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Understood. Not welcome.
If only I could let things be.
I moved in front of him, sinking onto the ottoman next to his legs, blocking his view of the fire. His eyes averted, his stare settling on the tips of his dark shoes.
My hands clasped together, slipping between my knees, and I stared at him, waiting for him to acknowledge my presence.
He didn’t.
I would need to push this.
Push this until he heard what I had to tell him. Push him until he either sent me to his torture chamber or set me free, for I could live in the limbo of his castle no more. Not with this peculiar pain of being near him and not having him gnawing away at my heart, never satisfied, always haunting.
I leaned forward, my elbows resting on top of my thighs. “Damen, I do have to tell you how genuinely sorry I am.”
His look flickered toward me. “For what?”
My right hand slipped onto his shin, curling up over his knee to rest on his thigh. “Rodolfo. If I had known. If I’d had a crystal ball and I had known what was in the future, what you would become to me, I wouldn’t have killed him.”
I paused, my eyes closing, suspended for a long moment. “If I could have seen how much you loved him, what he meant to you, I never would have killed him. The rest of them—I would sear the flesh from their bones in an instant. And I wouldn’t think on it, wouldn’t regret it. Not for what they did to Lyle.”
The pain in my chest at what I did to Damen making it hard to breathe, I crumpled over, burying my forehead onto his thighs just above his knees. My body asking just as fervently as my words for his forgiveness.
Forgiveness I knew he would never give.
My eyes closed, my words muffled as they sank into his legs. “But for you, I would have left him alive. I would have suffered whatever I needed to, to not take him away from you. To not leave you with the pain of his death. I never would have hurt you like that. And I will be eternally sorry that I did that to you.”
The muscles of his thighs tightened under my forehead and I tried to freeze the moment.
No matter how vulnerable I was in this instant, I needed to stop and sink into it, for I didn’t know that I would ever have it again. The scent of him wafting around me. The heat of him that radiated up into me. The gentle buzz of energy along my pores that always ran in the air between us. The sound of his breath, in and out, even, steady.
He hated me.
But me? I still loved him.
No matter what I told myself to the contrary. No matter that I didn’t want it to be true. I’d fallen in love with the enemy, and now the enemy owned me and I was merely waiting for my punishment.
Strong fingers suddenly sank into my hair, digging in along my scalp as they cupped the back of my head.
“I was alone, Ada. Ever since Rodo died. Alone.” His low voice filled the air around me, his fingers tightening along my scalp. “Thousands of people in and out of my life, yet I was alone. Even with Venetia, we were two ghost ships, circling each other. Then you came. And you did the cruelest thing of all.”
His fingers twisted viciously in my hair and he lifted my head, tearing me away from him and making me look at him as he continued. “You made me not alone. You made us a family. You made me think that I would be granted a reprieve, that I didn’t have to be alone, not anymore. But in a blink, you were gone. And not only that, you stole Venetia away with you—I may not have been what you wanted, but Venetia was here, she was mine, and you tore her away.”
My body angled to the side, trying to ease his grip on my hair. “I know—I know what I did to you by taking her away.”
“Do you?” His words seethed. “Do you know I have been an empty shell of rot for the last four years? The exact same—no worse, no better, than the day you left?”
My eyes closed, my lips pulling inward as I bit down hard on them. “So you want to kill me.” I opened my eyes to him. “I get it. You want to string me up like one of your torture victims in the undercrofts. Then I need you to do it. I need you to punish me for killing Rodo. For taking Venny from you. For leaving you.”
He flinched. “Those men down below deserve every ounce of flesh I carve from their bodies.”
“And I don’t?”
His fingers tangled in my hair released, dropping away from me. “I don’t know what you deserve. But whatever it is, it isn’t by my hand. You can trust in that.”
“Except I can’t.” My fingers flicked out around us. “All of this—me being here—is asking for trust I don’t think I can manifest. Not when you can turn me over to Cletus at any time. Not when you could be planning that very thing right now.”
His gaze ripped off of me, looking down to the tumbler he still balanced on the chair. He took a long sip of the drink, then set it on the round side table next to the chair before settling his stare back on me. “Why do you think I searched the world a hundred times over for you?”
