Page 104 of Forge the Blade

A sob racked Sevastyan’s inner being. Rei wrapped his arms around Sevastyan’s head and pressed Sevastyan’s face against his chest.

“We’re either both using each other, or we’re in this together.”

“How . . . how can you forgive me?”

“You’ve never done anything that required forgiveness. You’ve never hurt me. You’ve made choices. Dark choices. When there were no good ones.” Rei cupped Sevastyan’s face in his hands, bracing them both to stare into each other’s eyes. “There is nothing you have done to me that I have not done to myself. There is nothing you have done to me that you have not done to yourself.”

Deep grief had made Sevastyan’s eyes red. “It’s one thing to do it to yourself, and another to do it to someone else. I had all the power.”

Rei squeezed himself harder around Sevastyan. “You have exactly as much power as I’ve given you. I’ve always had the option to leave.”

“That kind of leaving, Rei . . . that’s not . . .”

“For me, it is. I chose to survive for my brothers, and then I chose to live because of you.”

“I took you without your consent.”

Rei cupped Sevastyan’s face between his hands again, pulling his love’s eyes up to his. “You saved our lives. You gave me the choice to continue or not continue. It hurt. It broke me. It shattered you. We both became something that paid the ferryman for that river and still chose to go on with the marks. The other choice was . . .” Rei choked up, tears on his own face. “The other choice was that it would have been someone else. I might have had to see someone take you and break you. I would have gone on, barely living, or died with that as my final moment. And instead—” Rei closed his eyes, tears sliding down his cheeks. “Instead, you brought me here. And you saved Jun. I got to see him again. I got to see him free. Him and Jaewoong, and Geun, and Yoihei, and Su-jin. I got one more day with them. They didn’t know who I was, but I was there. I did their makeup, Sevastyan. I helped them make art. I was there, feeling their feet through the floor when they danced. And that . . . that would never have happened if . . . if you hadn’t . . . if you hadn’t been strong enough to break us both and put us back together.”

“I’m not . . . I’m not back together,” Sevastyan whispered. “I hate myself. I had your blood on my hands. You weren’t even crying. You were just . . . there, on the floor, leaning against me, after everything I’d done to you.”

“It wasn’t you, it wasn’t what you did.” Rei gripped Sevastyan’s collar with both hands. Images of that horrible night were flashing behind his eyes, but he was here, in this moment, in this garishly white apartment that looked nothing like that dark, opulent room where they had both almost ended. “Hundreds, there were hundreds,” he managed to say. “It was them. The ones watching. Telling you what to do. I thought they would want a turn next. I thought their hands would be . . . on me next. I was scared of what they did to you, might do to you.”

“They did nothing to me.”

“Sevastyan.”

Sevastyan looked at Rei.

Rei gripped even harder. “You didn’t consent—either. We—both of us—we did not consent. There were two of us, that night.”

Sevastyan opened his mouth, denial on his face.

“Did you want to do that to me?”

Sevastyan shook his head. He didn’t look like he could speak.

Rei nodded. “Then everything you think you did to me, that was what they did to you. They didn’t use their own bodies. They used me, and they used you.”

Sevastyan cracked. He folded forward, arms around Rei, back heaving with silent waves of emotion that could not be contained.

Rei held him. Held him in the way that he had been too broken to hold Sevastyan that night when they’d finally gotten away. Held him the way Sevastyan had needed to be held the next morning when he found Rei in the bathroom. Held him the way Sevastyan had needed holding for weeks after but Rei still hadn’t been able to understand. By the time he’d come out of his own haze, all the cracks in Sevastyan had been painted over. He had put on his armor and swallowed down the pain of the violation and denied it all under a layer of guilt.

A guilt that had never let him acknowledge the wrongs that had been done to him.

“I still feel wrong,” Sevastyan whispered.

“I think feeling wrong is part of it.” Rei laid his cheek against Sevastyan’s crown. “I feel ugly, sometimes, when I think about what I did with my first owner, the way I pushed myself to please. I told myself I had to keep Jun and the others safe. And it still felt wrong. Because I did it to myself”

“No good choices,” Sevastyan whispered. “You did what you had to.”

“No bloodless choices,” Rei whispered. “We just chose what kind of harm we would swallow. And we chose the harm that let us exist, with all the crimes that placed in our hands.”

“I think I became a ghost with all those crimes.”

“We both have.”

Sevastyan took a shuddering breath. “It’s terrifying. To meet Richard. And the rest. They’re . . .”