TRIGGER WARNING: This chapter contains depiction of drugging a woman's drink to keep her subdued and further implication of somnophilia and just pure nightmare fuel...
CHAPTER SONG: "The Devil in the Ocean" by Erik Enocksson (from the 2013 film 'For Those in Peril' starring George MacKay)
March 18th, 2020
Richmond, Virginia
Emmanuelle Hunterson slammed the door to Erik's car, feeling his ever-watching gaze on her as she turned away from him without a goodbye or even looking behind her for a farewell glance.
If God knew what sins they had committed in that vehicle, He'd send them both to Hell. It'd certainly be preferable to being in his company for another second, having his hands all over her and being trapped in his inescapable grip, welded to his side...
The rain splattered on top of her head and soaked her blouse and skirt as she opened the door to her apartment complex, the urge to vomit nearly making her bend over and retch in the lobby, but she gathered up her wits and made her way up the steps, anxious to get inside her modest dwellings, strip herself bare and scrub every inch of her skin raw in the shower to rid her body of any trace of her employer's patron...
With herself as the payment on the side for Erik's generosity...
The thunder rumbled outside as Emmy finally arrived at her apartment door and unlocked it to let herself inside. Immediately, she kicked her flats off her feet and threw her purse down onto the wooden table by her small sofa.
She went to her tiny kitchen, pulled out her only bottle of sweet red wine and poured herself a glass half full , allowing it to sit and brew while she went to bathe...
Her hands began to unbutton her blouse as she went to the bedroom, clutching her phone in her other hand.
Ignoring the rumble of hunger in her stomach, she took a long hot shower while blasting out some Muse from her iPhone speaker. The scorching hot water burned her skin into a pink color, the steam making her relax, but her muscles were still tense as she scrubbed herself with multiple soaps, cleansing herself of Erik's nauseating use of her body as his personal plaything...
Emmy turned off the water and squeezed out the water from her hair and wrapped up her head into a towel before covering her body into a larger towel. As she stepped out of the shower and onto the bathroom rug, she looked up in alertness at the sound of a creak on the floor...
Was it from inside her apartment...or from the floor above hers? She couldn't tell, but then she didn't hear the sound again as she held her breath to listen closer. Turning down the music from her phone, Emmy dressed into a pair of small shorts and a loose gray t-shirt.
Her wild brunette hair hanged loose around her shoulders to air dry as she went back out to the kitchen and took a few sips of her wine. She wasn't one to normally drink as such after a work shift, but the whole ordeal with Erik called for her sorrows to be drowned out...
Emmy took a larger swig of her drink, swallowing it with a satisfied gulp as the expected numbness filled her head... or was it?
She set her glass down onto the counter, her hand feeling heavy as though she couldn't move it... She lifted her other hand to her head, a sensation of dizziness spreading through her equilibrium as she pushed herself away from the counter, desperate to make it to the couch before she collapsed to the floor...
What was happening?
Every limb of Emmy's body felt heavy, her arms hanging useless at her sides and her feet too weighed down to properly allow her to walk...
Her vision began to blur and a ringing assaulting her ears almost made her beg for unconsciousness...
A groan emitted from her mouth as her body slumped backward as her legs wobbled in the effort to support her weight...
She never hit the floor as a pair of vice-like arms wrapped around her waist and a solid chest caught her upper body... She recognized the nauseating cologne that belonged to the man holding her...
His warm breath in her ear that accompanied the ringing pitch...
"Just relax my little Schatzi. I thought you needed a little something with your wine to help you wind down." Erik crooned in her ear as though he were explaining a surprise of romantic intent when really it was a scenario of rohypnol induced fear.
"Let...let me go..." Just those three words Emmy could barely speak as her speech slurred, her tongue completely stuck inside her mouth. Screaming for help was impossible with her voice barely able to muster a sound.
Emmy's vision continued to blur, but amidst the uneven shapes and colors, she could decipher Erik's large, domineering form as she turned her head to meet his gaze even though her ability to speak was handicapped...
