FORTY

THE NEXT DAYS were hard for the battered Adalene. The bruises on her face and the cuts on her chest had to heal, and she had to force herself back from this unexplainable cocoon of numbness that seemed to have overcome her since my harrowing experience in the forest with the thieves.

She was going to have scars, but at the end of that week, as she watched Odette in another of her bursts of crying, she realized that it was the hardest of all. If that horse had not reared and bolted and if the other woman had fallen on the ground with her, both of them would have been taken. No one would have pointed to Fabian and his men in which direction the thieves had gone with her, and if the men had not reached them in time… Odette and she would have both been r*ped.

And she wasn’t completely r*ped, was she? Fabian and his men had stopped them, killed them all before they could finish what they’d started. They’d had their hands on her, and it would have just been a minute or two before—

She moane