aagh!” An agonizing pain, beyond description, washed over her. Clutching her shoulder, Hilde writhed, her mind blanking. It felt as if he were driving a knife into her shoulder blade, twisting it. The pain was excruciating…
Her scream abruptly cut off, and her body went limp.
“.…” Benedict caught her as she collapsed.
“You can’t even withstand this much?” An alarming amount of blood gushed out, staining her pale shoulder and chest crimson, yet he didn’t flinch. “Don’t worry, though,” Benedict murmured, pressing a handkerchief to the wound to stem the bleeding. “I won’t kill you.” As you begged.
***
The headache began abruptly, just as he heard the woman had escaped. And that headache was unlike anything Benedict had ever experienced. A pain so intense, he would have rather had his brain scooped out.
His eyes, bloodshot, scoured the forest. He sharpened all his senses, picking up her footprints, the faint scent lingering in the air, even the slightest hint of her breath.
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