"I just wanted to properly bid you goodbye before your trip, my little darling." Erik bent down and lifted up the incapacitated woman into his arms as though she were nothing but a dried leaf, a rag doll with no agency. "Still, you oughta be careful with where you hide your spare key to your apartment, my dear Emmanuelle."
Emmy found herself only able to make a whimpering sound as her head hanged limp, lolling over Erik's arm, her neck hurting in the position in which she was laying in the grasp of a predator successfully capturing his prey twice in one evening.
The drugged fog clouded her senses as she looked up at the hazy sight of the wretched man holding her, taking his sweet time as he carried her through her small living den. One of her arms hung lifeless in the air, dangling in the manner of a deceased animal and her other arm rested on her stomach in a similar way as though she were snuggled in bed. She could feel Erik's silently gleeful gaze looking down at her in the most vulnerable position he had seen her.
Emmy could imagine how they both appeared, the demonstration of an iconic image of a beautiful unprotected maiden being absconded with by a dastardly villain with the vilest implications meant for her...
"The drug I laced your wine with is only meant to make you completely still, little Emmy. You'll be weak as a kitten for quite awhile... and I intend to be here when you finally close those beautiful eyes of yours. Having you in my arms this way... I've never felt so fulfilled, my precious jewel." A note of malicious excitement entered his voice as Erik slightly turned his body as he carried a helpless Emmy through the threshold of her bedroom door.
He stood before Emmy's neatly made bed, nary a wrinkle seen in the blue covers or white pillows. His neat little goddess of cleanliness, she would do a flawless job keeping THEIR home in prim and proper order... Erik turned his attention to the woman fighting to stay half-conscious, her green eyes glazed with the delirium of sedation. He held her up closer against his chest, her slight weight barely causing much effort for his body as his arm cradled her small back. He watched her fragile throat constrict with a gulp of fright as her eyes blinked open and closed. A growl of territorial instinct rumbled within his blackened soul as he bent his head down, the tip of his nose skimming the center of Emmy's neck and his lips pressed a bruising kiss to the center of such a tempting appendage underneath her chin...
And there was enough to say about her supple breasts concealed from him with her tight t-shirt... How heavenly she would look in lingerie or even in nothing at all... His fingers ached to disrobe her, to view her in her most natural state while remaining unconscious in her bed, to anoint her with expensive lotions and oils.
"P...please..." Her weakened voice managed to croak out as the greedy benefactor of her career placed her upon the mattress, her head landing on the soft pillow.
"Be afraid not, little darling. I've already tasted everything you have to offer for tonight. My appetites have been satisfied for the time being." Erik sat himself on the twin bed beside the paralyzed woman, looking over her as she turned to glare at him with glassy eyes of green and bloodshot whites. "I only desire to see you sink into the sea of dreams tonight."
Emmy looked up at him, trying with all her might to move her arms so she could push herself away from him, but her muscles wouldn't respond.
Erik only smirked down at her frightened expression as he reached over and turned off the lamp at her bedside table, the only source of light originating from the moon emerging from the clouded sky. The darkness surrounding them only served to give Emmy's unconsciousness ideas for her nightmares once she fell asleep tonight...
The man hovering above her the monster meaning to take away her sense of safety and she the dainty damsel in distress about to succumb to the ether of a never-ending black abyss...
"Go to hell." She whispered with all the spite she could muster given her involuntary intoxication...
"I believe that's enough rebellion from you for one night, my fiery beauty." Erik clicked his tongue as though he were an irritated parent about to discipline their child. "You'll sleep now...down into the depths you'll submerge where you won't resurface for many hours."
He reached to her face and twirled away her soaked hair where a couple strands were stuck at the corner of her mouth. His fingertips petted her flushed cheek as though her flesh were made of a fragile flower petal.
Erik reached into his pocket and pulled out a small Ziploc bag that had inside a white rectangle pad and a clear liquid in which it was soaking.
Emmy shook her head so that she was facing away from him as she placed together what was in the bag.
He was going to chloroform her into a forced sleep...
"No...no!" Emmy cried in a cracked whisper with her dried throat.
