Obsidian Flame (Guardians of Ascension #5)(10)
Author: Caris Roane

She was surprised. “I thought you’d hate it.”

“Well”—he smiled—“when it was long, it did have one advantage.”

Her neck tingled at the reference. He had taken her from behind a lot, wrapping her long, long hair around his forearm, holding her back toward him, constraining her.

Of course those images weren’t helping and she really did need to talk this out with him. “I cut my hair because the fanatical sect that my parents were part of forced all the girls to wear their hair long.”

“You know I was born a Twoling in the good old Midwest, Second Earth, right?”

“Yes, that much I do know.”

“Well, my folks were abusive, I just wasn’t aware of it at the time. I thought what they did in the name of religion was normal. But getting lashed in a barn till the blood ran, all in the name of the Creator’s purpose and discipline, did not endear either my parents or their beliefs to me.”

She felt him stiffen and she was pretty sure she could hear him grinding his molars.

She sighed and twisted a strand of his hair around her finger. “As young girls and teenagers, we were required to keep our hair long and braided down the back, no exceptions.

“But that braid was a torment for years when I was young. In my sect, there was a group of bullies, girls, who would catch me and one of them would take me by the braid and drag me around until I was screaming and crying. Oh, they’d get punished, but the day I started fighting back, hitting and scratching, you wouldn’t believe what the church regulators did to me.

“One of the regulators used a group of three switches bound together that she called, ‘righteousness, purity, and love.’ My father approved although he preferred his whip to anything else. Both my father and the regulators would make me strip to the waist. At least the regulators didn’t bind my wrists and string me up. Beyond that, there wasn’t much of a difference. It was all done in the name of religion.”

She paused, unwrapped the strand of hair. She watched his chin tremble. She knew he was mad, but these were her burdens, not his. Thorne had enough on his plate as a warrior without being stuck with her problems. And she was only telling him now because she needed him to understand why she craved her freedom.

“Anyway, the Convent under Sister Quena’s rule wasn’t much different from the sect I grew up in. I think sister-bitch really enjoyed delivering the canings and whippings. The devotiates were rarely touched, women like your sister, Grace. But then, they abided by all the rules because of their religious fervor, which does make sense.

“But there were at least a dozen of us who had been consigned there by relatives for ‘religious instruction,’ a polite euphemism for ‘beating the sin out of us.’

“I admit I was the worst. I had no room left in my heart for what Sister Quena and her regulators were selling. In my opinion, there was no love in what any of them did. We were simply bad women and were treated in kind.

“But the truth was, most of the ‘bad’ women,” and she succumbed to using air quotes, “weren’t bad at all. They just weren’t there by choice and they didn’t agree with the teachings of the Convent.”

He leaned down and kissed her forehead. His gravel voice flowed over her. “Grace told me you often took their whippings for them.”

“She wasn’t supposed to tell you.”

“You forget, every once in a while I would see the results and even to my mind, you couldn’t have deserved that much of Sister Quena’s wrath, all by your lonesome.”

“I hated her. I know I’m not supposed to hate, but I hated her. Sometimes, it gave me pleasure to pick a fight with her when I could see she was ready to take apart one of the ‘bad women’ for some absurd infraction like not folding your napkin exactly right after dinner was over. I mean what was the point? All the linens went to the laundry. But no, we had to fold them in a perfect rectangular shape, then they could be hauled to the laundry.

“I think sister-bitch used any excuse she could to hurt one of us. I think she used her rage and the whippings to take her mind off her own inner demons.”

“I wanted to take you out of there so bad.”

She thumbed his lower lip. “I know. But then you would have been hauled up on charges for interfering with Convent business and Greaves would have had the excuse he needed to haul your ass in front of COPASS and demand the death penalty.”

His eyes hollowed out at that moment. “I was stuck.”

“We were both stuck. But don’t you see, we’re not anymore. We’re free, or at least I am. And I need this. I need to pick up where I left off during my wild college years. I lost my childhood and I need to be free, and in charge of my life, my days, what food I eat, where I go, what I do.”

He frowned. “So I’m getting more of a picture here. But you’ve never talked about your college years much or how it was you got sent to the Convent in the first place.”

She didn’t want to tell him. He wouldn’t like it, not as a warrior and her breh, but he should know the truth.

“Well, as much as I don’t want to, I’ll tell you straight out. Before I was sent to the Convent, and still in my teens, I totally rebelled. If I was going to get whipped by my father, it was going to be for real reasons. I found pleasure in sex, a lot of sex, with a lot of different men. I took up drinking, too, which fit the lifestyle and really bugged the shit out of my parents.

“Later, when I went to college, on my parents’ dime, I got to partying a little too hard and my grades tanked. When my parents got wind of it, I laughed all through the supposed intervention until I realized that my folks weren’t putting me in some early form of rehab, but rather they’d essentially jailed me in the Creator’s Convent thinking to work religion into me.

“I remember thinking I was going to die but that’s when I met you.” She stroked his cheek with the back of her hand. She smiled. “Do you remember that first time we met?”

He nodded and a low growl left his throat. “I don’t think I’d ever been more turned on in my life.”

“I’d never seen a Warrior of the Blood before. Then there you were: Thorne. The leader of them all. When I think about it now, you were like this unexpected miracle in my life. You were exactly what I needed.”

“I know what you mean, but it wasn’t just the sex. You got me. You accepted me for exactly who and what I was: a warrior.”