She hadn't really been thinking about revenge; her mind had been cast more along the lines of the theme of her near death experiences. Just since they'd been together, she'd been almost killed by Jazrael, then stabbed by Theon, and then nearly burnt alive at the stake. Still, what he said had a ring of truth to it, and she considered that particular theme in her head while Theon moved from her, leaving a ripple of goose-bumps to spread across her skin with the warmth of him gone.
Belac had killed her father out of revenge, while the official story was that her Da had fallen in battle; She had killed Belac out of revenge for the wrongs he'd done to her and her mother. Jazrael acted out of revenge, the mages had too. He was right - until life ceased on earth, revenge would be a tangible presence, tainting the good, and achieving no purpose.
His question rested heavily in the pit of her stomach. After their intimacy, there was hardly anything that she could hide from him now, but it still made her uneasy, hollow, just thinking about it. Her hands folded over her stomach, and her eyes fixed ahead. She'd tell him, but she wouldn't look at him while she did so.
"Belac killed my father. He was supposed to be his best friend, and yet he murdered him in cold blood. He married Mam then, but he was a fiend with his fists, aye? One day, I was ten, I tried to hurt him, to stop him from hurting my mother. She was pregnant, and sick, and yet he didna care. I hit him over the head, and he was already stinking drunk, and he fell like a felled horse.
"Mam took me then, set me off into the forest, and told me to run, to escape. And I tried, but there's no a lot of places for a ten year old bairn to run to, y'ken?" She sighed here, and closed her eyes, reliving those few days she hid in the forest. "I was hungry, tired and scared, had nowhere to go. And he found me. Found me, took me as a man takes a woman, and then left me for dead.
"I didna die though, of course. I'm here now. But I think that was when I first died inside." Keely turned her head then, the deep seated pain of that time years ago resting in her amber eyes, gone cold now compared to the molten gold of just minutes before. "I heard later on, much later, that Mam had twins, girls, and then fell pregnant again, and died in childbirth. My half-sisters were only two years old, and without a mother, they died. He bought so much death into my family. I could hardy forgive him when I saw him coming to finished wiping out my father's family. So I made sure there was an end to his, instead."
With a wry, sad smile and shrugged, and lifted a hand from her bare belly, and laid it gently over Theon. "If ye thought I was bad when we first me, I can tell ye, ye'd have never stayed with me back then."