"Don't be afraid, my fearful one. This won't harm you, it'll only make you be asleep. And you'll dream peacefully." Erik comforted her with an annoyed tone to his voice. "You'll awaken in the morning. But for now, you'll be floating and drowning in the deepest waters of painless sleep."
Tears flowed down Emmy's numb face as the man leaning over her spoke as though he were reading aloud from a fairytale book and he ignored how afraid she truly was. She managed to gain more strength in her own voice, but her body remained weakened. "I hate you, the sound of your voice, the sight of you."
"I don't care anymore, little princess." Erik pulled out the soaked pad as his eyes went blank with all emotion but concentration. "I want all of you, in all ways. And you'll just have to hate me forever at my side and in my bed, sweet Emmanuelle. Now, it's time for you to close your pretty eyes and take a deep breath."
Emmy inhaled a gasp of refusal as Erik grabbed her chin to keep her head still and he held the pad tightly to her nose and mouth. She breathed in the fume of anesthetic substance as her moonlit vision of Erik blurred into incomprehensible shapes until she saw nothing but black. She groaned in protest as she sunk down further into the swirling dark as though she were being buried alive...
"Shh, my dove... Your breaths will calm from a moan into a coo like the little bird you are. Your pulse will be steady in your veins. Your delicious lips and cheeks shaming the reddest of roses and the most exquisite of blossoms..." His chilling voice mockingly soothed her as though he were lulling her into a trance...
Her gasping subsided as Erik observed her become completely at rest. Emmy heard nothing but silence as the slumber claimed her and her panting relaxed into the normal rhythm of her lungs absorbing oxygen. Her eyelids closed as her green orbs of splendor rolled into her head and she eased further into the mattress. Erik removed the pad from her face, his fingers stroking the roundness of her hot-blooded cheeks, her pink blush emphasizing her magnificence...even Aphrodite herself would feel plain at the sight of the fair ingénue lying before him in ratty pajamas torn with hand-me-down wear... And a perverse pride in himself that he hadn't marked her face with bruises from the force of sedating her.
Her body would be better served in a glittering nightgown of sheer ivory white, soft like lace canopy; she would be beyond human splendor, pure incandescence...
Erik's metaphorical poisoned apple had worked on his own Snow White... All that she needed was a coffin with a glass lid to preserve her from spoiling or rotting. His Emmanuelle, his sleeping beauty incarnate and he couldn't resist sampling the experience of laying by her side at last. He laid himself beside the unconscious woman and absorbed the sight of her...
He imagined an alternative to keeping her if she wouldn't be his as a wife...
If he had to take her far away where nobody knew them and keep her as a possession... how he would even be pleased to see her like this forever. She would make a precious ornament to decorate his household, not as a beaming bride, but as a flesh and blood personification of the Sleeping Beauty legend herself. He could imagine placing her in a glass coffin, eternal slumber of death rendering her lifeless as her immaculate brilliance alone would brighten even the darkest days ahead...
She would be his sunshine and sunset, Erik's own treasured Aurora...
Her breath would forever be still, her blood congealed as her heart would cease beating, her fair skin translucent with the pale pallor of a ghost ... Like the averting of Juliet Capulet reviving in her family tomb...
His menacing thoughts overtook his mind as he enfolded an arm around her stomach, staring at her closed eyelids... His hand grasping hers as he rested them on her abdomen.
His nose nuzzled her hair, tickling her flushed apple blossom cheek before moving to her shoulder, inhaling the soap fragrance perfuming her goosebump riddled skin resulting from her shower. Erik then dared to rest his ear on her bosom, breathing in sync with the rise of her breasts and the pacing of her strong heartbeat.
His own Briar Rose waiting to be kissed by a valiant champion from her girlish fantasies...
Erik then remembered himself and came back to his senses, pulling himself away from his lust fueled primal instincts, sitting up straight again on the bed and readjusting his suit collar. His eyes never left the prone, unaware object of his abhorrent fixation as he prepared to leave before she woke up, which still wouldn't be for many hours.
