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“It’s not your fault,” Andi protested. She put a hand on his arm but Thrax shook it off.
“It is my fault. I wasn’t strong enough to resist,” he growled. “I tried at first but she fucking tortured me. Kept me tied down and restrained for days. Then the first thing she did when she let me free was to brand me—to mark me as hers.” He rubbed his back again where the tattoo ink barely covered the old branding scars. “I was her property to be bought and sold.”
“Thrax, I just…” Andi shook her head. “I can’t believe you’ve never told me this before. I thought we knew everything about each other!”
“I’ve been trying to forget it for the past twenty years,” he growled, glaring at her. “It was like living in one of the Seven Hells. If I was ‘bad’ I got the pain whip or the pain collar. She beat and tortured me fucking daily. But it was worse when I was ‘good.’”
“It was?” Andi asked faintly.
He nodded.
“Do you know what she would do if I was a ‘good boy’ at the end of the day? She’d let me taste her pussy—never as much as I wanted to—just a taste to tease me. But I would do fucking anything, just for that taste. Anything at all to please her so she’d let me go down on her.” He ran a hand over his horns again, feeling his insides twist with shame. “Kindred have a biological need to taste their females, you know—she used that against me. Perverted it into something sick and twisted.”
“Thrax, I’m so sorry.” Andi’s voice was soft and tentative. “She tortured you—abused you.”
He shook his head and looked away.
“It was a long time ago now—twenty fucking years since I escaped from that bitch. I should be over it.”
“Well, you’re clearly not.” Andi came to stand in front of him. “Look at me,” she said. But Thrax couldn’t. He kept his eyes down—he didn’t’ want to see what the woman he loved thought of him now.
He rose from the bed and rubbed his eyes. His fingers came away black from the elaborate eye makeup that he’d been wearing for hours now.
“I need a shower,” he said shortly. “I have to get this fucking tail out of me and wash this shit off my face.”
“Well…all right.” Andi looked at him uncertainly. “If you’re sure you don’t want to talk about?—”
“No!” Thrax barked.
Andi winced at his sharp tone and he took a deep breath, trying to calm himself.
“Sorry. I’ve done enough fucking talking. Now I just want to clean up.” Seeing Mistress Stoneheart again after all these years had made him feel dirty—downright fucking filthy.
But Thrax didn’t think there was enough hot water in the whole fucking universe to wash away the stain of what she’d done to him.
21
ANDI
Andi changed into a new outfit that had been left for her while she waited for her partner to get cleaned up. It was a soft blue sleeping gown that was cut low in the front, of course—the Delta Salacions seemed to love showing off their breasts for some reason.
As she pulled it over her head and tried in vain to get it to cover her nipples, Andi thought to herself that it probably counted as one of the “gifts” Queen Pantyitch had used to claim they owed her a gift in return. Too bad about that, since they were leaving tonight and taking her prize “stud” with them.
Andi just hoped they could get to the milking room and free Commander Kier without running into any of the guards. She thought it would be possible if they were careful and there didn’t seem to be any guards in the milking room itself.
She’d seen what looked like a back door at the far end of the milking room. If her sense of direction wasn’t wrong, it should lead right out near the docking area. And since Thrax could fly anything with wings, as he put it, they ought to be home free as soon as they stole one of Queen Pantyitch’s ships.
Thrax…Andi had been avoiding thinking of what he’d told her. God, to think that he’d been captured and tortured and abused when he was just a teen—it made her sick to think about it. Not to mention angry when she thought of Mistress Stoneheart—who was aptly named, in Andi’s opinion.
That evil bitch! How dare she do such a thing to a helpless child?
It made Andi wish she could go back in time and stop the whole thing from happening…or at least comfort the young Thrax and tell him none of it was his fault. She’d wanted to tell her partner that—to let him know that she didn’t think any less of him, but it had been clear he was finished talking. It was also clear that he was ashamed of what had been done to him…and the things he had been forced to do to survive.
Andi wished there was something she could do for him to make him feel better. Some way to ease the ache inside him. Now that she knew about his past trauma, a lot of the way he’d been acting on this mission began to make sense. The strange way he had zoned out when she put the tail in him, for instance…and the way he kept slipping and calling her “Mistress.” Obviously he had been reliving past trauma.
It made Andi feel terrible to realize that—she never would have agreed to put the tail in if she’d known about his past. She just wished that Thrax had felt like he could tell her about it before. Well, maybe he would talk to her more now that it was out in the open.
The two of them had grown a lot closer on this mission, she reflected. They had admitted there was more to their relationship than just friendship and a good partnership and they had gotten more physical—more sexual—than she had ever dreamed they would. Honestly, Andi didn’t know if that was a good thing or a bad thing.
