The agony throbbed through the next hit, and the next. The crack of the cane landed hard and fast, with no breaks in between and no sign of stopping.

“No! Please, stop!” I dug in my toes and scrambled away on elbows. “I beg you. Stop!”

He stayed with me, smiting my backside with unleashed brutality.

“You’re stronger than my other wives.” He pressed a shoe onto my back, holding me immobile. “They swooned upon the first cut.”

“Wives?” My voice broke on a guttural sob. “But you’re a widower!”

“Indeed, I am. Three times over.” His hand gripped my behind, squeezing abused flesh. “Perhaps, you’ll be the one I keep.”

My stomach heaved. Saliva pooled around my gums. My chest convulsed, and everything came up in a spray of vomit. It saturated the dirt and clung to my hair and chin in strings of slime.

His touch vanished, and the cane swung again, harder and more intense than before.

The blinding agony didn’t spare a single nerve in my body. It devoured all thought and stunned me into a sobbing pool of snot and tears.

Pain was all that existed.

It lasted longer than I thought I could survive. “No more. I beg you to stop. I’ll do anything. Anything! Please!”

I needed the torture to end. I needed my father. I needed mercy, and I pleaded for it, screamed for it, willing my soul unto any god who would have me in exchange for a moment of relief.

Nightfall wrapped the forest in shadows, and my cries lost strength. Blood soaked my broken fingernails, and dirt coated my cracked lips.

When the cane finally dropped to the ground, I couldn’t move, couldn’t think past the dense, trembling misery.

Until he touched me there.

Inside my center.

Then I was screaming, kicking at the legs that crawled between mine.

He grabbed my waist and pulled my hips to his naked groin.

“No! Don’t do this!” I twisted and slid through the dirt, dragging my chest through vomit. All the rolling and wriggling moved my body toward my bound hands until they were caught beneath me.

That was when I felt it. The hilt of the dagger in my sleeve.

A spark of hope.

As he wrestled my lower body into position against his, I pulled the blade free. But with my arms tied at the wrists, I couldn’t cut through the rope.

“Not like this.” I adjusted my fingers around the hilt. “Turn me over. Please, my lord?”

He rubbed invasive fingers between my legs and groaned a vile sound. “As you wish.”

The trumpet-shaped sleeves of my gown concealed my hands. I pinched the folds of fabric around the blade and pointed it outward as he rolled me.

The instant my back hit the ground, he dove between my legs.

And landed directly onto the dagger.