But he wouldn’t let her hide. His big hand cupped her face and gently tilted her chin up toward him. “What just happened?”
She opened her eyes, tilting her head back and bringing her hands up to rest against his chest where her forehead had been, reassured by the steady thump of his heartbeat beneath her fingers.
She would have to tell him. She didn’t want to. And she really didn’t want to end what was happening between them.
He was with her, finally. Touching her, holding her, making her feel things she had hadn’t dared to dream would be possible. And she didn’t want him to leave. But she owed him the truth.
“I… um… have never….”
She swallowed again, this time with worry clogging her throat, as the air cooled around them and he looked down at her with bewilderment, that rough line wrinkling between his eyebrows as he frowned.
“But the king… I mean….” He sounded so agonized—his tension flaring as every muscle in his body went rigid against her—that her guilt and grief rose in a massive wave and she could feel her hands trembling against his skin.
Her whole body started to shake, and suddenly her legs felt too weak to stand, so she sank down onto the blankets, pulling the sides of her vest closed and kneeling like a supplicant as she looked up at him.
He was so strong and good. She didn’t deserve his love, but she was going to ask for it anyway. First, though, she would have to tell him the truth about everything.
She reached up to take his hand as she knelt, and he sank down next to her, bare-chested, his hair standing in all directions where she’d run her fingers through the dark strands. His face was grim and dangerous as he wrapped one hand around his knees, the other still clasped in hers, his wings furled behind him like a fallen angel’s.
She let out a long slow breath and then met his eyes. “The king finds it difficult to… ah… become….” She flushed and then gave a small shrug before straightening her shoulders. This was Val; she could tell him. “Ballanor doesn’t get hard easily. He and Grendel, they always shared women… but the way they shared, it was never about pleasure. Not for the women.”
The furrow on Val’s face deepened as she explained, “Ballanor and Grendel only want a woman who is afraid. It’s the fear, I think, that they enjoyed, that they got off on. Ballanor likes to watch and Grendel is the only one he trusts.…”
She let the words fade as Val grew even more still beside her, his knuckles white where his hand gripped his leg.
This, exactly this, was why she had never said anything before. Because he would have attacked Ballanor, Grendel too, to save her. And he would have died.
But it was also why she could tell him now—he already knew most of it. And she trusted him with her life. With more than her life.
“Ballanor had a riding accident. I heard them talking about it once. He damaged the nerves in his spine, and he struggled to… you know. After that, Grendel would always take their women first. It excited Ballanor. And then he would… have a turn.”
“Why didn’t he see a healer?” Val asked.
“I think that he didn’t want to admit it. To anyone. His father already thought he was weak and stupid. But Grendel knew, because that’s what they’d always done, even before the accident.”
Val’s distress was pouring off him in waves, his fist gripping his leg so tightly she was surprised it didn’t hurt. Maybe it did.
His voice was rough as he asked, “So when they both came to your room, they… gods….Did they…?”
She shuffled closer until she was pressed hard up against his bent legs and drew his hand up against her face. “No, Ballanor wouldn’t let Grendel touch me until there was an heir. He needed Grendel, but he didn’t want someone else’s child on the throne, not even Grendel’s. That first night, he wanted to try on his own, but he didn’t… I mean, he couldn’t… and he was so very angry.”
She closed her eyes, remembering the hatred in her new husband’s eyes as he had torn off her dress, shredding the delicate satin that she had spent so many hours embroidering. His fists smashing into her as he raged and threw her into the wall, destroying an ancient portrait in his violence.
She remembered stumbling into an ornamental vase and how it shattered around her, its needle-sharp shards cutting into her skin as the pieces fell to the floor. Her hopes of anything resembling a bearable marriage shattering right along with it.
And every time after that. How he would make her strip and then taunt her for her ugliness, calling her a whore with one breath, frigid with the other. His words hissing as he pointed out her many flaws, how impossible it was for him to feel any kind of lust for someone so disgusting.
And then his fists.
The only thing that gave her any comfort was knowing Val was there. She could endure Ballanor’s rage because Val was her safety. And if it ever became too much to bear, all she had to do was lift her voice, and he would be with her in seconds.
Then, slowly, Ballanor’s interest in her—or, more likely, his belief that he would ever get his heir through her—had faded, and she was replaced with other women. Women who took the brunt of his rage and his love of inflicting pain. Women who refused to listen to the warnings of the frigid, jealous, Princess Peevish.
She told herself there was nothing she could have done differently or better. That he would have hated her no matter what she looked like. But his taunts still echoed in her head. His constant accusations that she was repulsive were so very hard to forget. As was the unceasing hatred of the court.
Val watched her, forehead deeply lined and eyes as dark as midnight, his horror a palpable presence in the tent.
She tried to tell herself that Val was disgusted by Ballanor, not her. That Val had cared for her even when she was bruised and vulnerable. But it was difficult to hold onto that belief with him sitting beside her, his face so grim, his muscles rigid with tension.
