Jon leaned his head back against the pew, but even that reminded him of her. She would lean her head on his shoulder on dates, even though she knew it made him uncomfortable.

"I don't want to go too far," he'd told her once. "Every time you touch me, it makes me want to touch you back, and we've got to wait..."

She'd only laughed and done it even more. When he proposed, she'd kissed him, and he'd let her, because they were going to get married soon...

And now here he was. Wifeless and heartbroken with only a perfect diamond ring in his palm to show for his troubles.

"I don't love you," she'd said in the moments before they were supposed to get married. "I don't...I just don't. You're too...you're too flat. I need excitement. I need a man who excites me."

What does that mean? I have a stable job. I'm not rich, but I can provide for her. I'm exciting! I climb for a hobby and we've gone on so many adventures together in the outdoors.

But he hadn't said these things. Instead he'd let himself turn into stone as she'd ripped off the engagement ring and put it in his palm, her fingers brushing his in a way that used to send chills down his body, but now only made him hot with anger.

"I love you, Sharon," he'd said. "I...we...why did you go through with this? We've been dating for three years? Why didn't you say something?"

"You were so earnest. You're a good guy, Jon. I thought I could persuade myself to love you, but I can't. You're too good. You don't have any fun."

So the coffee dates weren't fun? The dancing wasn't fun? The times we'd go see fireworks together and laugh and talk in the summer night weren't fun? She'd been a good actress. He should have known, the way she could switch personalities when her friends were there.

"Besides, I can't stay in this place. I need air," she said. "I'm sorry, Jon. I just didn't realize my feelings till now. My true feelings. Why I'm not happy. I need to travel, and Matt—"

She'd broken off then, but it was too late, and even she was embarrassed, flushing. Jon bit his lip to keep from saying something he shouldn't have. Even then he'd treated her like she was a queen. His queen.

"Oh, what the heck? You might as well know," she groaned. "You wouldn't give me what I wanted, so I went to Matt. At least he's not afraid of sex."

"You know I told you I wanted to wait until marriage," Jon burst out, bitterness filling his heart. He'd given her everything—every part of his heart, and she'd turned on him and destroyed it all. "I didn't want to hurt you—us. I wanted to offer you stability, commitment, so that we could grow old together instead of basing our relationship on something it wasn't meant to be based on!"

"That wasn't what I wanted!" Sharon snapped. "I don't want to be tied to one man. I'm glad you think it's possible to love only one woman for your whole life, but I can't do that! It gets boring! It's over, Jon. You ask too much."

And then she'd walked away, leaving him to explain to the waiting church why his bride wasn't going to walk down the aisle.

And here he was. Alone. As always. She'd lied to him. He wished she would have told him earlier. He would have understood. He was more upset that Matt hadn't told him. How long had they been sleeping together? Months? Years? Since the beginning.

He wanted to cry some more, but he didn't have any tears left. His only condolence was that her family had paid for the wedding. Still, it was a nightmare trying to explain to all of their friends and relations the break-up.

The door creaked open behind him, and he turned. Caroline. One of his friends since high school. He should have listened to her. She'd told him Sharon behaved differently around other people, but he hadn't believed her, so she'd stopped telling him.

"Jon," she whispered. "Just wanted to check and see if you're okay."

He sniffed, standing up and trying to smile. "I'm fine."

"No, you're not." She came closer, her face crinkled in a look of concern.

"I'm just...glad she told me before we got married. Glad we didn't build our marriage on a lie."

"Oh, Jon," Caroline sighed. "I'm sorry."

"No, I am. I'm sorry I didn't listen to everybody. I'm sorry I didn't open my eyes and see for myself that she didn't really love me."

"She didn't deserve you anyway, if that makes you feel better."

Jon tried to smile again, and this time he thought he actually did. "Thanks."

"Come on. There's still some cake left, and I brought the apple pie like you asked—your favorite."

"That'll help."

And they walked to the reception hall.

Five years later, Jon enjoyed his wife's apple pie even more than he had on that miserable yet wonderful day when his fiancée freed him to discover the perfect woman for him.

They called him a soldier. He was a soldier, yes, but he was also a killer. Every day he murdered, and ever night he saw the blood staining his hands, hands that he could never scrub clean.

They came for him when he was five. The Army told his parents that they were recruiting, and his parents told the Army no. He could still hear the noise of the shots as they splattered into his parents' chests. He didn't know then that he would hear that noise, produce that noise himself.

"It's a new program," the Army told him after they'd silenced his tears. "The best soldiers start young. Train them up early. You'll like it."

Little boys are easily twisted. Blood and more blood, that was his childhood. Watching the films, performing well in the drills, never failing, never falling, because to fall meant death.

One day, when he was twelve, his best friend Danny fell. Danny'd been sick that day, but he'd tried to hide it, because illness meant death too.

