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Matching her venom wouldn’t serve either of them. Rune kept his tone even, attempting to reason with the spitting minx. “The ceremony is inherently dangerous. You are stronger than I am.”
She scoffed at him, looking him up and down. “I can’t be stronger than you. If you want to be cruel, then own it. Tell me the real reason.”
“Faye,” he said gently.
She leaned forward baring her teeth. “Does it infuriate you that you, the great Shadow Prince could want an unsophisticated peasant?”
Tension set in Rune’s jaw as he said, “I—”
“Don’t lie to me we passed that a long time ago!”
“You do not understand what you are requesting!”
“I understand I want a life! A full life and you can’t be bothered to—”
“I curse fate for saddling me with such a stubborn creature.” At Faye’s stunned look, Rune realized his words.
Faye’s lips parted as he stood to his full height. He does think I’m his. And he looked furious for it.
“You think I’m so lowly. Let me tell you, Shadow Prince, you are no joy to be fated to either.” Faye crossed her arms waiting for a blistering insult.
“I do not think you lowly.” His voice was hollow as he stared into the blue flames.
Faye’s anger ebbed, cooling with her growing insecurities. “What is your hang up if I’m not lowly? Do I not measure up to the list of women before me?”
He gave a low laugh and took a deep breath before turning toward her. “I do not have a list of lovers.”
Faye glared up at him. “I need you to try a little harder if you’re going to lie to me.”
Rune returned to his seat at the end of the settee. “I am not lying to you.”
Faye drew her legs up, studying him. He had to be lying. He was three thousand years old. “I prefer honesty to flattery, or whatever it is you think you’re doing.” Rune exhaled and scrubbed his hand over his face. “Fine, you’ve taken no lovers. What would you call what we did?”
“Tending,” he answered flatly, before adding, “I tended to you.”
Dark courts and their bullshit sex games.“And how many women have you tended?”
“Excluding my training and including you?” He asked with a raise brow, setting his ankle over his knee.
This dick was not allowed to be upset with her. “Yeah, I don’t need an exact number. Round to the nearest hundred.”
He didn’t smile, held up his fingers, and answered, “Two. You met Lyssa. You are the second.”
Faye could only tilt her head at him and blink. “You were her consort.”
His smile was humorless as he gazed at the fire. “And I never hardened for her. I would not recommend you mention it. She would likely attempt to have you killed.”
He spent more than a hundred years with her. “You did her Ceremony of Blood.”
“A potion I took for her ritual forced my body to comply. I brought her across whole and did not linger in her bed.”
Darkness, this man, left her conflicted. If she wasn’t the issue, then it had to lie with him. “Are you worried I won’t like it?”
He gave her a contrary glance. “I can hear and scent the body’s responses. It is not a difficult read.”
The most conceited answer she’d ever heard in her life. But it left only one option. He found her lacking somehow. Faye’s shoulders slumped. “What’s wrong with me? I’m one of two women you’ve been with. You want me on some level.”
“You do not understand what you are asking for. I am no turned vampire with a previous life to temper my vampiric urges. Pure Bloods have the Ra’Voshnik. It is a predator in its purest form living within me.”