His fingertips ran down the delicate column of her swan-like neck, so breakable he could snap it like a toothpick with merely one hand.
He dared to pick out his phone from his pocket and snap a picture of her sleeping form, focusing on her angelic face, her dark lashes curtaining her eyelids like the fluttering of butterfly wings, her slightly open lips pink as a foundling rosebud in bloom... her mahogany hair a waterfall of melted chocolate on her pillowcase.
He placed her small hands upon her stomach to rest on top of one another as though she were being prepared for burial at a funeral. The soft sounds of her breathing made him want to remain with her for the rest of the night until the sun began to rise on the horizon.
But for now, he settled with recording her on his phone as he pulled the sheets and comforter from underneath Emmy and settled them over her up to her chin where mainly her head was visible, centered perfectly in the middle of the bed. Erik formed the covers into a tight cocoon to encircle her body as though to restrain her rather than keep her warm.
Her face remained impassive under Erik's invading her personal vicinity, every breath she took rendering him fascinated and wanting even more than what she had given him only hours ago. The demons inhabiting within the man's increasingly insane mind calmed enough to where he was finally able to leave the room and depart from Emmy's side, but not before allowing his trembling fingers to hover above her lips, her mouth just barely open to allow the beauty to exhale against his hand in her deep dozing.
Erik's voice whispered to her, his fingertips moving from her lips to caress her jawline and chin...
"You may have already given me your body to sample...but soon I will own you, either alive or dead." His nose grazed hers as he growled to her his threat toned with seduction. "I'll have your answer, and I will have you, little Emmanuelle. You'll be stripped, chained and placed on my mantle to adore and pride myself with you as my greatest trophy." His own lips brushed hers with an unfeeling phantom sensation of a kiss, his stubble scratching her flawless face with the coarseness of sandpaper.
His tall brutish form turned away from the unresponsive dreamer still anesthetized in the swirling void of sleep he had forced upon her.
If God was generous to him, she would never resurface from the whirlpool of ether, asleep forever... And how tempted he had been to spirit her away from this small apartment of hers and take her to his penthouse...
How he could envision her motionless in his king sized bed, wrapped in his blankets of priceless furs and silken sheets, her sweet head comfortably sinking into the pillows fluffed with the softness of down feathers and her glorious hair splayed across his patterned pillowcases...
If she agreed to be his, every luxury she could fantasize about would be laid at her feet.
If she refused, he would render her a silent addition to his collection of beautiful objects. She would be the beautiful sleeping death forever... her permanent residence the inside of a glass coffin like an exhibit in a museum... Enshrined to him Emmanuelle would be, if not wed to him in matrimony...
Erik disappeared in the shadows, closing the bedroom door and leaving the apartment as stealthily and quickly as possible.
Emmy's spare key laid on her bedside table.
She continued to lie lifeless in her bed, buried in the sheets and covers and the moonlight shining through her window and onto her heavenly form as she slumbered on, temporarily free of the monster's smothering presence.
She knew Erik would kill her to keep her...
She would accept death if it meant freedom from a man who didn't truly love her...
Amidst the frightening blackness of her chloroform clouded dreams, a calmness enfolded her into a sense of safety and she saw a pair of blue eyes that were worlds different from Erik's. Eyes of pure misty blue that looked at her  with a deep seated desire to pull her out of the water... before it changed into milky thick liquid like ink, a sticking ooze that pulled her legs deep down into its depths before it rose to her thighs...
Emmy's waist sunk down... then her  stomach, her struggling to swim through the slime sinking her further down, ascending to her chest... then her collarbone... her throat... The liquid savoring to devour the girl as though her body was a meal to be consumed and ravaged.
She was submerged now up to her chin and she kicked with all her might to keep her head above the surface. Her arms managed to reach out above the black sinkhole, as she clawed at the empty air out in the darkness like a desperate sailor fallen overboard into the storming ocean.
