*Aletha*
Never in her life did she expect him to apologize to her. She'd felt his resentment toward her ever since he brought her back to the Night Pack. In the beginning, he couldn't even stand their touch, because the bond between them had been searing. It had been in pieces, its strings torn and gnarled. She'd felt it all day and night and wondered, what had she done? How deep had her actions sabotaged everything between them? Now, even though it was healing, their bond may never return to its unblemished form again.
She knew from the way his fingers occasionally tremored that touching her still hurt him more than it hurt her. Although the bond didn't give him pain, he had felt everything that had transpired when she went back to Lucien. She'd let him mark her again, and that was when the betrayal began. That was when her entire body had been lit by agonizing fire and it never truly stopped. Every time she looked at him, she felt her insides burn. She felt herself clench inward, because although he'd acknowledged her, he grew distraught. The trance was broken. He was haunted by what he'd felt through the bond. And from the look in his eye, he'd never stopped hurting.
Since the day she saw how the darkness preyed on him, she saw a completely different side to him than she ever had before. There was that gleam to his eye, that darkness that suggested a level of trauma that bordered carnality. It made goosebumps break out of her skin.
What had happened to him? She'd wondered that for days. What happened before? What happened for all those centuries he'd been trapped with his mother?
Horrible things.
She felt his hands leave her face, slowly trailing over to her shoulders, her arms, her fingers. He was reminding her with his touch that he was still here, still with her, and he wasn't going to leave. "You won't do it again?" she asked. "Force me against my will?"
He shook his head. "No."
"Can I ask you something?" she began slowly, watching him.
He stared at her with his dark grey eyes. "Yes," he said. "Go on."
She gripped his hands tightly again. His warm fingers wrapped over hers, and he wasn't letting her go. "Why do you hate your mother?"
She'd remembered back in the throne room when he'd told her he hated his mother the most. His voice had been laced with cold abhorrence for the female. The female who had given birth to him. And it wasn't just the normal kind of hate either. There was nothing close to love in the inflection of his voice. Just endless hatred that ran darker than the night. It sent chills through her body, just knowing such hatred existed in the world.
He regarded her for a long moment. The silence was almost unbearable, and she thought he could hear how loud her heart was pounding against her chest. "She has given me endless nightmares," he began. "They chase me every night, trying to tear me down. For centuries, I've only known nightmares." He fell silent before whispering softly, "I can't dream anymore."
She felt her heart tighten. "Why is that?" she asked, knowing whatever the reason was, it was gruesome. Everything in his expression revealed the darkness behind his past. The unknowingness of it, it terrified her. But she still wanted to know. "Why do you have nightmares?"
His gaze never left hers. Instead, they flashed stark silver. His lips parted, soft, full, and for a moment she thought he would kiss her. He leaned closer toward her and whispered, "Touch my neck."
Her fingers instantly tremored at the intensity of his tone. Her face grew alarmingly hot as she slowly moved her fingers over his throat. But the moment she did, instead of smooth skin, she felt jagged abrasions. She'd always just assumed his skin was flawless from the distance but now as she ran her fingers over his skin, she knew he'd been brutally tortured once. "What happened?" she asked, completely alarmed now.
"There was a silver collar around my neck where you're touching. I couldn't really breathe in it, it was more of a choker." He placed his hand over hers and slid the pads of her fingers to the side of his neck where she felt an indent on his skin. "A permanent choker," he explained. "No matter how much I tried, it would never come off. I would bleed instead, as it tore my flesh off."
What in the hell? "Your mother did this to you?"
He gave her a very slight nod.
"But why?" she asked, her voice filled with wrath. She always hated Vicera, but this was beyond disturbing. This was unbecoming. "She gave birth to you. You are her son!"
He almost smiled. "I am what she calls her 'unworthy bastard.' She despises my very existence. She believes I did her a great injustice when my father decided he didn't want her anymore. Somehow, it was my fault for being the bad omen. So she locked me up and made me a pleasure slave for her lords and ladies."
And that was when she completely stopped breathing. "A pleasure slave?"
All of the Darklands knew what a pleasure slave was, or at least what being one implied. It was a dark act of turning one into a pleasure slave, because no one in their right mind would willingly become one. Males and females were held captive against their will and battered until their bones broke and their dignities tattered into worthless ruins. Then they were sold in the wolf trafficking circle, and aristocrats with more influence than they deserved kept their slaves imprisoned for years until the mistreatment finally killed them.
"Yes, a pleasure slave," he said. "I have been through many things, most of them I can't really talk about. They hurt me...a lot."
Something in their bond shifted at that moment. Something in it pulled them tighter into each other. Because the way he was looking at her...it was a look she'd seen in her own face many times when she thought of her past. He looked at her with pain that burned through her soul. It was stark and raw and enough to make her stop thinking, because he'd also lived through his own hell.
Her mind began spin, and she couldn't stop wondering how someone could be put through something so horrible by his own mother? She knew what it did to a person, because she'd had a lick of it from months of torture and rape. But she knew he'd lived through it for even longer than just a few months. "How long?" she asked darkly. Her muscles strained with possessiveness, with ire to burn away the demonic bitch who dared to ruin him. She felt that pull, that urge to stop his pain because in the most primal level, he was still her mate. And he didn't deserve any of it.
