“You seem affronted, alpha.” Shiloh tipped his head. “How hypocritical.”
“You think you can subdue me?” Sarang asked. “How? Make it so I can only get hard for you, and then deny me your body?”
“It’s an idea,” Shiloh didn’t confirm or deny it. “We don’t need to physically touch for you to get your fix.”
“I’m not an addict,” he growled. “This isn’t—”
“You just hypothesized that I plan to mate you and force you into painful celibacy, yet that’s the part you’re insulted by?” Shiloh whistled. “If nothing else, I’m grateful for the revelation that neither you nor I were ever honest with one another. And to think, I’d started to feel guilty over my own deception.”
“Had you?”
“No.” Shiloh laughed. “I can’t experience that emotion.”
“You’re like Kian.” He’d hidden it well, so well, that Sarang had mostly bought it. There’d been moments of course, tiny slips, but Shiloh’s dark upbringing had helped explain those momentary lapses away. Never in a million years would he have guessed just how thoroughly the manipulation went. “Why hide it?”
“Because of you,” Shiloh surprised him by saying. “I don’t remember much from that day, nothing after I passed out. But I do remember the last thing you said to me.”
Sarang shook his head, silently asking him to elaborate.
“Your type, alpha?” he tsked. “Don’t tell me you don’t recall. You spoke enough about that day while you were out of it to reveal you’ve got a good enough memory to know exactly what I’m talking about.”
“Vulnerable omegas who need protecting.” He couldn’t believe he’d said that. How off base he’d been.
“The Prince of the Eumia was neither of those things,” Shiloh explained. “So I became them. It was simple enough to pull off. Your ego made it easy. You liked feeling needed. Liked when I came crawling to you for help.”
“The baby wasn’t the only lie.” Sarang’s mind raced over the past four years. “Lane?”
“I thought for sure seeing me with such an incompetent alpha would push you past your breaking point,” Shiloh confessed, “but I was wrong. There were moments where I could have sworn you were jealous, but they were fleeting.”
“You’re not the only one good at masking your true feelings,” he shouldn’t have said it, but the truth spilled past his lips anyway.
“Save your breath.”
Right, he wouldn’t believe him now. He may have faked a lot of things, but Shiloh’s trust issues were very real. And it wasn’t like Sarang had given him much to trust, now that he’d found out about the life-bond.
“I was angry at first,” Shiloh told him. “I almost wanted to hurt you.”
“Do so if you wish.”
“Don’t be a martyr. It’s too late for that angle. Ask me why I was angry, Rang.”
“Because I lied and betrayed you.”
“Because you made mefeel,” he corrected, sneering the word with obvious discontent. “Because I’d bought into the bullshit and thought you felt something toward me that wasn’tbased off a bid for money and power. Romantic love isn’t real, but I thought you loved me in your own way. I thought I could play off of that and convince you I was worthy to commit to.”
He thoughthewas the one who’d needed to be worthy?
Sarang shook his head, but the omega wasn’t finished.
“But it turns out, you’re only slightly better than the rest. Sure, a lesser man would have claimed me that night, but you did the respectable thing and held back. Points for that, I suppose. Sticking around, making me believe you care? That’s fucked up.”
“I do care about you,” he said. “That’s why I’ve never allowed myself to have you.”
“You think rutting strangers who smell a little like me is a show of care?” Shiloh laughed. “You’re mistaking love for lust.”
“Even though we can’t recall it, we slept together after I healed you. You mentioned it yourself just before. Trauma connections. I was worried that’s what this was.”
“You think you want to fuck me just because—”
