His answer sounded just as sincere. She couldn’t tell if he was lying to her to give her false hope. She wanted to believe there was an out, but who was she kidding? This was her final day on earth if she let him continue.
He released her legs and dropped to one knee to pick up the whip. His head was within striking distance. She lashed out hard with her foot. She missed his head, but connected squarely with his shoulder, her bare toes ringing out in pain from the blow. Suspended, it was hard for her to put any real force behind the kick, but he hadn’t been expecting it, so the strike was enough to knock him off his feet.
He looked up at her with disgust and shook his head. “There’s no saving you, is there?”
She’d had her one shot and she’d blown it. She didn’t bother with pleading. They were past that.
He stood with the whip in his hand. The dirt floor was damp, and his shirt was soaked where he’d landed on it. He examined the soiled garment and crossed the stable to where a duffel hung off a hook between a couple of stalls. He removed a clean polo.
Cleanliness is next to godliness, she thought.
He turned his back to her and removed his shirt. His back was all lean muscle, covered in a crisscross of scars. He’d said a woman had taught him about right and wrong and paid the price. Seeing his bare skin, all of her questions were answered. Who he was and who he’d become was all there in the damaged flesh. He pulled on the polo.
He returned to the bag and pulled out something small. He walked up to her and held it up for her to see.
“You’ll need this.”
It was a rubber bit. Teeth marks from previous users marred the surface.
Tears ran down her face as she took it into her mouth.
He walked behind her. She heard the whip unfurl and hit the dirt, then he swished it a couple of times. The sound of it cutting through the air and ending its arc with its trademark crack caused her to flinch.
Not seeing him was so much worse than seeing him. Not knowing what he was doing added an additional element of fear. She couldn’t make out if he was getting pleasure from his work. She wouldn’t know when the whip was about to strike her. Did he know how much worse he was making this? She didn’t think so. He wasn’t sadistic, just self-absorbed, too wrapped up in his agenda to consider anyone else.
“I’m going to begin now, Zo?. It’s best that you brace yourself physically and mentally for the pain.”
This was really happening. There was no escaping it. She tried to prepare herself for what was about to happen, but she couldn’t. Her mind couldn’t wrap itself around the concept. Her breaths came fast and shallow, and sweat broke out all over her body.
“Remember, you brought this upon yourself.”
She clamped down on the bit, balled her hands into fists, and wrapped her legs together at the ankles.
The swish of the whip slicing through the air was the only sound she could hear beyond that of her pounding heart.
“One.”
A swish, a crack, then pain. It happened so fast she wasn’t ready, and it took her a confused second that lasted a lifetime before she realized she’d been hit. The impact was brutal. How could something that was as inherently flexible as a whip feel like a steel rod? The agony was searing and explosive. At first, it was a thin blaze across her back but it quickly ignited, spreading down the length of her back and to the center of her body.
She tensed every muscle to deal with the sensory overload she was experiencing. Her body turned to rock.
“Two.”
Swish-crack-fire.
Her brain filled with the noise of her pain. It deafened her. If she screamed, she didn’t hear it.
“Three.”
This lash felt as though it had crossed a previous one. She wasn’t so sure a moment later. The nerve endings in her back could be deceiving her. All of them were firing at once.
“Four.”
Swish-crack-fire.
Her body swung back and forth. The soft breeze failed to cool her; it only heightened the temperature across her flesh. The sweat sprang from every pore, leaking into her wounds and ramping up the pain another notch.
“Five.”
Something slow and thick trickled down her spine. A new wave of panic lit her up. Am I bleeding? her mind screamed. She couldn’t tell if it was real or a delusion.
Far off, someone was calling her name. She opened her eyes. The Tally Man was standing before her. He reached up to remove the bit from her mouth and placed the stool under her feet. She sagged under its support.
“That’s just the beginning,” he said. “We have a long way to go. I want you absorb what has just happened before we continue.”
An image of Holli hanging in the workshop filled her mind. Her body had been slack, streaked with sweat, dirt, and blood. She’d looked so bad that Zo? had thought she was dead. How many lashes had her friend endured by the time she had peered through the grime-encrusted windows? A low number was just as frightening as a high one. A low one meant the whip possessed devastating power. A high one meant she had much further to go.
“Are you sorry, Zo??”