Page 95 of The Thornwyck Rose

She closed her eyes.

He struck her.

Hard.

One blow.

No warning.

Father Osbert flinched.

His fist cracked across her face with the weight of restraint, with intention, carefully aimed to do what he needed but to inflict the least amount of damage.

Her body crumpled, folding in on itself like a felled stag. She collapsed in a heap at his feet. She lay unmoving and silent; her upper cheek revealed the fresh pooling of blood beneath the skin.

“ONE?” Henry roared. “One strike?! I said beat her!”

Erik stood above her, his expression holding everything back. Feet shuffled behind him. Geoffrey and Jovin knew what he’d done, but Henry was too angry to put the pieces together.

“I apologize, my lord,” Erik said, calm as before, as he hinged at the waist toward Henry. “I do not know my strength with women as you do. I am more familiar with hitting men as you’ve commanded me to do many times before.”

The passive insult made it through a firm facade masking any malice he held toward Lord Henry, but Henry’s lip curled, anyway.

“Get her out of my sight,” Henry snapped at Margot and Isolde.

Erik slipped his glove back on as Henry turned to Seren’s handmaidens.

Margot and Isolde rushed to Seren, trying to lift her—but she was dead weight. Her head lolled to the side, hair loose beneath her veil, trailing across the blood-dotted wooden floor.

“My lord, she is too heavy. We cannot carry her,” Margot said in a rush, with her face to the floor.

Henry’s teeth bared as he glared at Erik.

“Clean up your mess,” he spat through clenched teeth.

Erik nodded. “As you wish, my lord.”

He looked down at Seren’s body, his jaw taut.

Henry’s voice boomed to those in the great hall, “We depart within the hour. If the girls are found, kill them. They should have been drowned at birth. They are a drain on this keep.”

Erik kneeled.

There were three choices in carrying out Henry’s order to clean his mess.

One, he could drag Seren by the wrists—Henry’s preference, cruel and humiliating.

Two, he could throw her over his shoulder—the way one carried a sack of grain.

But he would not do any such thing to Seren. Only one choice remained. Let the host whisper their murmurs if they must.

He slipped one arm beneath her knees, the other behind her shoulders. His fingers brushed against her ribs, and a hush went through his blood like the vacuum of sound after a cathedral bell rang. His hands shook from the ache of reverence.

She was something sacred.

And he was the unworthy man who had struck her down.

He lifted her like a lady, his lady.