Prologue
Catherine struggled to breathe. It came in short gasps, though she tried to breathe deeply, excellent advice she was unable to follow. The thing thrashed inside her. She yelped in pain, enough to drain her of her reserves of energy. Another contraction hit her full-force, knocking the wind out of her. She drew a deep breath for once, but only from the pain. They continued, so close she couldn't tell the pain of one from the pain of the next. The advice given to her was from far away. All she knew was pain. Pain, from when she had been violated. Pain, from now, her first time in labor. But it was distant now; pain didn't matter. Faintly could she hear the exclamation from the midwife: it was a girl. She knew she should be sad that her daughter's fate would mimic hers, but she felt nothing but indifference, and a vague happiness that her daughter no longer pained her from the inside where she could not escape, as selfish as she knew that was.
After all she had been through, after the awful English bastard she had been forced to marry, instead of her love from Ireland, the country she had come from and then returned to, it didn't matter. It didn't matter. As her heart stopped beating, she slumped to the ground, never to rise again.