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“Wait.” The urgency in Freya’s voice brings him to a reluctant halt with his shoulders slouched. “My daughter Lilith asks if she can offer you pleasure before you leave.”
Daughter?
The contemplative look that Titus shoots back at me has my hand balling into a fist at my side, ready to knock it off his face. He shakes his head. “Nah, I’m good. Thanks.” He tugs me after him again, but I dig my heels to resist.
“What you’re doing to these men … it’s no different than the marauders. No different than the mindless Ragers. You’re producing children born of a hateful and vile act.”
Lilith steps toward me, as if to attack, and Freya throws out her arm to stop the woman. “You are right, child. We are no different than the marauders.” She lowers her arm, and I watch as the warmth in her eyes fades with sadness. “I suspect you’ve never been pinned beneath one before. You’ve never screamed no so many times your throat burned. You’ve never had the dirt choke you, as they held you down and took you like vicious animals. You’ve never felt the entire world slip out of your grasp, as you watched your own child violated beside where you lay bleeding out.”
I slice my gaze to Lilith, whose lip quivers, eyes brimming with tears, while her mother’s words seem to take her back in time.
“You see … inside every man lies a savage. A beast to do his bidding for good, or evil.” Her gaze flicks to Titus and back to me. “I pray you never feel that helplessness in your life. But if you do, know that the universe is watching. And for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. The children born of these men will be raised by loving hands, so they will never be so inclined to take as adults.”
I want to argue that they’re innocent and that they don’t deserve this fate, but in truth, I don’t know anything about those men, or what they’ve done.
Chapter 35
The lantern flickers, as I sit on the edge of the tub with my head tipped back, while on his knees, Titus daubs the wound at my cheek where Lilith punched me. The corner of my lip is swollen and split, burning with the sting of his earlier cleaning.
There’s something about Titus when he’s gentle like this. It feels like a mountain lion opting for a salad, instead of meat.
“You fight like a girl.” Only a twitch of a smile shows his amusement, as he continues to daub my wounds. “A strong and brave girl.”
“When they were talking about stringing you up on that stake and burning you, all I could think about was how many I’d have to kill to keep that from happening. I’ve never felt such a thing in my life.”
“What did you feel?”
“Fear. I was terrified. There was nothing strong, or brave, about it.”
“Bravery is simply learning to control the fear inside of you.”
I stare at his scars borne of the violence he’s suffered in life. “Nothing frightens you, though. Not the Ragers, or mutations. Death. A band of psychotic women.”
He snorts a laugh and nods. “My fears are much simpler.”
“What are they? Tell me.”
Lowering the cloth from my face, he stares at me, and reaches to push a strand of hair behind my ear. “I fear the day I can no longer gaze into these eyes.” With a quick downward glance, he lifts my hand to his lips and kisses my knuckles. “The day these hands no longer touch my skin.” Edging forward, he plants a soft and gentle kiss to my mouth, avoiding my cut. “The day I can no longer taste your lips on mine, or breathe in the flowery scent of you. These are the things I fear.”
My heart swells, as if it might burst with all this emotion he’s stirred inside of me. So much stronger than what I felt for Will, that it surely must be love. Smiling, I cup his face and kiss him on the lips once more. “As long as a heart beats inside my chest, that day will never come.”
“I’d plead, even to your God, to make that true.”
Turning playfully serious, I frown back at him. “So then, why the hell were you so willing to turn yourself over to those heathens without a fight?”
He chuckles and wipes a small bit of blood from my knuckles. “I willingly put my fate in the hands of a fierce Viper. Failure never crossed my mind.”
“I wanted to kill Lilith for the way she talked about you. The way she looked at you like a piece of meat she would nibble on for days.”
“You’re jealous?”
“Had that been a camp full of men wanting to have sex with me?”
“They’d all be dead.”
“Well, then. Seems I failed in my duties, after all.”
“Duties for what?”
