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TWENTY-EIGHT

Sergei

“Elara.” I warn her, but she’s already reaching for me, her hands trembling as they slide beneath the hem of my shirt.

My eyes fall shut.

Shame crawls through me, slowing my thoughts and suffocating me, as my fingers curl into a tight fist.

The fabric lifts and the cool air spills across my back, baring everything I’ve tried to keep hidden.

I’m not ashamed of it because they were forced on me.

But I am angry, because I let it happen.

I let him do it to me.

I hear a loud gasp and then silence, every second feeling longer than previous one, and I don’t turn, too afraid to see pity in her eyes.

Years of agony crash into me all at once, the dam giving way.

Pain—old, buried, rotting—floods through me. I fail to keep up with the dreadful memories of my father’s belt cutting across my back, again and again, each strike burning into bone, the crack of it echoing until there’s nothing left but pain.

Until the pain became my reality, and I found myself craving it.

“S-Sergei…” The pads of her fingers hover over the jagged, wayward scars, hesitant, like she fears the wounds might reopen beneath her touch. “W-what…w-who did this?”

My head falls between my shoulders, the heel of my palm stabbing me in the eyes, as I try to calm my breathing.

“I thought this was your way of getting back at me… keeping your shirt on because I wouldn’t let you see me.” And then I hear a loud earth-shattering cry forcing me to turn my head.

Tears spill down her face in thick, relentless waves as she stares at my scars and falls to the ground, hands clenched against her thighs, her body folding in on itself as the sobs tear through her.

Fuck.

“Baby, it’s okay, they don’t even hurt anymore.” I rush towards her, kneeling closer as I hide her in my arms.

“W-who did this?” She looks up, her head touching my jaw with the movement. I sigh when she keeps looking at me, awaiting an answer I cannot form.

I didn’t tell anyone about the scars, the abuse. When Roman found out, he beat the shit out of my father and we never talked about it.

He did say he’ll kill my father but I stopped him, it wasn’t his revenge to take.

My father wanted a successor to his throne and refusing to becoming one would be punishment enough for him.

“My father tried to discipline me.” I reply in a stoic voice.

Leaning to scoop her in my arms, afraid she might catch cold since she wasn’t wearing anything—

She wasn’t wearing anything.

My eyes land on her perky tits pressed against my naked chest. It was broad daylight, sunlight entering from the floor- to-ceiling windows and every bit of her smooth, porcelain skin was glimmering under it.

Every bit except her pussy, as she had a hand over it, her thighs closed as I walked towards our bed. I fucked her in broad daylight but was too delirious that I didn’t have a good look at her.

Did she not realise that she had no clothes on? That I was devouring her body with my eyes; the very body she fought tooth and nail to hide from me?

The thought of her forgetting the sun, too busy to have my cock inside her, makes me giddy like a teenager.