**TW: Mention of sexual assault/rape.**

/Never trust a survivor until you know what they did to survive./

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Henrietta was not dead as Young Master Cuffee had thought. And now, in the barn where he had dragged her in and done what he had done to her, she was here to make what had been wrong, right.

He had done what he did and then taken a knife in his soft-white hands and half-killed her before throwing her in the plantation lake. But now, her brown hands, calloused from a girl-woman’s lifetime of picking tobacco leaves, pinned those hands. She trapped his body between her thighs, staining the crispness of his trousers. Lake water dripped unto his face and it was the dirtiest she’d ever seen him.

She ignored him pretending to not know her. And his question of what was she went ignored too. She didn’t know either, only that in between Earth and Heaven, she had been asked a question and she had answered yes. And day and night and day and night and then day and then night passed and she was here now. And the feeling of fire and pain between her legs was gone, but not the memory.

Her thumbnail cut into his neck and there came blood but smell something else, faint.

Strawberries.

It made her stop.

...Had she ever tasted strawberries before?

Yes. Young Master Cuffee’s father owned strawberries. She had begged to pick them. ...Young Master Cuffee had promised to let her. And he lured her to talk more about it with a handkerchief full of them. They had been sweet as he had promised, flesh and seed and juice sliding down her throat.

She smelled them, faint, and remembered.

He used them to bring her here to do what he had done to her.

Anger flared within her. And she breathed deep and smelled the strawberries, faint, and felt anger and strawberries stir up a new thing within her: thirst.

Yes—she was thirsty. Thirstier than she ever had been. Thirsty for the taste of strawberries, faint. The kind she thought she smelled in his blood.

Yes. Henrietta was here to make what had been done wrong to her right. But first she would drink til she had her fill.

Her lips curled back and her new dog teeth bared themselves: long and sharpened to the points of needles. Her mouth suddenly filled. Fat drops of her drool dripped on Young Master Cuffee’s teary, bloody face.

She brought her mouth closer to Young Master Cuffee’s neck. She ignored his whimpers and cries, like hers had been ignored. Her dog teeth ached down to their roots, and they pierced the skin under the crook of his jaw.

The taste of him filled her thirsty, angry mouth until she had her fill. And it was there, faint: the taste of strawberries.