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I shook my head as if the motion would clear the insane words coming from this madman’s mouth. But he had been nothing but honest, brutally honest, with me from the second I woke up in this wagon. He knew the prophecy, he knew my heritage, and he could explain so many things that I had questioned since I left my cave.
I remembered the village where the shopkeeper assumed they’d rescued me, and how Cazius had covered by saying I was being trafficked and they were only sending me back to my home. If they knew about the trafficking, and if that wasn’t the first time they had rescued someone, then they had to have known about Angels and Demons and Shifters and all the other races on the far-flung continents. They had mentioned how secretive the Iron Realm was, but surely they must have seen something when they visited for Béke? And they’d seen my white magic and angelic wings. They must have known.
“How will I ever know what is true if I have to rely on others to tell me about the world?” I fisted the furs, clutching them to my torso and curling up in a ball, as if making myself smaller would protect me from the overwhelming feelings surging from the depths of my heart. The organ beat wildly, robbing my lungs of air as heat and pressure flared in my head, filling my eyes with tears until I feared I would drown in a deadly combination of rage and despair. I clenched my jaw, closing my eyes to fight the tears that threatened to drop. One still trickled down my cheek, and a warm, rough hand caught it before it dripped over my nose.
“You can’t read?”
Blinking through wet lashes, I found Ruslan’s hand cupping my cheek, wearing an agonized expression, as if my pain hurt him just as much as it hurt me.
“No.” My confession was a hoarse whisper, the saltiness that dropped from my eye holding all my shame.
“I can’t stand to see you sad,” he whispered as another tear slipped free, taking a little of my broken heart with it.
“I may want to conquer the continent, but I am telling you that now, not scheming to make it seem like it was your idea all along. I will always be honest with you, Izidora,” he promised, using my real name to emphasize his sincerity.
I nodded, sucking in a ragged breath. My head and heart were too confused to speak any more. He retreated, lying down across from me so our prone forms mirrored each other, then tried to meet my gaze. But I closed my eyes, guarding myself against this new disorienting world where Ruslan was good and Kazimir was bad.
But Kazimir had saved me, and Ruslan had kidnapped me.
And maybe Kazimir lied and manipulated me, but I had no way of knowing if Ruslan was doing the same. I had placed implicit trust in the words of Kazimir and the Nighthounds, and I would not make the mistake of doing the same with Ruslan. My head began pounding as my brain and body warred with each other, and my mind circled and circled around thoughts of who was right, who was wrong, who was good, and who was bad.
“I need to sleep,” I whispered.
“Okay,” he murmured. “I know you didn’t sleep last night, and sleep will make you feel better. I’ll be right here the whole time.”
I wasn’t sure whether his words were a comfort or a curse, but I allowed the rock and sway of the wagon to lull me until I finally slipped away.
I woketo Ruslan sitting beside me, stroking my hair. I jumped up, backing out of range as my breath caught in my chest. “Don’t touch me,” I threatened, using anger to cover how startled I was. I would not fall into the clutches of panic, where my adrenaline spiked and reason fled.
“Let me guess, your precious mate asked permission every time he wanted to touch you? He probably told you that he didn’t want to hurt you too, didn’t he?”
He baited me, trying to see how much his earlier words had affected my resolve. He had shaken me to my very core, but I wasn’t ready to admit that yet. Instead I defended Kazimir, though I was not nearly as resolute as I had been previously. “Yes, because he is an honorable male who cares about me.”
“While you were fucking him, did you ever want more? Harder? Did you want him to be violent?” he smirked.
My face flushed at his insinuation, but my stomach dropped because it was true. I had baited him, bitten him, pushed back into him because I wanted more. With Kazimir moving inside me, I felt powerful, I felt free, and I felt alive. It felt like I was rewriting my story, taking back my life with each circle of my hips. But I did not want Ruslan to know that. I bit the inside of my cheek, holding back the words that threatened to spit like snake’s venom from my mouth.
“I thought so. The thing about people like us is that we like it better when it hurts. It reminds us that we are alive.”
“And what do you and I have in common? You know nothing about what I went through,” I snapped.
“I think you’ll find out that we are much more alike than you want to admit,” he taunted, voice low and filled with a thickness I could not place.
I said nothing, tamping down the fear that still coursed through my veins and pounded my heart. What was with this male and his up, down, sideways, and corkscrewed thoughts?One minute he was sweet, the next he taunted, and I rose to meet his intensity every time.
What was wrong with me?
The wagon halted, and my hands and knees smacked the ground, flares of pain stabbing through each limb as momentum caught up to me. When I lifted my head, Ruslan smirked down at me. “I like you in that position.”
I pushed myself upright, hands finding hips as I shot him a look that was icy enough to kill. “Fuck. You.”
“Oh, you will,” he said, and he leaped off the boxes and strode to the doors of the wagon, just as Drazen flung them open from the outside.
The bitter chill flooded the wagon immediately, and a shiver started at my head and reached my toes before I pulled a fur around my shoulders.
“We’re stopping for the night,” Drazen announced, before disappearing beyond my line of sight.
“Come, let’s get you some food.” Ruslan offered me his hand. I regarded it like it was a snake, then I clutched the fur tighter around me and hopped to the ground without his assistance. Landing lightly on my feet, I strode into a massive cave dug into the side of the mountain where the soldiers were starting fires and preparing food. It was unlike the one I’d been chained in, with high ceilings and an opening wide enough for two dragons to wander through side by side.
