Midnight Eyes by Brophy, Sarah (well read books .TXT) 📕

her face full into the sun, but she couldn’t seem to feel it. She had a solid core of ice wedged inside of her and even the intense rays of the sun could not melt it. She doubted she would ever be truly warm again.

Not that it mattered. All sensation and feeling were frozen inside her and there was nothing she could do to shake off the numbness. She felt as if she had ceased to exist, but her body hadn’t been informed and mindlessly it continued with the automatic business of living even when there was nothing alive left inside.

The strange sensation was only compounded by the fact that everyone surrounded her with a conspiracy of concern, hemming her in from all sides, acting as a suffocating buffer between her and the real world. They all did it. They tiptoed around her as if she might break if they dared to raise their voices.

And she didn’t have the strength to stop it.

There just seemed no reason to. Let them make all the decisions just so long as they left her to her numbness. Nothing mattered anymore.

When Mary had suggested Imogen might feel a little more like herself if she sat outside for a spell, Imogen had agreed, although she had no desire to sit outside in a chair like an invalid. But Mary was wrong. She didn’t feel better. Her hollowness was entirely portable and had joined her in the cold sunshine.

She sat on a hard chair borrowed from the main hall in sunshine she couldn’t feel, looking at things she couldn’t see.

Her hands clenched tightly together in her lap, her fingernails driving into the soft flesh of her palms, but she didn’t feel the pain. All sensation had stopped from the moment Robert had ridden away.

Strange, but even as she had come to fear him, he had still taken with him the last vestige of hope. She couldn’t understand it. How could she have given him so much of herself when she didn’t trust him? How could it be that without him she ceased to exist, that she could no longer even feel her own pain?

It wasn’t possible, unless she had come to love him. And she couldn’t love him. How could she when she knew he was playing on Roger’s side? Playing Roger’s game, was Roger’s man.

But if it was true, if despite all logic she actually loved Robert, then Roger had won, just as he had always told her he would.

She drew an unsteady breath, smelling Roger’s gloating satisfaction in the air. When he caught up with her this time it would be worse than it had ever been. This time he would no longer have to wait. This time, he would stop only when there was nothing of her left.

This time. Would it start like it always did? Would she wake from her tortured sleep and know he was there? She knew the answer.

She would wake and find him waiting. There would be no warning, no time to plan. There would be nothing she could do to protect herself. “Run, Little Sister, I want you to run.” His voice would sound so normal that it only made what he said, what he was about to do to her, with her, all the more grotesque.

She would run. Her hands would be sweaty and she would struggle frantically with the bar on her chamber door. Eventually it would lift. It would be in the passageway that the walls of panic would press grindingly in on her. She would be slumped in a cowering heap when Roger found her.

His excitement would be a tangible presence as he touched her, hurt her. “Beg me, Little Sister. Beg me to take you. Beg me and all of this will stop.” She had heard his calm voice caress over those words so often that even though she was safely away from them for now, she covered her ears. It didn’t work. His voice was trapped in her head. “Well then, if you won’t beg, we will have to play a little more.”

And he would play, but this time he wouldn’t stop. This time he wouldn’t wait for her to beg. He would take her utterly and at that moment she would cease to exist altogether. That was the only way this torturous game could end. She had always known that.

But for a short, wonderful moment, she had dared to let herself forget that. That was why she hated Robert even as a small, traitorous part of her thought she might be in love with him. She hated him for showing her hope. She had actually dared to believe that at last the nightmares were truly over. But they weren’t and she was too weak to fight them now that they had returned.

Roger’s win would be pathetically easy, she realized listlessly, but instinctively crossed her arms over her middle. It was a gesture that proved she wasn’t yet as entirely resigned as she needed to be. She couldn’t be if she was actually trying to protect, however feebly, the heart that now beat under her own.

That small, living secret was the one thing that repeatedly managed to penetrate the fog that surrounded her. Under her cold palms there lived another soul struggling its way into life. It seemed impossible to imagine such a thing, but this unborn child would not be denied its existence just because it seemed impossible. It did exist, even if she didn’t.

That knowledge was startling in its newness. She had been standing like a lifeless doll as all of her gowns were altered to fit her changing shape. Her waist seams had to be let out, as everything else had to be taken in. Even then, she hadn’t seen the truth. It had taken Mary’s flat “You’re pregnant” for her to understand the changes taking place in her own body.

She had yelled at Mary, told her that she lied, that she had got it wrong, that she wasn’t