Emmy was reminded of the princess Jasmine in the movie "Aladdin" when she was trapped in the hourglass, scarlet desert sand pouring down on her and slowly enveloping her body to entomb her and slowly kill her with agonizing suffocation, buried alive within mere minutes and her fire quenched until her hero broke her free. Emmy remembered watching the film as a child, scared for the animated princess as the sand rose up to her waist and she pounded furiously on the glass, calling out her love Aladdin's name to save her. The sand was up to her shoulders...then her neck...and past the bridge of her nose as Jasmine's large eyes were wide with fear, the sand pebbles raining down on her hair before completely burying her head...and finally her outreached hand sunk beneath the sand's surface and the princess's fingers vanished within its depths to be a dying desert flower...
And now Emmy was in the same situation...and nobody would pull her to safety...
Emmy fought with all her strength as the ooze rose up past her jaw, crawling up to her lips as she clamped them shut, but her voice screamed for help toward the blue eyes staring down at her. The burning scorched her tongue with its acidic taste flooding her mouth, enflaming her throat as she accidentally swallowed and choked on the liquid submerging her like quicksand.
Her mouth was now underneath, the fluid substance millimeters from her nostrils as the stench of ink invaded her nose along with the dizzying aroma of chloroform. Emmy leaned back her head, her gurgled speech choking out another cry for help at the frightened blue eyes...and only then did she realize that she was stranded in an ocean of inky depths with no port in the storm.
And then she was no longer drowning in ink, the ebony color of the entrapping whirlpool replaced by the scarlet horror of blood...
A terrified strangled scream was rendered  silent from her  submerged mouth as a liter of blood was swallowed by the slowly sinking woman, her body convulsing with her gag reflex overwhelmed with her involuntary consumption of the liquid drinking her up. Emmy's nostrils were next to disappear, more syrupy  blood flowing into them and her head almost halfway sunk beneath the thick substance. The blue mystery eyes remained unable to help, Emmy's head submerged in blood  that climbed the length of  her nose, up to her eyes and they already stung with tears as she shut them tightly. She was literally drowning in blood, every part of her senses in pain as her lungs struggled to hold her breath.
She was pulled further down inch by  crushing inch, centimeter by excruciating centimeter...
Sinking... sinking... dying...
Her eyelids were submerged now... gluing her eyelashes together...
It  crawled up her forehead...then her scalp... her hair soaked with blood as her head completely sank underneath... Her brown tresses floating around her head like stained ribbons absorbing the liquid.
Emmy's lips were still open, allowing more blood to flow into her mouth and throat as though she were simply drowning in water. Her body convulsed again with the agony in her lungs as she no longer had the will or constitution to hold her breath. With her eyelids closed, the deep darkness of red faded to nightmare black as her body shut down...bubbles of withheld oxygen emerging from her mouth, floating up to the surface, her arms still outstretched above until her muscles wilted.
As more bubbles patterned the blood's surface, the drowned girl was dragged further below...her elbows vanished next, then her arms were sinking beneath at an achingly slow pace like the blood was slowly caressing the length of her limbs...
Then her wrists sunk down... her palms...
And her fingers twitched while staying afloat above the surface...all the bubbles popped without any others coming up to replace them... the blood's thirst for her flesh was satiated...still so slow as it consumed her fingernails...her fingertips...
And the dead girl was gone...
To be suffocated not only by chloroform, but to float in the watery grave of an oozing pool of death...her body and soul claimed by the underworld as she sunk and swirled further down... Eurydice descending into her permanent crypt where nobody would find her...
"May you enjoy eternal damnation as I offered you the world, schatzi. Now you will rot in the sea of rejected souls... there will  be nobody to rescue you from being the harlot of Hades himself." Erik's voice mocked her in the thunderous air although she no longer heard anything at all.
Her last conscious functional thought being that she was like Jasmine in the hourglass...
The brunette girl's soul separated from her pale deceased body, eternally a prisoner of Death...
The mysterious blue eyes that this endangered girl had begged to help her with her final dying gasp filled with tears of guilt and mourning as they watched with crippling anxiety of any sign of life beneath the crimson ocean...ripples, bubbles, a small hand breaking the surface to reach out...
