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“Yes,” I said, trying not to shout the affirmation at him. I’d needed a moment to get my head back on straight after all the shit that had gone down with Kolya, but not the eternity Ren had apparently been intending to wait. By the Blessed Five, had he been planning to spend the rest of our lives waiting for me to answer a question he hadn’t even asked?
Maybe other people who’d had their agency ripped from them, who’d been violated and had their souls left feeling raw, needed longer to process what had happened. Maybe others needed less time.
I didn’t fucking know how I wasmeantto feel, only how I did feel, and that was frustrated and worked up and needing Ren to make me forget it all. To get lost in the future I’d chosen for myself; something good and ever so precious and better than anything I ever dreamed I’d get to have. A future with him.
I wanted it rough, like only he could give me. I wanted to be fucked hard and deep, and I told him so, revelling in the way Ren’s eyes lit up. And then my mood immediately soured again when his gaze morphed into horrified pity.
“Or maybe we should do it your way from now on?” offered the prince.
I eyed him suspiciously. “What do you mean, ‘my way’?”
“Gentle. Sweet.”
I frowned. “Is that whatyouwant?”
His silence was enough of an answer.
“Then why even suggest it?” The words came out harsher than I’d intended, but this demure, watered-down version of Ren was starting to piss me off. “What’s going on with you?”
Ren fidgeted, twisting his fingers in my shirt. “I just…want to give you something nice,” he said quietly. “Like you’d enjoy, not how I always insist on.”
I had never been more confused in my life. “Like I’d enjoy?” I repeated, dread creeping into my heart at the words even though I didn’t fully comprehend their meaning.
Or maybe I did. “Renato.You’renot Kolya.”
“But that’s the problem!” the prince roared, and then winced, as if worried his yell might shatter me like a pane of glass. “Everything I do to you is violent and cruel, and exactly like him!”
“That’s not-”
“The first time we fucked, I held you down and made you take me,” Ren spat out, his lips curling in distaste. The man could be so full of unexpected self-loathing at times.
“And I consented.”
“That doesn’t matter!”
“It’s all that matters!” I shouted at him, leaning forward to press my hands to Ren’s face and hold him still to ensure the prick was listening to every word. My voice dropped to a whisper as I repeated it. “It’s all that matters, darling.”
His eyes grew wet, and his shoulders heaved. Ren started to sob silently under my touch, and I pulled him close as I rested his head against my chest and wrapped my arms around him.
Kolya may have been my demon, a nightmare that sometimes woke me in cold sweat, but I’d never considered that he could be Ren’s too. I had been the one rendered helpless and pliant as Kolya took what he wanted, but my prince had seen it all where he’d been bound to the tree by my own hand. How would I feel watching it happen to Ren?
Absolutely fucking furious, I knew that. Like I wanted to shred the continent down into individual blades of grass and toss them all into the deepest parts of the sea.
But it wasn’t just his vulnerability he was lamenting. It was mine as well.
Well, fuck him. I was plenty capable of brooding on my own: he didn’t get to do that for me too.
“I don’t want to be your monster,” Ren sniffled into my shirt.
I dug my fingernails into my palms to prevent myself from hitting him. I figured smacking him across the face while he was crying was something the old Nathanael would have done, and I was trying to show growth and shit.
“For someone so clever,” I ground out, “you are incredibly stupid.”
That got a reaction.
“Did you just call me stupid?” my prince asked half-heartedly, dragging his face out of my clothes and wrinkling his nose at their smell. “That kind of shit talk from a foreign royal can cause wars, you know.”
“Ren. I knew when I first said yes to you-”
