Madness Read Online Free

Madness
Book: Madness Read Online Free
Author: Sorcha MacMurrough
Pages:
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eventually secured her sister the consideration of a private chamber. Well, that and the appalling events the day she had been attacked...
     
    Gabrielle looked around, determined not to think about that now. She sighed. The room wasn’t much, a cell just large enough to hold a cot and chamberpot, and little more. There was one tiny barred window just out of arm’s reach even if she stood on the wrought iron bedstead with its thin mattress.
     
    But it was certainly better than being in the common wards, which she had to pass coming up and down the stairs every day.
     
    She shuddered at the mere thought of the place. Every single depravity known to mankind occurred there. Her sister still bore the scars of the beating she had taken within her first three days of being immured within, and had been thrust into this total torpor by the sexual assault she had had to endure three days later.
     
    Had had to endure until one of the other inmates, shuffling through the corridor for his monthly bath, had unexpectedly saved her. Saved them both. Simon….
     
    Gabrielle could still feel the catch in her breath where her ribs had been battered as the assailant had lashed out at her, and then tried to turn his foul attentions upon her own tender person.
     
    She had tried to shield her poor fallen sister and her own virtue as well. It had been an unequal struggle with a man in the throes of such mania.
     
    Only the huge, dark-haired man, his lank, greasy hair obscuring his eyes, had come to their rescue.
     
    Gabrielle had blacked out for a moment, but then the pressure had eased from her throat, allowing her to scrape a breath in past the inmates thick fingers.   She had seen a man glaring over the would-be rapist’s shoulder.
     
    For a moment she had been certain he was about to pull the man away only so he could have a go at her himself.
     
    Then he had lifted the giant off his feet and flat on his face in a second, stomping him down with one foot planted in the middle of his spine.
     
    She had gasped as he’d torn off his shirt, exposing a huge chest and shoulders rippling with solid muscle. She’d steeled herself against ravishment once more.
     
    The man had rent the garment in two with a single effortless tug. Using one piece of shirt he had tied the pervert’s flailing hands behind him tightly. With his knee planted firmly in the small of his back, her helper had then fastened the degenerate’s ankles.
     
    Gabrielle had gaped in astonishment as her rescuer had lifted the savage man off the floor by the ankles with a single hand and hung him upside down from one of the wrought iron candle brackets nearly seven feet up the wall. With the man thus suspended, he had then come over to help her.
     
    “Are you all right, Madame? Did he harm you and your sister very cruelly?”
     
    He had taken her hand, sending a shiver of pure terror through her limp body. Terror, or something more?
     
    For despite his bedraggled appearance and emaciation, she had never seen a more handsome man. She had blinked, trying to think who he reminded her of.
     
    His other hand had stroked down her side from just under her breast to the swell of her hips with a curiously impersonal gesture. She had shrunk away from him with a sucked-in breath and cry. Then the guards who were supposed to have been escorting him, or maintaining some sort of order in that hell hole, had moved to beat him to the ground.
     
    “No, he didn’t hurt me. It’s my ribs!” she had shouted.
     
    She raised her hands and inserted herself between the man and the guard with a raised truncheon. “No! Don’t hurt him! He was trying to help.”
     
    She could see the weapon descending inexorably, and shoved the man’s barrel chest as hard as she could, while stepping back hard to ram her hapless rescuer out of the way. She trod heavily on his foot, and her buttocks came into contact with a rigid wall of flesh and bone.
     
    One huge hand came up to steady her as she
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