Page 209 of Rogue Alpha Prince
Cain takes my knife-holding hand off of the back of his neck, which I haven’t realized I put there, and he pulls back from the kiss, leaving my lips swollen and tingling.
“I want your mark, but if you could use your teeth instead of a knife, I would be grateful,” he jokes with a smirk that makes my knees soft.
“I have to show you something,” I say quickly while I still have some courage to do it, and I quickly cut my left palm in front of him.
He looks at blood pooling with pursed lips and then up at me with a condescending expression.
“No, no, look at it!”
He gazes down again, clearly unamused, but I thrive in unfavorable conditions—so I show off the healing, wipe the blood to really showcase the way I stop it, and let the skin scar.
“What the fuck?” He catches my hand from the bottom and pulls it closer to himself to look, “How did you do that?”
“Well, I figured that it’ll scar if I completely stop my powers for a few seconds. That’s why I have all this scarring tissue inside in the first place, right? Because my wolf powers were dormant for a few days? Anyway… look.”
I’m so eager to impress him with the only real project I’ve had for the whole month, that I make my skin repair and smooth out quicker than ever. Or maybe that’s the presence of my oblivious true mate. Either way, I look at him with a wide, proud smile and palm healed as new.
And there it is, hishopeleaking through the mate bond and drowning my innocent happiness without mercy. He wants to have his heirs after all, and I hate him for that with my whole heart.
I want to scream at him to go and impregnate any of the women that dream of being fucked by the imposing Rogue Alpha Prince, and there’s a lot of them, a whole Kingdom. Two even. But I don’t because he marked me, andeven if he would somehow be able to stomach it, I would suffer with his every move in someone else…
I don’t even know what he is saying to me. I turn around and climb into bed again. I lay down with my body feeling so fucking heavy and my mind so empty all of a sudden. I’m numb, and it’s a special kind of heart-wrenching numbness that sits bone-deep in me. But I know by now that I have to pretend I want to do something, anything, so I point at the book Cain gave me and reach for it when he passes it over with another sour look on his face.
I ignore him and open the book. I must admit it’s one of the best gifts I ever received and I wish I could just read it without drifting away in my numb mind… The book is suddenly snatched away from me.
“I’m done,” Cain hisses at me and yanks me up. “You know I can fuckingfeelyour every emotion, right? I can feel you spiraling down right now.”
I’m being pulled to the bathtub that is yet to be filled with fresh water, and I start to protest, but my mouth is being forcefully closed by Cain’s huge hand, and I know better by now than to fight him.
“You know why for the whole month, while you’ve been doing this—because I assume that’s what you’ve been doing then—you were so fucking happy about every success?” he asks, putting me in the cold used water while I’m still in my shorts and t-shirt. “It’s because I could feel you being better for all these short, increasing moments, and I was so fucking relieved that my emotion doubled your happiness. Because you can feel me, too. Do you know how hard it is for me to not dwell in my sadness when I feel yours, so I won’t make you even worse? It’s fucking hard!”
With every word Cain shouts at me, my composure breaks, and more tears come to my eyes.
He takes my clothes off with a huff, not looking at my face. The clothes land on the floor with a wet slap. He shakes his head, looking intensely to his left, with furrowed brows.
I stand paralyzed with tears slowly falling down my cheeks. He sighs loudly and looks at me again. Our eyes lock before I break the gaze and look down at his full lips.
“I can’t even show you how much I love you because I can’t even touch you!”
“You can touch me,” Iwhisper, suddenly realizing how frustrating the lack of this kind of intimacy is.
I look up to catch him rolling his eyes at my statement. We both know what the doctor said, but I don’t care anymore. I need him. I need my true mate. I need to feel like myself again.
“You keep bleeding so much I wasn’t even able to smell that you were cutting yourself!” he growls with frustration and uses one of the buckets to pour the cold water over my shivering body.
“Cain, it’s dirty!”
“I don’t care, I need this, stand still,” he rubs my body with a cloth while I try not to freeze to death for no practical reason.
He doesn’t say a word after that and neither do I. Through the mate bond, he so foolishly established, I can feel we both are mental messes. I’m just the only one who usually shows it.
I take off my hair elastic and tie his semi-long black hair in a mini man-ban because they keep falling into his eyes. He stopped going to the barber, not wanting to leave me for anything not essential, and the only thing I could do was shave his sides and trim his beard with a battery-operated clipper. The top of his head grew long.
I like it.
Finally, he gives me a hand to help me get out of the tub because I must have been so weak at some point that he forgot I’m a fucking werewolf with a supernatural balance and I can’t trip over just like that. I feel his frustration with me rise, fueled by my own, even before he throws a towel at my face and storms out of the room with a slam of the doors.
I take a big breath, dry myself, angrily put my pajama set on, and go to bed. Sun barely sets, and I should probably try to go eat dinner with everyone else for the first time in over a month—as I planned for a few days now—marking my birthday as a good day to do it. But I feel so drained after this whole intense conversation with Cain, that I don’t think I would be able to stomach anything.
