Villain Month: Richard Khiro and Tabitha

I wrote and finished this just now, deathly tired and half-entranced from listening to Opeth. Bear this in mind while reading the excerpt.

With that said, Tabitha is already showing potential to be as interesting a character as Richard. Hopefully she can bring out his good side a bit more.

His new wife accepts Richard’s offered hand while stepping down from the carriage, and smiles wanly at his murmur of welcome. It is the first time they meet face to face. He recognizes the sweet, pointed chin from her photos, and the dimple in her left cheek, but her eyes hold a brightness the camera did not capture, a feverish gleam that gives hint to the darkness she has so recently left.

Yet as they walk across the courtyard, Tabitha slips her arm into his calmly enough. The move hitches up her lace glove and exposes the ugly marks upon her wrist, weathered yet raw, like skin chafed to bleeding repeatedly. He is no stranger to manacle marks, yet the sight still surprises him.

“What state of neglect are you used to?” he asks, remembering how her family had given him nervous, bleating excuses for her stay in the asylum and then their attic once their money had run dry. Cringing from the topic yet eager to send her off to a husband perhaps crazy himself if so willing to take a madwoman’s hand in marriage, they’d proclaimed her in fine health.

Of course he had ignored their claims. Peddlers with their foul elixirs and powdery aphrodisiacs would have sounded more convincing. Yet he had expected a modicum of sanitation. Now he wonders whether they cut short her hair merely to avoid washing and untangling any knots.

Tabitha doesn’t follow his gaze, but her lips tighten ever so slightly. “With time, one grows used to anything, my lord.”

“The proper term is ‘Your Grace,’ but as my wife you hold the right to call me Richard.”

“Richard,” she amends softly. Her voice sounds so unlike the cracked, broken tones he usually hears by the time a woman tries to plead with him. Hearing it caress his name, a surprising chill rushes through him, startling yet not unpleasant.

He clears his throat; the sound startles her. “I’ll ring a servant for some bandages once we’re inside.”

The dimple appears in her cheek as she smiles. “You’re not frightened of a little blood, are you?”

“Hardly,” he says as a servant opens the door to the mansion. His ironic tone slips by unnoticed as the twisted gargoyles carved into the wall and pillars guarding the door catch Tabitha’s attention. As they step inside, he adds, “I simply don’t wish to see it on my wife.”