Total pages in book: 208
Estimated words: 209645 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1048(@200wpm)___ 839(@250wpm)___ 699(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 209645 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1048(@200wpm)___ 839(@250wpm)___ 699(@300wpm)
“So was Trajan. Gods,” he groaned, seeing his mother in his mind’s eye. “She was beautiful, Ellie. So lovely.”
She lifted her head and stared into his eyes.
Hers were bright with tears.
Cassius kept talking.
“She loved us both, so fucking much. I still hear her voice reading us stories or singing me to sleep. I still feel her arms around me and how she would hold me tight. I see her expression when we were brought down to the breakfast table. Her face lit up with such gladness at the sight of her two boys.”
“I’m glad she at least had you.”
He had always wondered about that.
It seemed he and Trajan were the only things that gave her joy.
But how could they with the way they’d been conceived?
He did not ask Ellie about that.
He told her, “It was not a love match from the beginning. Father coveted her beauty, and as king, he could have it. So he took it. She hated him. She feared him. She recoiled every time he was near. She always seemed to move to protect us from him. And I knew nothing but her cuts and scrapes, bruises and swelling, limping and holding herself carefully. I wouldn’t know, until much later, that it was he who made her so. That it was not normal for a woman to be like that. It was just, then, all that I knew.”
He lifted his hand and curled his fingers around hers at his jaw.
“My stories do not get worse than that, lamb,” he said. “But they are not much better. Now, do you understand why I did not wish you to carry this weight?”
“I do, and so now, do you see that I have not broken under it?” she asked.
He shook his head. “Elena, more grows from that. This kind of atrocity, this kind of evil, it breeds and spreads and infects everything around it. For me, I’m angry at her almost as much as I hate him. She fought him in the act. Years she’d endured that, and she still fought. Why did she not continue to fight? Why did she not try to get away? Perhaps she could have escaped. To The Enchantments. To Mar-el. Being a bounden, she’d have more rights and protections than she did in that bloody citadel.”
“She still would have had to leave you.”
“But eventually, I could have found her.”
“Oh, Cass,” she whispered, her fingers moving under his to stroke his jaw.
“I also failed her,” he stated.
She appeared perplexed. “How?”
“I wanted no part of him, of my birth, of that castle, of his reign. I removed myself from it as much as I could when I could not actually remove myself. I watched my brother turn into him, and I did nothing to stop it. And I knew women all over my realm faced the same and I did nothing to stop that either.”
“You were the second son. This is a precarious position, Cassius, I know that. You knew it better than me for you lived it.”
“I still did nothing to stop it.”
“You’re doing something now.”
“Do not think this will be easy, Elena. There will be a revolt. It’s inevitable.”
“And you’ll best it.”
“I want to kill him.”
She pressed closer at his declaration.
“I have to remove myself from that too, from the feelings I have,” he told her. “I have to close them down, freeze them out. If I do not, if I let free that rein, I will murder my father.”
“You do know this is not an unreasonable reaction,” she replied, and he let out a bark of disgusted laughter. “It isn’t, Cass,” she pushed.
“The lifelong urge to commit patricide?” he asked disbelievingly. “What kind of man does that make me?”
“You’re asking the wrong question.”
“What is the right one?”
“What kind of son does that make you?”
Was she mad?
“That I want to kill my father?”
“That you want to avenge your mother.”
He closed his mouth.
“And you will do that, by freeing those like her from similar tyranny,” she declared. “She will not witness it, but do you not think she is in the beyond, watching you and proud of you and knowing that she made you? Knowing that, through you, part of her will liberate her sisters? How beautiful a legacy is that, Cassius? What beauty she has created, my warrior. What a precious gift she has given our world.”
Gods damn it, he had to have her.
He could no longer hold his need at bay.
He didn’t want her.
He needed her.
Now.
So he took her, starting with her mouth.
He also took her down to the blanket, with him over her.
And feeling her under him, Cass was as he expected he would be.
Lost to her.
He simply couldn’t get enough.
Her lips and tongue, his hands on her body.
She responded eagerly, hungrily, spurring him on.
He pulled at her tunic.
She tugged at his leathers.