My Abusive Relatives Treated Me Like Dirt — Until The Empire’s Strongest Duke Knelt Before Me

Part 2

Linen.

Clean, dry linen smells like sunlight trapped in woven threads.

It was the first thing that registered.

The second was the total, unsettling absence of pain in my lower spine.

I opened my eyes.

The ceiling was entirely wrong.

It wasn’t the rotting, damp, stained beams of the servant quarters, but smooth plaster edged with intricate crown molding.

I tried to sit up and the world violently tilted.

A dull roar filled my ears, a leftover symptom of the fever that had boiled my blood for however many hours or days had passed.

I collapsed back into the pillows.

They were filled with down, yielding and obscenely soft.

I felt trapped by the comfort, my body so accustomed to resisting hard surfaces that this softness felt like a trap waiting to spring.

A voice to my left commanded me to drink.

I snapped my head sideways, ignoring the sharp spike of nausea the movement caused.

Craig sat in a high-backed leather chair near the hearth.

He wasn’t wearing his armor or his heavy coat.

He wore a simple white linen shirt, the sleeves rolled up past his elbows, exposing forearms corded with muscle and crisscrossed with faded silvery scars.

He was reading a stack of ledgers, a quill resting loosely in his right hand.

He didn’t look up from the pages.

A tin cup sat on the small table beside the bed.

Steam curled from the rim, carrying the bitter earthy scent of willow bark and dried mint.

I stared at the cup, then at him.

My throat felt like it was lined with shattered glass.

I dragged myself upright, clutching the heavy velvet quilt to my chest.

I realized, with a sudden spike of cold panic, that I was no longer wearing my soaked, filthy canvas dress.

I was wearing a men’s sleeping tunic, easily three sizes too big, the fine cotton swamping my small frame.

I rasped out a question about who changed my clothes, my voice sounding like two stones grinding together.

Craig finally looked up, his gray eyes flat, betraying zero emotion.

He explained that his physician had tended to me because I was drowning in my own fluids.

I processed this, the panic subsiding, replaced immediately by a crushing, familiar dread.

I asked what time it was, and when he said it was past noon, I breathed that I had missed the morning fires.

I threw the quilt back and swung my legs over the edge of the mattress.

As soon as I tried to stand, my knees turned to water.

I pitched forward.

I didn’t hit the floor.

Craig moved with a sudden, violent speed that defied his massive size.

He caught me by the waist, lifting me effortlessly and depositing me back onto the mattress.

He ordered me to sit down.

I fought against the heaviness in my limbs, trying to push his hands away, explaining that Brenda didn’t forgive this and if I rested, I wouldn’t eat.

He told me I was not going back to the kitchens.

I froze and looked up into his face, asking bitterly if he was going to have them throw me out the front gates into the mud he pulled me from.

Craig leaned back, crossing his arms over his chest.

He stated my full name, Megan Davis.

I flinched.

I hadn’t heard that surname spoken out loud in ten years.

He coldly recited the public record of my father’s gambling debts, then revealed what wasn’t public.

My mother had established a dowry trust meant to unlock on my eighteenth birthday.

When my father died, Brenda claimed wardship to absorb the debts, but in reality, she assumed control of my trust.

She had been draining it for a decade to pay for Heather’s silk gowns, the rotting manor, and her own gambling habits.

I looked down at my hands.

The deep ingrained ash was still there.

Ten years of being treated like an infected stray dog, all while they stole what was mine.

The rage that spiked in my chest was too hot, too dry for tears.

I asked him why he cared, a man who subjugated rebellions.

He explained he was here to commandeer the estate because Brenda’s family were bankrupt and owed forty thousand gold pieces in taxes.

He pulled a heavy iron key from his pocket and tossed it onto the bed.

It landed on the velvet quilt with a dull thud.

He told me it was the key to the estate’s main vault, containing a ledger detailing every copper Brenda stole.

It was enough to see her and her daughter hanged.

He gave me two choices.

I could take that key, hand it to the magistrate, and spend five years in court.

Or, I could walk out the door, get in his carriage, and leave them to the rot.

What would you do?