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xoxo
Gennie.
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CHAPTER 2
My eyes were red and swollen like a baboon's arse when I finally stepped off the train into what I could hopefully now call my new home. Not the train station, obviously. I did have some dignity left.
I caught a ride in the back of someone's horse and cart, who happened to also be heading to the inner city, or so he said. The guy was so stuck up, he wouldn't even let me sit at the front with him, in the seat. So I had to share the back of the cart with a smelly little Jack Russell that tried to bite me when I reached out to stroke it on the head.
We finally arrived... somewhere. I had no idea if I was in the city of Edinburgh, but there was a fish market where we stopped, and I could see the sea behind the different stalls.
"Here you go, get off," he ordered. "And take your garbage with you."
I glared at him as I dragged my small bag off his scruffy cart, and walked away without saying a word, muttering all sorts of insults under my breath.
"What did you say?" he demanded, walking beside me aggressively.
"I said I'd love to get a long, thick pole and shove it up your shitty bum hole so you actually have a reason to act so stuck up."
He stopped in his tracks with his mouth hanging open wider than a flasher's jacket.
I didn't have a clue where I was , but I liked it. I had money in my bag and the world at my fingertips.
However, the weather was freezing and the sky was getting greyer and darker by the second, so I decided that I'd better find somewhere to stay. I may not have been in London anymore, but the streets wouldn't be safe for a woman, especially come nightfall.
The first place I found reminded me too much of the brothel, so I left immediately. The next place was an inn that was full of shady looking men who stared as I entered, so I turned back around and carried on. Finally, third time lucky, I found what seemed to be a nice place. It looked tidy, smelled of delicious cooked food and was cheap to stay, costing less than a shilling per night.
I paid the lady at the bar and she led me to my room. It had everything I needed. Bed, wardrobe, lamps and a small table. It was perfect and so cosy that I just wanted to curl up in the bed straight away and go to sleep. I decided to quickly unpack what little I had and then go for an early night.
I stripped off into my undergarments and carefully hung up my best dress in the wardrobe. The dress was gaudy and looked unsophisticated. I decided that tomorrow would be shopping day.
As I unpacked the rest of my things from my bag, I noticed a tatty piece of paper right at the bottom underneath everything, folded in half and edges curling.
It was him.
It was his likeness from the "wanted" poster back in London.
The drawing didn't do his face justice at all. In this, he looked a good 10 years older, and not as hypnotic. Still, you could tell by the crappy drawing that this man in real life had the potential to be strikingly beautiful.
I lay back on the bed, facing the ceiling, recalling our encounter in all its sensual glory.
I want him.
He's probably been hung already.
Necrophilia.
Shut up!
You're crazy, you're talking to your own thoughts.
I sighed, reminiscing about him. His sculpted body, sharp features, deep chocolaty eyes that absorb your soul. And his magical touch that could turn me into a quivering wreck within seconds...
Every single one of his gorgeous features would be engraved into my mind for the rest of my life.
It was true what he said, 'you will always remember this night as the best in your short, miserable existence.'
And it was true. It ended way too prematurely, but his stallion cock was certainly the highlight of my life at the minute. That plus the 200 guineas I had in my possession. Yeah, that was pretty nice too.
I eventually drifted off to sleep, clutching the poster of him to my chest and slept peacefully, dreaming about him and being with him, all night.
I woke up the next morning to someone knocking on the door. Rubbing my eyes and stretching lazily, I eventually moved towards the door and opened it, probably looking exactly like a sloth to the barmaid.
"I thought you'd be hungry, so I brought you up some cawl," she said. "It normally costs an extra two pence for lodgers to get fed, so don't get used to it."
The woman was quite big and had a hard, reddened face. She looked like she had never smiled in her life, but I felt a sense of compassion radiate off her and I immediately liked her.
"Thank you so much," I said, wiping some eye boogers on my nightshirt before taking the tray of food off her.
She grunted something as she turned around and walked off.
