Page 93 of Pawn of the Cruel Princess
“You’re confusing sex with feelings, you absolute fool. You onlythinkyou know me. How could you, really? In so few days? You don’t understand me at all. Maybe you think you canchangeme, train me, like a thrall, to be the person who suits you, the woman you want to see. No.” Chest heaving, I step nearer and slap him again.
He shakes it off, his handsome face molten, his eyes shining unrepentant. “There’s nothing different Iwantto see, nothing but the truth of you. You’re sadistic, moody, vindictive, and cruel, and I love you, not in spite of it—because of it. Not because I think you’ll change—don’t you dare. Every jagged shard of your soul is a piece in the beautiful wreck that is my love for you.”
“What are you even saying?” I gasp, my voice tight with oncoming sobs. “That’s the stupidest fucking thing a man has ever said to a woman.”
“Oh really?” He smiles, warm and sweet. “Then why are you crying?”
“I’m not crying.”
I am. Tears are sliding down my face, one after another.
“I wanted you to know,” he whispers. “In case whatever is happening here, happens to one of us.”
“You mean in case we die.”
“Yes. But I would have told you anyway, even if there wasn’t any danger. You can hate me, sell me, kill me. Torture me, if you want—I’ve already spoken my deepest truth. I would kill to touch you right now, to show you how I feel, but I can’t.”
I clutch my chest, hating him for saying those words, those stupid, meaningless, precious words. Turning, I yank open the cell door and stride away from him, along the dank corridor of the dungeon.
When I get to the crooked stone steps, I sit down in the dark, heedless of shell-rats. My chest tightens until I think it will burst, until I have to let out a soundless scream, a silent wrenching sob.
Mine. He’s mine, and I didn’t want him like this, passionate and kind and heroic and loving me. He was supposed to be an attractive pawn, an indifferent object that I could move from person to person as needed. I wasn’t supposed to care how he felt or what happened to him. I wasn’t supposed to feel this delight when I’m with him, this sweetly painful craving, this possessive ache in my soul.
I have never felt this way about anyone—never experienced horror like I did when Vienne nearly put out his lovely dark eyes. I would have given up my own eyes for him.
What does that mean?
Something scuffles in the darkness nearby, and I rise abruptly. Instead of returning upstairs and heading for my suite, I swipe away my tears, suck in a deep breath, and walk back down the corridor to Ducayne’s cell, because I can’t leave him alone in the dark, with the shell-rats.
I’ve become a malleable, spineless weakling.
I slam his cell door open with a bang, and he startles.
“Don’t repeat those words,” I order. “And don’tsmileat me, or joke, or say anything sweet, because if you do I will vomit all over you and leave you drenched in the smell all night. And I know you have a sensitive nose.”
He’s fighting to keep his expression serious. And he’s losing.
So I broach the one topic that’s sure to sober him as effectively as it did me. “Tell me about your parents.”
Ducayne tells me about his father, who left, and about his mother, who ignored or despised him when he did not meet her impossible standards. And I tell him about my mother, who sailed away with a beautiful woman aboard her ship.
“What about this?” I touch the scar over his left breast. “There’s a story here.”
“Ah, that.” His smile is a fragile veneer over an old wound. “My mother was very drunk one night. Came to my room, claiming she would carve my father’s faithless heart out of me. Our housekeeper stopped her before the blade reached anything vital. But my mother refused to let me have a healer. So instead I have this lovely scar, to remember her by.”
“We are so damaged, you and I.” My fingertip traces the puckered flesh. “Do you think your mother knows you were captured?”
“She probably believes me dead. What a relief for her, to finally be rid of her son, the failure.” He gives me a rueful grin.
Gods—I’m feeling things. Very soft things, like wanting to hold him and pet him and comfort him with my body, even as a dark, savage part of me wants to get his mother on my torture table and punish her for the pain she caused her son.
Ducayne is sagging where he sits, his eyes bleary and tired, so I say, “I have another story to tell you. One you wanted to hear—the story of Arawn, god of death.”
“Oh, good,” he says. “Tales of death while I’m chained in this godsdamned stinking cell with the ghosts of prisoners past.”
“No.” I grip his jaw. “Don’t say that.”
“I’m only joking, Highness.” He smirks. “Go on with the tale. Please.”