After a few moments of deafening silence, the blood changed to an eerie midnight blue and the girl's corpse resurfaced into the eyes' view. Her own eyes remained closed, her eyelids and cheeks darkened with the rouge of blood-red, her once voluminous hair a dull brown likening to dried mud, the long strands floating around her head like a halo...a wingless angel cast down from the heavens above only for a the most torturous demise to befall her.
Her body was clothed in a yellow gown of the purest woven gold, her small feet bare as the water lowered around her inert form and the waves glided her to lay upon a bed of small length just to accommodate her petite height, her hands folded just below her breasts that remained unmoving with no life in her lungs...
The fair drowned Emmanuelle lay on the bed, cushioned upon the many pillows and to ensure her comfort even though she was a non-breathing vessel of expired life... A bouquet of red and black poppies lay upon her lap where her hands rested, a wreath of Queen Anne cherry blossoms crowned on her head and her hair strewn on the fleece threaded pillowcase.
A thin gossamer veil laced of spinning silk shielded her body, a final touch to place upon the dead woman before she was forever buried. The waves of the ocean crashed around the small island that was her resting place...
The blue eyes that had witnessed her drowning had disappeared...and in their place was the owner of those eyes who now looked down at the young maiden for whom his grieving heart longed to die in sorrow at her sacred bedside.
Orpheus mourning his love Eurydice trapped in Hades' dominion...
Hamlet sobbing for his equally drowned dearest Ophelia...
Romeo joining his sweetest Juliet in her family mausoleum and weeping in her comatose embrace...
This youthful everyman rogue, only named William, was not a grand hero...but he had to try to rescue his paramour from the clutches of this deathly spell...
There were some things not even love could change...but he could do every attempt to save Emmanuelle's soul even at the cost of his own life...
Flowery words of poetic romance or a mere kiss upon her candy lips wouldn't bring her back... All he could do was take action.
His gentle fingers petted her cheek through the thin veil covering her, cold to the touch when he wished with all his might to feel her warmth and vibrancy and saintly beauty... His forehead brushing with hers in a silent proclamation of his love...
His tears landed right above her eyelids upon the veil, dripping through to soak her eyelashes...
He went to the precipice of the small inlet of land, taking one more glance at his Emmy, who remained motionless and stiff as though the coffin had been permanently closed and all hope was lost...
Hope was a dangerous thing, after all...
Will inhaled a deep breath and dived into the water's hellish depths...swimming down, down into an abyss of darkness...into the underworld depths of misplaced souls departed too soon from the world...
He had never been more terrified, but he had to face this for her...
A life without her would be empty and joyless like daytime without the sun's brightness and the night without the stars and moon's illumination...
He kicked his arms and legs to swim even deeper down into this whirlpool of churning death, vigilantly scanning the floating souls, translucent and eyes wide open as they rode the strengthening current to be devoured evermore by Hades to keep himself alive...
His lungs protested at the length he was holding his breath...until at last he saw her...
His Emmanuelle, so luminescent and flawless. Her eyes closed as though she were only sleeping, her lips in an unconscious frown of relief from the torment endured upon her life fading away, her brow furrowed as though she were trapped in a troubling dream, her hair encircling the apparitional glow  around her head in ghostly tendrils.
Will swam faster toward her, as she floated further out of his reach, leading him down into the belly of the beast...the Devil awaiting her arrival in the bowels of the Earth as his maiden sacrifice...
To keep her as his own Persephone...
Will swam further with more fury at the vision of this Hades holding his sweet Emmy's soul literally in his grasp, upon his throne to rule at his side as his mistress, or to capture her as a morbid memento of feminine perfection in the world of mortal humans, her unconscious soul entrapped in her own coffin where the Lord of the Dead would look upon her whenever he desired, his eyes glazed with lust and fascination, his hands reaching out to taint her with his wickedness...
No! That would never happen!
Emmy's hand was mere inches away from William's outstretched fingers as they both descended further into the whirlpool, closing down into its center towards Hades' domain...
Will reached out closer to her...
