“Yes,” she whispered. “Like this, without the blood on your skin, you are my Flame, again.”  Maddie stirred the spoon again and said, “Can I feed you?”

“Yeah,” I replied and braced for her to move closer.

Maddie shuffled on her knees but she stopped just inches from my legs and said, “I will not touch you. I would never give you cause to distrust me like that.”

I relaxed, and a second later Maddie lifted the spoon to my mouth. The hot soup hit my tongue and I groaned. Viking normally made me my food. I didn’t know how to cook anything. But it never tasted like this.

Maddie was silent as she fed me the soup. My empty stomach suddenly felt full as the hot liquid ran down my throat.

And I watched her. I watched as she was calm at first, but the more I studied her, the more her hand began to shake. When the last of the soup was gone, she dropped the spoon to the bowl, and lowered her head.

I frowned.

Maddie’s small chest lifted with her breathing, but it was getting faster and faster. “Thank you,” I said. Maddie’s head snapped up.

“What for?”

“The soup,” I replied and her head lowered again. I didn’t understand why she wasn’t looking me in the eye.

“Maddie—”

“Do you believe that I am a sinner, Flame? Do you look at me and believe that the devil created me to tempt men?”

Instant anger raged through my veins at her question. My jaw clenched as I shook my head. “Fuck no,” I growled, my hands coming back to life as the flames that ran under my skin began to ignite.

Maddie placed the bowl down on the floor. “All of my life I was cast aside, along with my sisters. I was paraded through the commune as a child and the people were told by the elders that I was evil. That my looks; my hair, my skin, my eyes… my body, were perfectly crafted by the devil to tempt men to do evil things.”

I focused on breathing through my nostrils, to keep calm. But I was losing my shit. I couldn’t get the image of that fucked up commune from my head. Of that cunt Moses holding Maddie’s hand, that little hand that was mine, as people looked at her and hated her.

Maddie’s eyes held mine, and she quietly asked, “Do you think me beautiful, Flame?”

My heart slammed in my chest. “Yeah. The most beautiful,” I answered.

Maddie nodded, blushed, then asked, “Do you think I am evil?”

Unable to contain my anger, my hand fisted and I hit out at the empty bowl. It crashed along the floor and smashed apart.

Maddie stiffened, but inhaling a deep breath, she continued to speak. “Neither do I… now. But for years I believed it to be true, and I would question all of the time why God had singled me out, to spite me. Because I did not feel evil. And my sisters,” Maddie’s voice cracked and her eyes filled with water, “my sisters, to me, were not evil. They were perfect. Yet all of commune despised us. They would spit upon us as we walked by. And they would recite passages of deliverance to us, trying to rid the devil from our souls.”

Maddie’s hands, in her lap, trembled. “Then I turned six and my life went from being one of fear and loathing, to being one of pain and utter self-hatred. On my sixth birthday, Brother Moses came to take me away at eight in the morning.” She huffed a humorless laugh. “The birds had been singing outside, and I remember that it was incredibly hot. There was not a cloud in the perfectly blue sky. It truly was the most perfect of days… a day that ended in darkness. I did not know it then, but it would be the day to change it all.”

Maddie quickly wiped a tear that had fallen from her eye, and feeling all of her pain, my skin crawled.

“He took me, Flame. He took me in ways I do not think I will ever be able to divulge, as saying them aloud makes me feel it all over again. He did things I did not know were even possible. And every time he did, I believed more and more that I was a Cursed Woman of Eve. I believed I was inherently evil.”

Maddie shook her shoulders and took a deep breath. I stayed transfixed. I stayed transfixed on her pretty eyes. “And then Mae left. I had returned from a Lord’s Sharing to find Lilah sitting alone in our quarters. And she was crying. Mae had gone. But not only that, I found out that my elder sister, Bella, had been killed by Brother Gabriel for refusing his advances. It was why Mae ran. I remember praying with Lilah, the two of us believing that God was punishing us. Taking us one by one. I lived in fear for days. The Disciple Guards could not find Mae, and it drove them to such anger that it terrified me.”

Maddie’s breathing changed, the knuckles on her hands became white. The color had drained from her face, and with unfocused eyes, she said, “That was when they all came for me. All four elders. They believed my bloodline was tainted. That my blood ran with nothing but sin and evil. The bloodline I shared with Bella and Mae.”