Page 51 of A Broken Promise

But the truth was, my soul was ruined long before this click of the trigger. It was born tarnished. Created by Death. It was stained with my very first breath. With my utter existence, I brought death.

The line might have been crossed today. But his blood? That was just a drop in the ocean.

“Nice shot, Freckles!” Priya smiled as she took a closer look at the arrow. His head now slumped back, exposing his neck. “Here.” She handed me her bloodied dagger. “You should try to cut his skin too. With a good knife it feels just like slicing warmed butter.”

I set my crossbow down on the table and took her blade into my hands. The handle felt so warm from her hands against my cool skin. Without blinking, I ran the blade against his opened chest. Small trickles of blood came out one by one. His skin turned ghost pale as more blood pooled underneath his chair.

I twisted the dagger deeper. The blade went through with no hesitation, no resistance. It was too easy. The human flesh was so vulnerable, so defenseless against the sharp blade.

Priya observed each move, each blink and breath.

“Good,” was all she repeatedly said as I dug her dagger deeper and deeper until it pierced his heart completely. “You feel that?” she asked with anticipation and ecstasy in her voice.

But I didn’t feel anything at all, except calmness like the dark, still waters in the midst of a moon eclipse.

I didn’t reply to Priya. She was ecstatic, full of energy and life.

“This is what it’s like to feel powerful. To run the course of other people’s lives. To decide who lives and who dies. To deliver justice. Tobevengeance. No other feeling in the world feels like that. Their fear, their pure terror; no drug in the world could replace that.”

I pulled the dagger out and handed it back to her, my eyes still on the limp body of the unfamiliar middle-aged man. Priya wiped the blood off her dagger against his ripped shirt.

“So, what do you do next?” I asked her.

“I find myself a trophy. Something to remember this by.”

“A trophy?”

“Well usually, I take all their gold and jewelry, but I also like to take something personal of theirs.” Priya glanced around the small cabin. “But since this guy was as poor as the church rat, I doubt we will find anything of value.”

I had no desire for a trophy, no desire for someone’s possessions. I stayed by the body still, while Priya made her way to his bedroom, rustling his sheets and his dressers looking for something of value to her. A souvenir.

Even with the sheer calmness, my stomach ached. Pain seemed to worsen since this morning. Nausea and the headache were to be expected, as I skipped breakfast today, but the pain seemed to now distract me.

I felt it then. Like a bucket of ice water, the sticky wetness and the feeling of a slithering blob landing between my legs, washing away any calmness I had felt.

“I need a washroom,” I yelled to Priya.

“What?” she yelled back at me, through the loud screeching of the moving furniture against the wooden floor.

“I need to use the bathroom.”

“Well hell, go then.”

The crooked outhouse, filled with buzzing flies and mosquitoes,stood not too far from the house. The definitive stench didn’t help my now panicking thoughts.

Please don’t be it. Please not now. I opened the door to a hole in the dirt, filled with shit and piss, and gagged. The hot, burning sun was not helping today. With the stench burning my lungs, I rushed away from the hole. The outside would do.

“Oh, please not it,” I begged out with my closed eyes, pleading the gods and spirits above to have mercy on me. But deep inside I already knew the answer. My underwear was soaked with blood as I pulled the leather pants down.

“Oh, fuck fuck fuck, utter holy fuck,” I muttered under my breath, with my butt exposed to the world as the realization of what was happening to me came.

It’d been years since I had my period, and even before I was just a child, never steady, never full. But now… I should’ve known. I should’ve guessed. Now that my body was well nourished, the dreadful reminder of womanhood came back with it too.

I hissed. A cruel Fate. Laughing at me. Blood for blood was quite literal to her, it seemed.

Priya finally popped out of the cabin with a satisfactory look on her face. She was carrying a small, carved figurine in her hand. Pausing just a few steps out of the cabin, she bunched her eyebrows in amusement.

“Want to tell me why are you stripping down? Shining your sparkly white ass to the world?” Priya’s lips stretched in a large smile.

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