MY RUIN: In Love With My Step-Uncle-Chapter 38 - Thirty-Eight: Weight of Blood

//CLARA//

The cold came first.

It crept between my shoulder blades where his release still clung, drying tacky against my skin, and I shivered violently once before my body remembered how to breathe without his weight pinning me to the oak.

The tree’s bark had left red impressions across my frontside. I could feel them now, each ridge and whorl translated into raised flesh, a topographical map of what we’d done.

Casimir stood mere feet away. His shirt gaped open, buttons torn or missing, and the scratches I’d left across his chest had begun to weep thin lines of blood. But he was no longer looking at me. He was staring at his hand.

I followed his gaze. His right hand, the one that had worked between my legs with brutal precision—palm up, fingers slightly curled. There was blood there. Not much. A smear across the heel of his palm, darker at the creases of his knuckles.

My blood. The evidence of my virginity, or what remained of it, catalogued in his skin like ink.

Right, Eleanor’s still virgin as Mary.

His hand began to shake.

"Casimir." My voice came out rough, scraped raw by his mouth, by the creek’s damp air, by the things I’d screamed when he was inside me. "Casimir, look at me."

His eyes tracked from his palm to my face, then back to his hand, and something in his expression curdled. Not horror, but more corrosive. Recognition. The look of a man who has committed a crime and found himself holding the weapon.

"I’ve ruined you." The words barely carried over the creek’s roar, but I heard them anyway. He’d said them before, breathless and spent, but now they emerged flat. Certain. "God help me, Eleanor, I’ve—"

"Clara." The correction cut through his fog. I stepped toward him, my skirts catching on underbrush, my torn corset hanging loose beneath the bodice he’d half-ripped from my shoulders. "My name is Clara. You don’t get to forget it now."

His jaw tightened. The muscle there jumped, a spasm of control failing.

"Don’t." One syllable, cracked at the edges. "Don’t make this into—"

He gestured vaguely, his bloody hand slicing through the cold air between us.

"I know what I’ve done. I know what this costs you."

"Do you?" I was close enough now to see the sweat cooling on his temples, the way his chest heaved not with exertion but with something trapped beneath his ribs. "Tell me, then. What have you done? What has it cost me?"

He laughed, but it sounded like a glass cracking.

"Everything." The word scraped out of him. "Your reputation. Your prospects. Your—" 𝐟𝕣𝕖𝐞𝐰𝕖𝚋𝐧𝗼𝚟𝐞𝕝.𝗰𝐨𝐦

He caught himself, throat working.

"Bartholomew would have taken you with your virtue intact. Now no one will have you. I’ve made you worthless on the marriage market, and for what? For this?"

His hand closed into a fist, the blood darkening his knuckles. "For fifteen minutes against a tree?"

I struck him.

Not hard—not the way I’d hit him before, when we were fighting toward this instead of away from it. My palm connected with his jaw, a sharp crack that echoed off the water, and his head snapped sideways. When he turned back, his eyes were wet.

"Don’t you dare," I said. My hand stung. I wanted to hit him again. "Don’t you dare make this about your nobility, your sacrifice, your—"

I grabbed his wrist, the one with my blood on it, and yanked his hand between us.

"This is not a tragedy you orchestrated for my benefit. I was here. I chose this. I wanted this."

His fingers twitched in my grip. The blood had begun to dry, pulling at his skin, and I could feel his pulse rabbiting against my thumb.

"You don’t understand—"

"I understand perfectly." I stepped closer, close enough that my torn bodice brushed his open shirt, that I could smell the sweat and moss and something darker on his skin.

"You think you’ve stolen something from me. You think you’ve marked me as damaged goods, and now you’re preparing to play the penitent villain in whatever drama you’ve composed."

I tightened my grip on his wrist until I felt his bones shift.

"I am not your victim, Casimir. I am not the old Eleanor, or some porcelain doll you shattered in a moment of weakness. I fucked you because I wanted to. And if you call me ruined one more time, I will find a way to make you regret it."