"Three centuries."
She just felt something inside of her shatter when she heard that. "Three centuries?" she repeated. Her fingers were digging into his. She couldn't believe it. She thought three months was bad enough, but three centuries? How did he survive three centuries of depravity?
"At the time, I thought it would never end," he said. "I'd lost track of time, and sometimes I would lose my sanity and succumb to sleep for years only to wake up to more pain and abuse." He shook his head, his face twisting. "The ones who should love me hates me, Aletha. I didn't live in the light. I was kept in the darkness, and I was tortured in the darkness. I'd been a pleasure slave a decade after I was born. And for a long time, I lived like a shell. I had nothing, but even nothing had more than me."
"No," she said, her heart breaking. Her throat was shaking, and she didn't trust herself speaking at all. She wrapped her arms around his neck. "You're more than that. You're not nothing anymore. You're so much more..." She couldn't speak anymore, not when she felt his pain through the bond, and it was still not all of it. There was plenty more he wasn't revealing to her. He'd always been broken, like a deep scar that refused to heal. He was worse, though, because those centuries were engraved in his mind forever. Those centuries more than outlived even her. It was depraved, the world he knew, because he was forced into the darkness to endure its evil.
When he told her that she was in the Darklands, that things were different here, she brushed it off. She never understood the extent to which he meant it. She always thought this whole realm was evil, that anything within the dark spawned whatever was vile. But now she began to realize that only the Darklands could contain the most of the world's deadliest depravities.
She had always thought no one could hate the vampire queen more than her, who had lost her entire family and pack because of her. But now she could feel the hatred hissing in their bond, and it wasn't her. It was his hatred toward his own mother.
"She was never your mother," Aletha spoke, forcing her voice to remain intact. How had he endured centuries of what she'd endured for just months? And from the sound of it, what he'd gone through was darker. It had bloodlust and carnage all over it. "No mother would do that to her child. No mother would make her child a pleasure slave for slave masters! She is not your mother."
"Oh, I wish she wasn't. I've always wanted to kill her." His grey eyes flashed almost silver in the moonlight that filtered softly through the window. It was a lethal site, just seeing how much unfiltered hatred he bore for his mother. "It's easy to kill immortals when you pierce their souls, but with my mother, you can't find her soul to kill her. Her soul isn't in her body. It is hidden somewhere no one knows. And maybe one day, I'll find it. Then I'll make her see what she's done to me."
He really was a male who started with less than nothing. He'd endured everything the night had offered him, and he'd survived. The centuries of abuse had turned him into something else completely. He was no longer innocent or naive. He was no longer weak. He was stronger, firmer...and maybe even unbreakable. He'd already been broken, and now nothing could break him even more.
"They don't have pleasure slaves anymore," she said, drawing him out of his dark haze. "There was no word of them for centuries."
"They exist, but it's unheard of because I abolished trafficking when I took the Night Throne," he explained. "The wolf trafficking renders many pleasure slaves, and you would have been one if I hadn't taken you from Lucien that night I marked you."
She realized that now. There were things that Rush knew that she didn't know. He'd ruled for over a thousand years. He knew Lucien more than she ever did. "If you knew he was evil from the start, why didn't you tell me?"
"I didn't have substantial evidence to accuse him of trafficking, so I didn't hold it against him until you ran off." His voice darkened at the last part. He was still angry with her for leaving. It hadn't just hurt him--it broke a part of their bond.
"I shouldn't have run off," she admitted, feeling almost stupid. She should have known it, Alphas weren't stupid. They never acted irrational without reason. With Rush, there was always reason behind what he did. "I should have believed you."
"Yes, you should have," he agreed. Then he touched her mouth and brushed his thumb over them. He liked touching her with his thumb, feeling her skin against his. "If you had given me a chance to explain everything to you instead of refusing to to see me, maybe things would have been different."
"I was just..." she began, searching for words. It had been awhile since she'd had to make such an effort to speak to a male. With Lucien, their conversation remained simple, condensed, not very stressful. But with Rush, she always battled a storm. "I was just so scared. And angry. You took me somewhere unknown and, I don't know, I just freaked out." Her voice softened. "I missed him a lot, too. I only ever saw him as my savior. I couldn't really think wrongly of him...but I guess I was too stupid." She shook her head with a snarl to her lips. How much she hated Lucien now, it was almost unbelievable. "That's my weakness. Being a reckless airhead."
"You see now, don't you? We are not much different. We know the trafficking, because we've been victims of it. I've worked for centuries to destroy the wolf trafficking because it ruins lives. It preys on the helpless, just like it once preyed on me and you. That's unforgivable. I won't let this go."
Now she knew he could never be what Lucien was. He could never be what those rogues or those vampires were, because they were everything that he despised. As far away as he seemed, at this moment, their souls touched. Awareness shot through her body. Right now, they were the closest they'd ever been. They were finally looking at each other for the first time with all the ugliness of reality surrounding them.
He'd told her he'd protect her in the darkest night, but now she found herself wanting to do the same for him too.