I shut the door with my foot and laid the tray on the table before grabbing a clean dress from the wardrobe and putting it on. I also decided in that moment to go shopping later on and treat myself to a new dress and shoes.
Later on, after I'd eaten my food, I took some money with me and walked to the town where most of the shops were. It reminded me a lot of London, but it was a lot more busy.
I could barely see two feet ahead of me with the massive swarm of people around me. Maybe something was going on today. I was nearing the town square, so maybe there was something special going on today. It was very noisy too.
I snaked my way through the crowd until I got a clearer view of the sectioned off area. Now it was clear what was happening. I'd seen it happen in London too.
Three men each dressed in white linen with a white linen hood pulled over their faces and a rope around their necks. Their hands were tied behind their backs and their feet sat humbly on top of a hollow platform as they awaited their deaths.
But as I looked more closely, one of them was stood on a tall crate to make up for his height. A child.
How old? Nine? Ten? What had someone so young done to deserve to be put to death?
Several drummers vigorously thrashed on their instruments as a man clad in the King's uniform began reading some garbage from a scroll. I switched off for the most part. It was just the same old stuff I'd heard before, back in London. The interesting part was finding out what crimes they were guilty of.
I had watched a man hang once before. He had refused to wear a face covering, so I was able to watch the life drain from the parasite's unregretful eyes while he choked to death. I wanted to watch him die because of the crimes he'd willingly committed, and the way he showed no signs of regret or remorse, even down to his very last breath I could tell he was proud of himself. I enjoyed watching him slip into a slow, painful death. Rapist. Child molester. Murderer.
Scum of the earth.
"For the crimes of manslaughter and murder, His Majesty the King condemns thee, Mr. William Sheckle of Yorkshire, to hang by the neck until dead," the executioner read from the scroll. "May God have mercy on your soul."
A leaver at the other end of the gallows was pulled by another man dressed in uniform, and Mr. Sheckle dropped a couple of feet as the floor beneath him collapsed. Good riddance.
Next was the kid. I didn't want to watch this one.
"For the crimes of petty theft, pick-pocketing and associating with gypsies, His Majesty the King condemns thee, Young Jacob McCoy of Edinburgh to hang by the neck until dead. May God have mercy on your soul."
"Are you fücking serious?!" I yelled. "You can't hang a kid for stealing enough to stay alive!"
No one seemed to pay any attention to me, and the guy was about to pull the leaver. I did the first thing that popped into my head, which also probably wasn't the best thing to do.
I was compulsive, I couldn't help it.
I jumped up onto the gallows with the peacock-men in their fancy uniform and slammed my heavy purse as hard as I could into the Leaver Guy's balls before he could pull the leaver and send the boy to a premature death.
Several guardsmen immediately jumped up and began wrestling me to the ground. My skinny self was able to wriggle painfully out of their tight grips and land a back-hander into one of their mouths as they reached back out for me.
The crowd below me gasped and wooed at my actions.
Another guard struck out with his fist, but luckily, as someone from the crowd shouted, "look out!" I was able to move out of the way and his fist hit a wooden beam of the structure instead. I then collided my purse into his skull and he fell to the floor.
Unfortunately, as I was doing this, the leaver guy came out of nowhere and pounced on me like a leopard, tackling me to the floor where I was unable to escape this time, until the remaining uninjured guards hoisted me up onto my feet and tethered my hands together behind my back.
The crowd unanimously booed at the uniformed men, while I stood there in a daze, unable to comprehend what had just happened.
I began to be shoved off the platform by the man tethering me, and the scroll guy began preparing himself to start again.
"NO!" I yelled. "Release the boy! Who's with me?"
"Release him! Release him!" I chanted.
Soon the crowd was chanting it with me.
"ENOUGH!" the executioner boomed.
The chants fizzled out quickly while the man spoke.
"The King's orders-"
BOOM!
A gunshot fired as he was mid-sentence, and the man dropped to the floor dead, with a gaping hole in his forehead.