"Weak!" the drillmaster barked, and they dragged Danny away.

Later they gave him Danny's uniform, stained with blood. "That's what happens if you fail," they said.

They knew of his weakness. That he flinched when the bullets pounded into bodies on the screen, that he cried out when he was struck and slashed in practice. That he loved.

Oh yes, he loved.

He'd seen her while out on march. He was fifteen. She was too. He didn't remember love; he didn't know what it was, but she did. He saw it in her eyes, full of light, and her hair, extravagantly long instead of shaved brutally to the scalp.

At night he thought about her, wondered what it would feel like to touch hair so long and beautiful. Like touching feathers, maybe.

Those days were rough. They were trying to make the boys into men, but they hadn't discovered that men weren't made through blood and sweat—only monsters were. He'd had to shoot three prisoners in the space of a week, and every night he tasted their splattered blood on his lips. I would have been in school, he thought when the images of brutality flashed before his eyes. I would have been learning. Maybe had a girlfriend.

But the images of her kept him awake too. She danced in the woods sometimes. All alone, with no partner to lead her and hold her. Her long hair swirled around her, and her eyes sparkled with joy in a joyless world. He wanted to be in that gaze of pure bliss; he wanted to be the reason for that happiness.

When he got his first assignment, he couldn't look the victim in the eyes as he shot him. That cost him a lot. He thought the flogging would kill him, but it didn't. Instead they left him to lie on his bunk in his blood, stripped to the waist and shivering. It was his eighteenth birthday. He would have been a man. Instead he was a killer.

When he woke from the feverish infection, he heard her singing. So he left the barracks and stumbled outside. The snow burned his feet through his cracking boots, but he didn't notice. The song called him. Its loneliness burnt his heart more.

He had never ventured into the woods alone. He wasn't allowed out, and the barracks should've been guarded, but tonight it wasn't. And there she danced—body graceful like a doe's and eyes alight like a bird that cried into the sunrise.

He had never been so close to her. He watched, weariness gone, breath coming deep and long even in the icy wind. He still felt the blood on his hands—it dripped, staining the virgin snow with the hated scarlet of death. The snow didn't hurt him, strangely enough, despite its soft iciness touching his bare chest.

Suddenly she stopped, her arms floating back down to her sides, her shining hair settling around her waist. She turned, and she looked at him. He thought she would be afraid. Don't you see the blood? Don't you see what I am?

Instead she watched him, no fear in her eyes. Her look was that of a deer that had never met a hunter—innocent, uncertain, curious. He was the hunter. He felt the urge now, the sick, dark energy they'd instilled in him since he was a boy—to kill. The blood ran down his hands.

Then she spoke, neither frowning nor smiling, solemnity in her eyes.

"What's your name?" he asked, as if he would die if he did not know.

A flicker of a smile ran across her face, before it died like his parents.

"Who are you?" he went on. You're beautiful, he wanted to say, but he was afraid.

She stared at him still, before taking a step closer and reaching out a hand. Tears glistened on her lashes, and he wanted to wipe them away, to hold her until she knew she was safe, even as nobody had ever held him when he was afraid or upset.

"What's wrong?" he asked.

"It is so dark," she finally said in a whisper, the tears falling from her cheeks. When each one hit the snow it turned into a drop of blood. "But I have come to bring you into the light."

He took her hand, and joy and warmth spread across his body.

When they found the deserter, he was leaning against a tree, his body frozen and blue. But he was smiling like he'd been given the greatest gift in the world. Nobody understood it, and they buried him with the other dead soldiers in a nameless grave.

Constance carefully arranged her baskets by size on the mat, her scarred hands moving nimbly among the brightly-colored wares. She warily watched the crowds beginning to form for the marketplace, anticipating the new day with about as much dread as she always did. She adored the basket-making, to be sure, but the selling of the baskets was to her equivalent to leaping into a sea full of sharks.

You're safe, she heard her mother's voice. Keep yourself covered and they won't hurt you.

Momma had been wrong. She had kept herself covered, her kerchief concealing her shoulders and neck and her headscarf hiding her unruly curls. He had come anyway, and that night—

Constance closed her eyes, breathing raggedly. Five years. Five years and you have to forget it. You can't undo what's been done to you. It's who you are now.

That night she died. She could never forget it.

And so she endured when the first customer, a burly sailor, made a lewd comment, so long as he bought a basket with money that would feed her slender frame. She endured when an irritable mother pushed her ogling son away, so long as she bought a basket. She endured when an old man propositioned her, his wrinkled hands reaching towards one of her reddish-black curls that had escaped from her scarf, so long as he bought a basket.

You're going to have a hard life ahead of you, little girl, Momma had told her with her last breaths. I wish it weren't so. You're too beautiful for this world, and it'll only bring you grief, but I know you'll be strong nonetheless, like your father was when he faced the sea monster and perished. You'll have to be strong.

