Sinnerman

Chapter 9 Dignity & Despair

4 Weeks later

The next time Kylo is sat down across from her. Evie has never realised she could feel such pain on another human beings behalf. But she feels it for Kylo. She feels it then - a sharp pang in her heart like a piercing hot dagger - when she sees the sorry state of him;

When he lowers down into the seat. He moves slowly, too slowly, carefully. Almost wincing when his torso shifted. She held no false illusions as to diagnosing his pain: he'd been beaten. Hard. She watches his glance wash over her as his cuffs are attended too.

They'd clapped him in full body irons like a disgraced circus animal. A dangerous attraction, scarred, beaten and brought to heel. Beasts in the Circus always seemed the most pitiful sight to her. A glorious, wild, beautiful animal reduced to prancing and performing for the entertainment of others. Trodden down. And kept in chains.

Chains wrapped around his waist. Joined his feet. Kept his hands closely bound to his body. And they did remember to fix him into the table this time.

His face was bruised and the several cuts that split his skin looked recent. A gash above his eyebrow looked swollen. It almost married with the blossoming spread of a purple-blue bruise under his eye. His plump lower lip was split too. And the highest plane of his cheekbone bore another dark, ugly bruise surrounding another thin fissure in the skin.

She swallows back something sour and sad that feels like grief stinging the back of her throat. She's angry too, but that isn't what consumes her. That will come later when the guard makes a snotty comment to him. Or when Finch undoubtedly reminds him whose in charge with that horrible, coffee stained sneer, that shows off his crooked smile.

She has a persistently domestic wish taking up all thought in her head at the moment: a desire to rub an ointment balm on those wounds to help them heal. Helping cleanse away the cuts of dried blood on his face with a flannel. Silly stupid romantic notions. Holding an ice pack to his sore face to calm the swelling.

She'd have to start giving those sappy Veronica Henry novels she loves so much, a rest, she thinks. Or she'll start imagining herself as Florence Nightingale mopping the poor man's fevered brow.

He looked at her across the table like he usually does. With that expression of his she had never quite learned how to read. And the start of his trademark curling smirk tugging on his battered lips. Face: as ever impassive. Eyes: as ever, assessing.

He watched her adorable little face fall the second he was shuffled into view. That furrow so deeply set in her brow, it bunched up her whole forehead. She swallowed and he saw her eyes flicker across every wound of his visible to view. He watched her small body hunched up in her seat as she gazes at him with an expression and air to her, like a kicked puppy.

"Kitten. I've had far worse." He explains when the guard sidles away. Today they are given no liberties. A guard stands watch in the room. One stationed outside the door too.

She shuffled in her seat. Not saying a thing. Then again. She didn't need too. She opens her mouth and he answers before she can speak.

"I can read your earnest, worried little face like a book." He tells. Resting his arms on the table. His back and shoulders were too sore to lean against anything. He seriously suspects Finch may have broken one or two of his ribs. Again.