His breath came out ragged. I watched the words land, watched him struggle to process them through the nineteenth-century machinery of his guilt—duty, honor, female virtue, the entire edifice of his social world that had just, in his mind, collapsed on my head.

His eyes searched my face, looking for the lie, the delusion, the hysteria that would explain why I wasn’t weeping.

"You can’t simply decide—" he started.

"I can and I have."

I released his wrist and stepped back, suddenly aware of the cold again, of the wetness between my thighs, of how thoroughly my body had been used and how little I regretted it.

"The question is whether you’re capable of accepting it, or if you’d rather wallow in your own villainy because it’s more comfortable than acknowledging that I might have wanted you."

He stared at me. The creek roared on, swallowing the silence that stretched between us until I thought I might scream just to fill it.

Then his shoulders dropped. Not much—an inch, perhaps two—but I saw it. The rigid line of his spine curved, just slightly, and his hand—the bloody one—rose to cover his face.

"Your dress," he said, muffled. "Your—Christ, your corset is in pieces. Aunt Cornelia will know. Everyone will know."

"Then they’ll know." I gathered my skirts, suddenly aware of how exposed I remained. "Help me, or don’t. But decide which version of this story you’re telling. The one where you ravished me, or the one where we chose each other, because I won’t play the weeping innocent for your conscience."

He lowered his hand. His eyes were red-rimmed, but something had shifted in his expression, some gear grinding into a new alignment.

"The cravat," he said. "Give me a moment."

He turned away, retrieving it from where it has been abandoned, and I watched him work at the knot of his silk cravat with fingers that still trembled.

He pulled it open with a soft hiss of silk against linen and turned back, holding it out.

"For your—" He gestured vaguely at my lower body, then at my back where his release still marked me. "It’s not adequate, but—"

I took it. The silk was cold from the mist, and I used it first between my legs, wiping away the mingled evidence of what we’d done. The fabric dragged against sensitive flesh, and I hissed at the contact, still swollen, still tender. Casimir looked away, his jaw tight.

"Don’t," I said. "Don’t perform modesty for me now."

His gaze snapped back, sharp with something that wasn’t quite anger. "I’m trying to—"

"You’re trying to manage the situation. To restore some sense of propriety." I turned, presenting him with my back, and handed him the cravat over my shoulder. "Clean me properly, or don’t touch me at all."

He took the fabric. I felt his hesitation in the stillness of his hand, in the breath he held before his fingers made contact with my spine. The silk slowly dragged upward, gathering what he’d left there. His touch was light, suddenly too careful, as if I might shatter under pressure.

"I can feel you flinching," I said, not turning. "Stop it."

"You’re bruised." His voice had gone strange, thick. "Clara, your chest—there are marks from the bark, and my fingers, and I—" The cravat paused at my shoulder blade. "I bit you here. I can see the teeth marks."

"I know."

I looked back at him over my shoulder, catching his expression in fragments—the parted lips, the blown pupils, the look of a man who has woken from a fever dream to find the damage real.

"I was there too. I remember."

His hand dropped. The cravat hung from his fingers, ruined. I turned, and the cold air hit my exposed skin, raising gooseflesh across my chest where the torn corset no longer provided cover. I didn’t try to hide it. Let him look. Let him see what he’d done and what I refused to regret.

He was looking at my throat. I followed his gaze down and found the mark he’d left there, a darkening bruise just above my collarbone where his teeth had closed hard enough to draw a sound from me that I hadn’t known I could make.

"I should—" He stopped. Started again. "We should return. Before we’re missed."

"Yes."

I began the work of rearranging my clothing, tucking the torn corset into some semblance of order, pulling my bodice across the gaps. It wouldn’t fool anyone close, but from a distance, in dim light, I might pass for merely disheveled rather than ravished.

"You’ll need to tell me what story we’re telling."