Side Note - I mean no disrespect to any survivors of rape or sexual abuse, I mean the greatest respect, which is why I've waited so long to decide the best course of action to rewrite this scene in the most tasteful way possible.
/
Mary cries out as that bastard's large palm strikes across her face, the force so great that it sends her to the floor. Her face stings sharply with the impact, her body beginning to ache as the shock wains away. Automatically, she goes to curl into herself, her last move of defence in a situation otherwise uncompromisable. Her leg crooks in a move to try and protect what she began to suspect he was going to take from her, and her body begins to tremble with the fear and the memories of times like this gone by. Memories of Count Vincent and Collin, events so long ago, but not nearly this frightening.
"Don't speak to me of wrongs done...you murdered my son," he hisses at her loudly. Mary keeps her face from him, almost as if that would make a difference in this confrontation, almost as if that wouldn't make it all so horrible. "-you and your husband." he hisses the word, almost as if the mention of Francis brought the man physical pain. But the hatred that drips from his words make it seem insignificant. "Hung him upside down on a cross, like something evil, and he, my boy, a man of God." throughout this sentence, Mary can hear his footsteps getting closer and closer, her body coiling in fear as his words begin to make sense in her mind.
"Your son was the minister." Mary realises, her words shaken by tears. But, because Mary is turned from her attacker, she does not see the look in his eye and the look in his face begin to change as he takes her in, vulnerable on her own floor, wearing nothing but a nightgown, not a guard in sight.
"Severin... ?"
"Severin. She's a queen." the assailant says. Mary bites her lip, it's a cruel irony that he tries to reason with him, and it's a bitter one at that that's the only thing he does in an effort to prevent what Mary now understands is going to happen to her, the grim reality seeping into her veins as the blood seeps from her lip.
"Aye," Severin whispers. "she doesn't look like a queen now, does she?"
But, that's when things change for the Queen of Scots and France. One of them shoves a table out of their way in the path to get to her, but it flies forwards instead of backwards. Mary is struck in the head by the flying object. The rim of the wood strikes her in her frontal lobe, while the thick iron makes contact with the back of her head. Mary screams as the pain registers immediately, she can feel blood begin to coat her face in an alarming rate, the back of her head throbbing harshly. She manages to grunt through the pain and the nausea and the slight immobility she feels at that moment, somewhere in the back of her mind, she's aware of the large, calloused, dirty and rough hand grasping her ankles and yanking her towards him. The only mode of defence she has is to take her fingernails through the rug as she movies, it does nothing, because of course it does.
She coughs up the blood that fell into her mouth, grunting as she's forced suddenly onto her back. The nausea and the pain threaten to turn her stomach. Mary's forced to forget these things as her wrists are bound above her head, her legs kicking out of instinct with what happened with Collin the night she returned to Court.
"You took my son, you destroyed my family, you destroyed me!" he screams into her face. Mary can barely see him through the tears, and she continues to kick out of nothing but instinct.
"He said he had a bomb. It was your people who killed him!" but the truth doesn't matter to the man. Why would it? The truth means nothing in this world.
"Gerard, now!"
Mary screams as the bastard's assailant takes over holding her wrists. She screams and tries to kick and jerk and punch, but he covers her mouth and Mary's left defenceless, her body limp and staggered by the blows to the head. She's helpless in their arms, and she begins to know it.
