Total pages in book: 83
Estimated words: 76857 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 384(@200wpm)___ 307(@250wpm)___ 256(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 76857 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 384(@200wpm)___ 307(@250wpm)___ 256(@300wpm)
I was in no mental state to process any of that. Since I was twelve, he had been planning this…
That would mean that despite all my best efforts, I’d never had a future. Not one year of my hard work would have altered anything. The fog would never have been an option. He would never have allowed me to leave the academy. The list he repeatedly suggested I consider was never a true option. Only a means to gauge when he might pin me down on his office floor.
I swear I felt him spurt again that very moment. As if to punctuate the rape.
And I knew that word, because he had taught it to me. Once in explanation, and once in action.
Yet, to him, such a monstrous thing seemed only a minor inconvenience.
He had not struggled at all, whereas I had been overpowered and confused with little effort. There had even been moments in the mating that I had actively participated in my own destruction.
Mind reeling, I began to hyperventilate.
The man had heard my song for ten years and kept it secret. A man who had wanted me on a very visceral level since I was a child.
Who had planned and kept me hidden away.
He’d made my life, and the lives of all those around me, hell.
The rules had changed so abruptly after I’d first met Cyderial. There was no more playing in the courtyard, no more visits to my mother. We had all been locked inside under constant armed guard. So he could have a reason to keep me locked inside under constant guard while the inconvenience of my age worked itself out.
I’d been kept in a bubble until he’d deemed me old enough to rape.
The suffering of all the other students… the executions. All of it was because he wanted me to himself.
He’d made me culpable.
Working at connecting the mess of my thoughts, I realized the needless violence over the past ten years, the executions. All of it had come from the madman still spilling fluid inside me. “You killed Private Cullen for no reason!”
“That damned boy!” Temper, the cold-blooded general had always had a strong reaction at the mention of the redheaded boy. “He gave us a full confession, Lorieyn. Private Cullen had every intention of fucking you. He was just working up the nerve.”
Gripping my hair by the roots, he forced my head back so I would have to see those eyes. Acid-green eyes burning as they always had. Yet I knew what that insanity was. It was pure obsession. “Private Cullen was desperate and already aware he was going to die. You’ve always been too sweet to think the worst of anyone. How you’ve made him some kind of saint in your memory is poison between us. He wasn’t a saint; he was a criminal.”
“Then what does that make you?” I was sick with anger and once again aching where he pulsated in my guts.
“It makes me your mate.” He’d spoken the words with deeply satisfied male pride. Cherished them on his tongue, smiling with joy and relief, as if he had waited a lifetime to say them aloud. “One willing to do anything required to keep you safe. Anything. Remember that as you contemplate retaliation. We have an eternity together, and I am a very patient man.”
Rippling his cock at that moment, as if to luxuriate in the confines of my body, he made no secret of the amount of delight being inside me gave him.
The way he thought to cup my face between his palms while rocking our bodies so his knot might tease my oversensitive seam. How he looked at me with such adoration, tracing fingertips over the shape of my features.
The man completely terrified me.
With a soft smile and languid caresses, he murmured, “I have studied every text I might find on how to please you. Listened to elders describe the process of opening a mate. The first time is painful for the female no matter how careful one may be. I counted the seconds of your suffering once your body chose me and began to bloom. Even then, driven as I was to mount you, I gave you time to see and feel. Please remember that when your hatred fosters only regret for the way you were claimed. I can bear your disgust, but I do not wish for you to be sad.”
But I wasn’t sad. I was devastated.
A direct opposition to his elation. This had been sacred to him. The way he murmured and stroked me, despite my open fear, unsettling. “You are mine now. For life. I can love you enough for both of us until you’re ready to accept me.”
Knowing there were two men outside who’d also heard my song, knowing I could have chosen the man I’d be tied to for the rest of my life, made me resent him all the more. This monster had stolen me. “You took away my choice.”