Tewewh was watching on with bated breath.
“That will be all,” I told them, reaching for the dress I’d been wearing.
They packed up their things in silence and left after their curtsies. I’d just fastened the last button over my chest, whenhefilled the doorway. He’d been waiting for them to leave.
“Syera,” he said.
I was faced away and stayed that way. “What do you want from me today?”
“Nothing except to speak to you.”
“That’s how it always seems to start. Like the time you clapped me in chains and dragged me through the fortress.” I didn’t turn.
“That was… regrettable.”
I could think of other words for it. But did I expect that I could yellfuck youin the demon king’s face without consequence? No. Worth it, in my opinion. No one would forget my defiance, and that meant something.
Carmine cleared his throat. “I wanted to say that yesterday was unintentional. Had I known, then?—”
“You would have bullied me in some other way,” I said, finally facing him.
He inhaled and didn’t look at me. “Are you all right?”
“I’m great. Now that you’ve asked, you can go about your day without guilt.”
Carmine closed his eyes, then opened them to meet my gaze for the first time. “Syera, the distance between us is… I wish that we could return to what we once were. Please tell me how that might be possible. I want my mate beside me. I want to stop hurting you all the time. If there is a way, then I will do whatever I can to get there with you. But please put me out of this turmoil.”
I gaped at him.Histurmoil? Distance? What we once were?He must be fucking joking. He must be.
I continued to gape as he awaited my answer. I couldn’t even laugh. There wasn’t any returning to what we’d been. What we were had been based on his lies anyway.
Chains one day, and heartfelt pleas the next—he wasinsane.Whatever thisrare begging and guilt-ridden version was, there would alwaysbe that ice lurking under the surface, ready to rise up at any sign of challenge. Carmine was broken goods, a monster, and I wasn’t enough to fix him at sixteen, and at twenty-one I had no intention of fixing anything about him.
Whatever had happened to him in the dungeon was irreversible. There was no key to unlock his cell.
Crack.
I felt the rip inside my mind. I strode to the bed and lay down on my back. “You don’t want a solution, Carmine. You want my surrender, remember? That’s what you were saying yesterday.”
In my devastation and rage, lust still considered this a ripe time to pop her head up. I batted her away.
“Yes,” Carmine said at last, and the tightness in his voice—and his trousers—was plain. “If that is the only way forward, enamai, then I will accept your surrender, yes.”
“We’d better get to it then.” I lifted my hips and wriggled my underwear off, then hitched my skirt to spread my legs.
I propped up on my elbows in time to see Carmine’s wide-eyed stare as he fixed on the part of me that had tortured him for three years.
His grip on the doorway turned brutal, and stone cracked and crumbled. At this rate, none of the fortress would be left, or he’d need to hire every stonecrafter in the realm.
Carmine closed his eyes. “Not like that, Syera. You are only doing this because you’re angry.”
No shit.“But this is me surrendering,” I whispered. “Think how warm I’ll feel? You know the mating will make me wet. And you don’t need to worry about my feelings. You didn’t yesterday. You can just worry about how good your cock feels as it slides in and out.” Carmine inhaled and groaned.
“You can smell that I’m ready.”
Stone crumbled to the ground, and he whirled to turn away, shoulders heaving.
I closed my legs and sat. “Anything else you’d like to chat about?”
