The young woman had blood on her hair, on her left cheek, on her dress. She looked seventeen or eighteen, innocent for the most part, roughened by labor for the rest. She brought to imagination a story of a village girl who grew up in a farm somewhere, raised normal by poor loving parents with rough hands, promised to the boy next door to be married young, to live out her unadventurous life living on her ordinary farm with an average husband and three laughing children. Maybe a dog or two.

She was about to be raped by ten bandits and taken along for the same purpose for the remaining duration of her life. It happened. The world made room for these things however well one's life had been planned. 'Life pities no one, Zahara,' her father had said. 'A deformed goat is eaten first because it should not breed, or else there will be only sick goats and none of them will survive. We cannot ask the world to favor the weak any more than we can ask the desert to produce water when we need it, but we can make the weak stronger to save them. If you want to save someone, my child, then first you must never break, under any circumstance, or you will save none.'

Under any circumstance. Zahara repeated those words in her mind, wrapping the cloak around her tighter as she watched the girl being dragged into the campground. The men tossed her in front of Qasim with the supplies they'd looted from the nearby farm. There was also a boy with her, maybe twelve or eleven. A younger brother, if she had to guess. The mother wasn't there and therefore was likely dead. But dead long ago or dead just now, she wasn't sure. Judging from how relaxed the men who returned appeared, Zahara thought it might be the latter.

They hadn't used the girl, not yet. She was considered tribute, a show of respect for the leader, a gift saved for Qasim to use first before turning over to his men to be distributed in equal shares. The brother they'd use for something else, labor perhaps, at least until the girl could no longer be used.

Next to her, Muradi was leaning against a rock near the fire, watching it all with the flat expression of a man who had seen and done it all and could no longer be stirred out of his elements. He was also exhausted, she could tell from the slumped shoulders and the faint, painful breathing. Qasim had moved them out of the cave and into the forest closer to the border villages of Samarra days ago, too early and a week too soon for Muradi's injuries. They needed supplies, Qasim had said. 'Yes, and we need a woman,' the men had agreed, eyeing her as they spoke.

And she could feel it––anyone could––the tightly knitted tension that accumulated day by day in that cave into something she knew would soon rip at the seams. She was the only woman among bandits who raped and pillaged as a profession, and together with Ranveer Borkhan receiving special treatments and being declared off limits after killing one of their comrades, the need for release of some kind could be read on their faces, in the twitch of their muscles, in the way they fidget every time she or Muradi was in sight.

Qasim knew it, so did Muradi who, in the past two days had refused to sleep, having sensed the breaking point nipping at their heels. He had been watching them all anxiously from a dark corner, studying the way they moved, counting their weapons, memorizing their habits like a chained up beast pacing behind bars making preparation for the day it got out of the cage. You wouldn't know it, not unless you were married to him for almost two decades, or if you were Ghaul or Jarem who had been by his side for longer. Muradi was a master performer. He could be the hero men needed to die fighting for, the cheater at dice and card games who never got caught, the irresponsible prince who drank one shot too many, all depending on what he needed at the time and by whom said need was to be fulfilled.

Here and now, he was Ranveer Borkhan, an unruly bandit so used to seeing rape and pillage that he seemed almost bored. But for all the reasons that told Zahara he must have gotten used to it by now, behind those hooded eyes of utter disinterest, she could sense a cold, cold anger rumbling inside of him. This was, lest one forgot, his territory, his people––people he had lived and killed to protect. However big a monster he was, however cruel he may seem, no one who had spent enough time with him could miss the love he harbored for his land.

Qasim took the young woman without ceremony, dragged her off screaming to a nearby tree far enough for some privacy, close enough for the men to hear it. It would have taken half a day's walk for them not to, Zahara thought. First times tended to be loud.

Such sounds had been an unavoidable part of Zahara's life for as long as she remembered. She'd heard it plenty of times growing up in the desert, having survived a battle, having lived in the Black Tower after all this time. The world she lived in hadn't allowed her to go through life without such incident. She hadn't gotten used to it––no woman could, not truly––but one could shut it out sometimes, or simply endure.

Not this time. Not now. Not for how or why it happened. This time it stung like an old would being cut open by a blunt, serrated knife. This time the voice in the back of her mind kept yelling, pointing fingers.

It should have been you.

And it should have. It should have been her making that noise screaming. It should have been her begging for help, for mercy, for some kind of divine intervention everyone knew wasn't coming. It should have been her, now, or eighteen years ago. In the end, broken or not, she couldn't save anyone.

The screaming died down soon after, sooner than she'd feared, yet long enough to make the remaining men shift irritably where they sat or stood. They had been looking at her while Qasim took the girl. They were still looking, through the dark, past the crackling fire, like nine starving dogs waiting for their owners to throw down the bones. Nine, she thought. It wasn't going to be over quickly tonight.

"Get behind me," said Muradi in a whisper, watching Qasim return with the girl, fixing his gaze at the two obsidian blades now strapped to the back of the bandits' leader. "You don't want to see this. Go now."

"Don't tell me what I want or don't want to see," she quipped, only what came out of her mouth was a far cry from the rage building in her chest. It came out like a whimper, broken, and unconvincing. Go where? She wanted to say. To close my eyes? To run while someone else takes my place? To have it easier on my conscience? So I can sleep better at night pretending nothing had happened?