At the same time, the other prisoner who had been very quiet up until now managed to untie the rope around his wrists before removing the noose from around his neck and the execution hood that covered his face.
In an instant, the guards went mad and reached for their muskets before any more damage could be done.
But it was him.
Leonardo De Leonardis was the final hangman.
He leapt over to me and wrapped his thick, tanned arm around my neck, hiding his body behind me.
Silence.
"If you shoot, this innocent woman will be killed and you will all be guilty of manslaughter," he said in that exotic accent of his.
I was confused at that point of weather I was swooning over this gorgeous specimen, or if I was just about to faint out of fear of being shot.
"Lower your weapons!"
The guards slowly lowered their muskets and Leonardo began moving me towards the steps leading off the gallows. He stopped at the body of the scroll guy and removed his pistol from its holder around his waist.
The crowd, who had been silently watching in horror began to quickly disperse in a panicked frenzy of screaming as soon as the weapon was in his unrelenting grip. He held it to my head.
"If any one of you dares to make a wrong move, the whore gets it in the head."
Tears streamed down my cheeks in fear. Would the guards shoot? Would he shoot?
"I'd rather give it to you in the ass though, my little Virgin Whore," he rasped dirtily into my ear.
He led me off the gallows down onto the cobblestone street, still walking backwards, facing the enemy.
After a few more steps, he grabbed me by the arm and yanked me along as he sprinted for cover behind the nearest houses.
"What are you doing here?" I whisper-shouted as we ran.
"Go after them!" The guards shouted from behind us.
"I could ask you the same thing," he said. "But I'm a little preoccupied right now."
"We have to go back for the boy," I said.
"Screw that! I'm not risking my neck for the sake of some shitty-arsed brat."
"If it wasn't for me, you wouldn't have gotten away at all. You owe me."
"I owe you nothing, whore. In fact, you owe me a good fück, so unless you're in the mood to get your brains fücked by a lead ball, you'd better keep your pretty little mouth closed and hope that I don't lose my patience with you too quickly." He clicked the hammer back on the pistol, loading it as he pointed it back at my head.
I gulped a big lump down in my throat.
"They're coming. Let's move."
He yanked me along by my arm again and we sprinted to the next house along. He kicked open the door with his heavy boots and smashed the butt of the pistol into the face of the woman in the house. She fell to the floor, unconscious.
He pulled me upstairs into an empty room and spied out of the window at the rampage of guardsmen beneath us. More had been called.
Again, without thinking things through, my stupid compulsive self lashed out and kicked the pistol out of Leonardo's unsuspecting hand as he spied.
It took the both of us a second to realise what had happened before we immediately dove to the floor, reaching for the weapon in desperation.
My finger hooked around the trigger guard and I quickly tugged the pistol towards me, picking it up and aiming it straight at this handsome man's face before he could snatch it back off me.
"Fair play, Piccola Puttana." He raised his hands in surrender, a smirk lifting one corner of his seductive lips.
I ignored his weird language. I didn't know what the hell he was saying or if it was even a word.
I ran over to the window and kicked it in before dangling off the ledge and dropping safely into the bushes and shrubbery beneath me. I ran back in the direction of the gallows.
The boy was still there, balancing on what was now a buckling crate about to give away.
Luckily, all the guards had gone, so I climbed up onto the platform and unhooked the rope from the boy's neck and lifted him down onto the firm ground. I then untied his small hands and removed the cover from his face.
He had his eyes tightly closed and his cheeks were stained with shiny wetness from his tears.
"It's okay, you're safe now," I whispered, bringing the boy in for a hug. "Let's leave before they come back though."
I was about to get up off my knee and run with the boy before anyone saw us, when I heard a blood-curdling click from behind me. A pistol.
"Yes, let's leave before they come back," Leonardo said. "First things first though..."
SMACK!
I fell to the floor, unconscious, as he hit me around the head with the weapon.
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