Page 61 of Nightshade

“Why are you … doing this!” Lustina dug her heels into the gravely earth and tugged in futile resistance, as Drystan dragged her after him. When he didn’t bother to answer, she gritted her teeth in frustration. “You are with the bishop! I saw you last week during mass. You entered the chamber in the undercroft.”

He finally skidded to a halt and turned on her. Something flickered in his eyes, like serpents, which made her step back. “Do you have any idea how foolish you are? Do you have any idea what the baron really is?”

Contemplating the questions, she stared back at him.

“He is the spawn of the devil himself.”

Laughter tugged at the back of her throat, and before Lustina could stop herself, it broke loose on a quiet giggle, and she slapped a hand over her mouth to contain it.

Drystan’s brows pinched to a frown. “I am serious! It is not a laughing matter, Lustina! He is evil in the flesh!”

She bent forward, laughing harder, unable to reign in her amusement.

“Laugh. And when he damns your soul to the infernal realm for eternity, perhaps you will wish you had listened to me.”

An unattractive howl escaped her, the laughter so intense, it drew tears. “You have … no idea … how utterly … insane you sound!” More laughter poured out of her, until her face burned and her throat turned hoarse.

“He is capable of things no man can physically do. Tell me you haven’t witnessed them and you are lying. He is a dangerous aberration that must be destroyed.”

“Perhaps it is you who are the aberration, with your talk of destroying another human being.”

“He is not human.”

“And neither are you. What good human being is so self-righteous as to judge another? That is not human. That is monstrous! More so than the spawn of which you speak. You torture him. I heard it. You and the bishop torture him in that chamber. If your god is as merciful and right as you say, it is you who stand to be punished!”

His palm slammed into her throat with a force that banished the last sip of air from her lungs. “Defend him, if you must, Lustina, but he will never find happiness with you.”

* * *

Lustina lay on her stomach. The wounds on her back, where she’d suffered the lashings, burned like flames across her skin. As Pentash Maria daubed a particularly deep cut, Lustina closed her eyes, praying the pain would subside. Tears streamed down her temple, and as the pentash tended her wounds, she lay pondering how cruel fate had been that day in the woods, when she’d first lain eyes on the baron, had first felt the dangerous tendrils of the unknown wrap around her curiosity.

The bishop would have referred to such an encounter as a test of her virtue in the face of temptation.

For Lustina, it had been an awakening. The cursed unveiling of truth that had lain buried in her heart for too long. The realization that no matter how virtuous she endeavored to be, the church would never consider her worthy of redemption. For if a baron could be punished for his existence, in what hope stood the daughter of a condemned witch?

A door clicked. Heavy footsteps followed, punctuated by the tap of a staff between each step, undoubtedly made by Bishop Venable’s crosier, and alerted her to who had come into the room. Dread sank deep into her stomach.

“Leave us,” he said to Pentash Maria.

“Your Excellency, she still requires her wounds to be--”

“I shall not repeat myself.”

The cool cloth that’d given Lustina a small measure of relief was lifted from her skin, and her lashings flared in complaint.

The door clicked again, signaling the pentash’s retreat, and Lustina found herself alone with the bishop.

“Do you understand why I punished you, girl?”

Lustina didn’t answer, the anger and sadness inside of her too overwhelming.

A lightning bolt of pain struck her back, in the same moment she realized Bishop Venable had stuck his finger into one of her wounds.

“Answer me!”

“Yes!”

He removed his finger, but the pain persisted, jabbing at her ribs every time she dared to take a breath. “Did you honestly think the son of an earl would have anything to do with a sinning harlot such as yourself?”