It wasn't going to work either way, she had come to learn a long time ago. There would be no sleeping better at night, there hadn't been for the past eighteen years. And she had been through it all, hadn't she? Had been young when it happened too. She also knew the cost of being blind to these things, of pretending everything was all right. She knew what would happen if she ever let go of the rage. All these lives, these sufferings, these screams would have been for nothing, forgotten at convenience and for the sake of her own self-preservation, and nothing would ever change.

If you want to save someone, then first you must never break...

And so she stayed, hands wound tight around the fabric of her skirt, to watch nine men take pleasure from a woman, to carve into her mind what her own life and had cost. She stayed and watched, as the men descended upon the girl like wolves, like vultures fighting over a carcass. As grunts of pleasure and jests and noise of excitement hovered over cries of pleading. As pleading turned into yelps, and yelps into screams, and screams into––

Zahara shot off the ground, one hand gripped tight around a rock she'd picked up from somewhere, blind rage rushing up her spine, down the length of her arm looking for a gap to burst.

"Don't." Muradi's hand snatched her wrist, stopped her before she made that step. "You can't save her."

"Don't tell me what to do." Out there, the girl was still shrieking. Zahara jerked back her arm, felt the grip tightened, felt his hand trembling as it kept her tethered to the spot.

"Zahara, listen to me."

She wheeled at him, years of caged helplessness, of hate, of uneased pain, and still opened wounds rode up her chest, forcing their way up her throat. Enough of this, of being silenced, of being made to sit and watch everyone around me scream and burn. Enough of holding back, of pretending, of––

"Listen to you?" It came out before she'd finished that thought, the string of words that matched the shrieks and screams by the campfire, a flood of long pent up emotions she no longer had control over. "You're one of them. You're the same despicable monster that did this, the same kind of beast, the––"

"You can't save her." A forceful tug of her arm brought her to a halt, her words cut short by the cold cold rage in his eyes and a voice that matched the blue fire in them. "Think, Zahara. Think before you throw away your life and mine. They'll bring in another and you know it. Another daughter, another wife, another child. How many more lives will you sacrifice to save one?" He asked, shook her again by the hand around her wrist that now felt like steel, like hot iron burning through her skin, seeping into her bones. "How many? Tell me."

It stabbed her like a blunt blade, delivered with precision where it hurt the most––the truth in those words she didn't want to hear, to admit, to agree. The truth she knew and had refused to acknowledge, that there was no point to doing this, to trying to stop it from happening, that even now, when her hands were no longer tied and her voice no longer silenced, there was no changing the world from what it was, nothing to be accomplished by her hatred or aversion to these things, nothing at all.

"Let it go, Zahara," he said, softer, steadier this time. "Sometimes you have to sacrifice one to save a hundred more, a thousand more. You can't save victims, not all of them. If you want to change the world, you have to kill the beast, and you're going to have to live to do it. Close your ears and eyes if you must, but let it go. There will be time for retribution, I promise you."

For the first time in a long time, perhaps longer than she remembered, a torrent of painful pressure flooded her chest, forced its way up the back of her throat, pushing and pushing against a wall that had kept it contained for decades. It choked her where she was, sent her into a panic as she huffed in breaths after impossible breaths, searching for air, for release. She began to recall the feeling––something she'd experienced as a child. Everybody cried sometimes, but she had forgotten how.

There was a gasp from him, from the man she'd called an enemy for two decades, from the only person left in her life that could see through her without needing a work spoken. "Oh, Zahara." The hand around her wrist loosened. It travelled up her arm, buried itself in her hair, and pulled her down into his embrace. Not gently, no, quickly, forcefully, like someone reaching out in a desperate attempt to catch something from falling, from crashing into the ground.

And held it, held it against the heaving of his chest, beneath the large, strong hand that promised to never let go no matter how hard she might try to get away. She didn't fight him tonight. She couldn't. Not here, not now, not with the girl still screaming by the fire.

"Tell me what you want done, Zahara," he spoke against her temple, through lips pressed assuringly tight above her brow. "When we get through this you take your pick, you tell me what you want done. You let me be that beast for you." Another kiss on her forehead, a harder, longer one this time. "Stay with me. Stay alive," he said, "I won't live to do it if you die tonight. I won't know how."

The tears she'd long forgotten came down like a flood, like water bursting from a damn filled past its breaking point. He held on to her as she cried. The arms that came up to wrap around her felt like steel, like stone, like an indestructible wall that held her together, keeping her from falling to pieces.

Zahara knew then, knew it with the certainty of his unshakable embrace, with the clarity of a blue sky after the rain, that this beast, this monster, no matter what he'd done or how much she'd despised him, was the only person in her life that could offer her this. That it was only in these arms that she could cry without breaking apart. Because he would never let her.

She didn't know when the screaming stopped, or when the men was done with the girl. Muradi made sure she saw or heard no more of it, holding her face against his chest, keeping her ears closed to all the sounds but the steady beating of his own heart. Some time later she'd drifted off to sleep, her conscience lost in the folds of his robe, in the heat his body generated, in the arms that never once loosened or swayed throughout the night.

And was awaken in the eerie hour before dawn when the attack came.

----

A/N: Call me a sick !@#$ but man, I'm helplessly obsessed with Muradi and even more so in the next chapter, which will come in a day or two because it's done and I'm just doing the last edit. And one thing you must be warned, I love my bad boys, and no, I don't turn them good for any woman. Muradi's badaserry stays. Zahara's bitchery will also stay. That is a promise. :D