Chapter 104: Ashes of Silence

Lavender soap filled the guest room with its fragrance but the scent nauseated her throat with its bitterness. She was curled on the bed, her fists tightly balled into a hard one as if to even relax for an instant, her entire body would break apart like pieces of fragile glass.

Daylight was cruel. It crept through the lace curtains and whitewashed out all the shadows, lighting up every bruise out of darkness, every mark on her body, every memory of the night she wished to cast off like a dried seed pod. She burrowed as small as possible into the blanket around her shoulders, but light always had a way of seeping in.

She hadn't slept. She'd tried to close her eyes, ride through the pounding drum of the house waking, but as soon as she'd done it, she'd felt faces — sneering faces, laughing mouths, the instant when pride had been ripped from her among them. The image recurred in revenge, over and over in her brain.

Her own heart still pounding too hard, a rabbit trapped in the teeth of h