Momma had been beautiful too, and it had killed her. Constance every day despised it. Beauty—beauty only brought death. Sometimes she would look at her perfect, earth-toned face and wish to take a knife to it, to slit the full lips, to slice off a piece of the symmetrical nose, to mar the high cheek-boned visage. But she never did, because she knew it wouldn't change anything.

Evening came and she had few baskets left. Others were beginning to pack up, and she thought she should too, but she wanted to get any extra penny she could. A tall man approached her stand, muscles bulging. A blacksmith, she surmised, noting his blackened hands and the burns on his arms.

"Going to stay the night, beautiful?" he asked, eyeing her with a clear intent.

"Which one would you like?" Constance replied wearily, ignoring the comment as usual and pointing to the four baskets that were left. "One is watertight, if your wife needs something to go to the well with."

"I need something to go home with," the blacksmith said, leaning closer. Constance smelled rotting fish in his breath, and she scrunched up her face. He laughed, reaching out a thumb and rubbing it against her lips.

"Beautiful. Just beautiful. Siren, you're calling me." He moved his hand downwards along her neck...down...down...

Constance felt her throat close up, her breath choking her. Just like that night. Just like...she couldn't move as he leaned in closer, his foul breath heating up her face. I was frozen last time, too. Frozen when her innocence was ripped from her broken body. Unable to fight. Why didn't I fight? Why don't I fight? Frantically she looked around the marketplace, but it was as if she was in that dark, lonely hut again, with the corpse of her mother the only witness to the violation being done against her. Nobody would help her. Nobody cared.

"Leave me alone," she cracked out, pulling away. The blacksmith only laughed further, stepping over the mat, taking her by the arm, brushing his filthy lips against her ear.

"I can't leave such a pretty girl alone."

Constance closed her eyes as his hands reached up towards her hair. A tear ran down her cheek, salty like the sea behind her in the docks. Leave me alone. Please, leave me alone.

"Leave her alone!" came a shout, snapping like the sound of a gunshot.

The blacksmith froze, releasing her. Constance slumped to the ground, reliving that night, feeling the rough touch in places where it shouldn't have been, her screams silenced by the ruthless soldier's aggressive kisses. I should have died. I should have died with Momma. Why didn't they kill me? I would rather have been killed.

"Hey! Hey," the voice continued, as a gentle, cautious hand brushed her arm. "Miss, are you all right? Please, answer me."

Constance opened her eyes a crack. The hut was gone. The smell of her dead mother was gone, as was the smell of the man.

She met the ocean when she looked up. His eyes were blue like the sea when the sun shone upon it, a blue that she loved to look at because it reminded her of being a child and playing in the sand when both of her parents still lived. For a moment she wanted to becalm herself in those blue depths, but then she remembered where she was and looked past them to the face that held them.

Scars. That was the first that she thought when her eyes moved from his. Four ragged scars, one across his forehead, one across his nose, a small one on his neck, and the worst—puckered and raised and disfiguring—stretched across his face from right cheekbone to left jaw. It should have frightened her, but it didn't. Maybe because she saw the quiet resignedness in his eyes, the resignedness of someone who has seen suffering—felt it—and has grown accustomed to questions and stares.

"Pirates," he said quickly as an explanation, brushing his fingers over the scar with a wry smile. "Had a bad run-in a few years back and they didn't like my attitude much. Don't worry, I'm not one of them. Are you all right?"

"Y-yes," Constance murmured, stare going from the scars back to the sea-blue eyes again. Men frightened her. All of them...except this one. Perhaps it was the tender way that he looked at her, or the way he held himself—as if he was the least of all and he didn't care much, or he was used to it—but he didn't frighten her. He doesn't want power. That's why. He doesn't want to hurt and kill and destroy. Only to help.

"Here," said the young man, holding out a hand. "I can take your baskets, if you want. Buy them, that is. So you don't have to carry them back. Or, if you need somebody to walk you back so you're all right, I could do that too."

Constance swallowed, eyes darting to the outstretched hand (it was strong and calloused from gripping ropes; he was a sailor). Hesitantly she took it.

"My name's Wes. Wester Channing, that is. My da named me for the wind that was blowing the day I was born aboard his ship. And yours?"

"Constance," said Constance.

The young man smiled, and for the first time in a long time Constance smiled back, something warm fluttering in her chest that for a moment made her forget the pain of the past, and have hope for the future.

When the autumn winds blew her away from him, she waited for the warm summer breeze to bring her back. When the icy winter froze her heart in expectant love, she waited for the summer's sun to thaw it with renewed adoration. And when spring's rainy days echoed her tears of longing for her distant love, she awaited the summer's clear skies and the promise of reunion.