Her Deviant Husband | [✓]

Chapter 57

(A/n: I thought you all knew. But sorry to assume. But actually Reyansh is a Delhi Punjabi.)
Warning: Gore, Violence, CLIFFHANGER

The fire behind me raged, devouring the trees, licking at the sky with its flames. The heat wrapped around me like a second skin, but I barely felt it. The crackling of the burning forest, the distant screams of the dying woodland, the chaos—it all faded into static.

Because there, standing before me, was my wife.

And she stood tall and proud. But was in a tarnished state.

A silence so deafening pressed against my skull, my own heartbeat the only thing I could hear.

One.

I drank her in, slowly, methodically.

Her ankles—raw, torn, bleeding.
Shackles.

Two.

The broken anklet. My anklet. Her left anklet—the one I clasped around her ankle myself—was snapped, smeared with blood. Snapped like the brittle bones of the hands that would soon pay for it.

Three.

Her dress. That was not her dress. She would never willingly wear anything like that. So, they had changed her into these pathetic one—or what was left of it—hanging from her frame in tattered, soot-covered rags.

Four.

Bruises. So many bruises.

Purple, blue, red—angry welts defiling the skin that should only ever know tenderness, and should remain unblemished. only ever know me.

Five.

Her face.

The raw mark of a slap still burning across her cheek. The cut on her lower lip, crusted over with dried blood, against the trembling softness of her mouth.

A muscle in my jaw twitched.

Six.

Her hair.