Page 262 of Once Upon a Fable

I was swimming in misery.

I crashed to my knees as my eyes caught hers, and I grunted with so much fucking pain.

She sat primly on the floor, her cheeks glittering with tears, her hair full of static and crowning her like a halo.

She looked as if a bear had mauled her. As if she’d gone to war with her biggest enemy and only just survived. Her lips were swollen. Her shirt torn. Her legs red from rubbing on the carpet.

And even now, even while my heart dissolved into a pile of worthless acid, I still wanted her. My cock still throbbed for her. My body still tormented me until the end.

Bowing my head, I braced myself for her hatred.

I cowered for the curses I deserved.

I would do whatever she asked. I would free her. Love her. Worship her until I could make this right.

But...in that never-ending moment full of wretchedness and wrongness, she just gave me the tiniest of shrugs.

A shrug with glossy eyes and lips that quirked into a watery half-smile.

A shrug that somehow granted understanding. That wobbled with forgiveness. That miraculously accepted that I’d hurt her even when I didn’t want to. That I’d fucked her against her control.

A shrug that said...it’s okay.

And that fucking shrug broke me into smithereens.

I curled into myself.

I hugged the body that’d forsaken me.

I fell forward over a cock that still tried to control me.

And I screamed.

I screamed for help.

For salvation.

For deliverance from this never-ending nightmare.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

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WHAT HAPPENED NEXT WOULD never be confessed toanyone.

No matter if I managed to get home.

No matter how hot these secrets burned.

No matter how good it would feel to hug my mother and brother and tell them what I’d endured.

No matter if I climbed back to my life, my friends, my career...I wouldneverutter a single word of what happened between Kas and me in that library.

Not because he’d raped me while trapped in a nightmare of his past.

Not because I knew now what it was like to have every inch of my power stripped away by a man so much larger and stronger than myself. And not because I’d left the kitchen, after doing his bidding and cooking him dinner no less, merely to find myself on my back with him rutting between my legs.

No.