Closer...closer... He was about to save her, his reason for living, his future...
His fingertips barely grazing her palm... aiming to clasp his hand around her wrist...
"Emmy!" Will cried out to her, though her face presented no response to his speaking her name...
.
.
April 23rd, 1917
"Emmy! Emmanuelle!"
Emmy Hunterson's eyes shot open as the frazzled voice of a familiar tone unmistakably the same as her savior in her nightmare turned dream of improvised mythology...
Her William was here! He would rescue her in all ways humanly possible... He was her salvation...
Her eyes tried to keep focus on her surroundings as a train whistle echoed in the air around them. She was lying in a bed, in a train stateroom, the floor rumbling underneath her with the locomotive's movements.
A cool pressing of cloth soaked her forehead as her vision cleared to see her soldier, her now dressed Lance Corporal Schofield leaning over her as he gently dabbed her temples and cheeks with a damp rag. Her head was supported by the comfortable pillow, making her realize that her hair had been loosened from her tightened braid.
She slowly sat up, fighting the lightheaded feeling of her head and looked to see Will at his water basin, soaking the rag again with water.
"William...what happened?" She croaked out her question, shocked by the scratchy quality of her voice.
Her Lance Corporal, ever handsome in his blue uniform tunic, turned fully before meeting her eyes, his hands holding the dripping rag and a glass of ice cold water.
His reverent gaze held nothing but concern and unquestionable care as he handed her the glass and dabbed her face again with the rag now soaked with warm water instead of cold...
"My beloved, you were crying out, having a deep nightmare. It shocked me awake and I tried to pull you out of it." Will's ever patient tone to his voice conveyed his evident worry directed towards her. He pulled the rag away from her face. "It scared me so much I was close to searching the entire train for doctor or even a hypnotist."
Will chuckled to himself at the somewhat absurd idea of consulting someone like a hypnotist...but he would've sought out the King himself if he had the ability to aid his American sweetheart and bring her back to the land of the living...
Emmy felt his eyes watching her, making certain she drank enough of the water until it was past half empty before she set it down on the wooden bed table.
"Did I say anything strange?" She asked him, hoping he would be honest with her and not lie for the sake of her silly dignity.
"You called out a name many times. I believe it was 'Erik'." William reached up to her face and swiped away a piece of stray brunette hair off her forehead, still slick with some sweat. "Was he someone from your era, somebody you knew well?"
Emmy looked to him, tears forming in her eyes at the sound of the name that haunted her dreams and transformed them into nightmares of terror and dread and violation.
Will immediately sat closer to her, his large hands rubbing her shoulders as he awaited her answer.
"Yes...I...know him..." Emmy found her voice strangled as she tried to form words to explain. "I don't wanna hide anything from you, Will...even you may not love me anymore once you've heard everything."
"Emmanuelle Julia Hunterson... I would never cause you such heartbreak, my darling." One of his huge hands cupped both of her dainty ones in his hold as he pulled her closer to enfold his other arm about her shoulders. "I want to know everything if it will make you feel better. I cannot bare to see you trapped in such nightmares if this man has been the one to cause them for you."
"You've no idea what a truly sick mind can be capable of until you've experienced such horrors, Will." Emmy sobbed as she leaned further into his chest, her nose grazing his clavicle. "Just being around him...and how he would touch me...and treat me like a thing and not a person... to be at the center of someone's twisted obsession..."
Will inhaled a sharp breath of disbelief at her words and he recalled what she had said about being violated the previous night in her cabin. The disbelief turned to rage as the normally controlled soldier internalized his anger, so passionate he was certain he'd never felt such a sensation and he didn't even know what this fiend terrorizing the woman he cherished looked like...
"Tell me everything, Emmy." Will patiently encouraged for her own emotional sake, his fingers stroking her cheek with his scarred hand. "I swear on my deepest love for you that I won't judge or shame you... You're the bravest, loveliest, most amazing woman to ever grace this God-made earth."
"Thank you, William." Emmy sniffled as he lifted up one of her hands to his lips and kissed her fingers...