Page 46 of Pawn of the Cruel Princess

Her hand flashes.

Pain shoots across my chest, right over my heart. I look down, and blood is oozing from the wound, dripping down the ridges of my stomach.

The Princess is swaying where she sits. I’m surprised she can maintain her grip on the knife. “Fuck me, thrall.”

“No.”

She screeches with frustrated anger and whips the knife across my arm. “Stop defying me and do it!”

“Not tonight.”

Her teeth are clenched, her eyes filling with angry tears. “Please! I have to get past this. I won’t ever be one of them unless I can do this, unless I canbe this. Please.”

I’m being torn apart. I want her, and I’m angry, and her pain is mine, and I can’t divide lust from this raw yearning in my heart to be her choice, not because she’s afraid or drunk or pressured, but because she truly wants me.

I move in, seating myself on the bed beside her. “Ask me another time.”

With a little sobbing shriek, she cuts my chest again. I ignore the pain and shift closer, circling her with my arms.

“Stop,” she gasps through a choked sob. “You bastard, you whore, stop!” But she’s yielding, folding, crumpling against me. The tip of a knife drags down my ribs, and then she lets both blades fall among the blankets and she curls against my bleeding chest and cries.

I hold her amid the blood and the soft white feathers.

I hold her until she has sobbed out her entire heart and she sags against me, nearly unconscious from exhaustion and drink.

It is a greater pleasure than any I’ve ever had.

Finally I settle her on the pillows, wipe her face, and set her knives on the bedside table before lying down beside her on my back. My cuts are shallow. Someone can heal them for me tomorrow.

I wake amid bloody feathers. My chest is sore, and the skin aches, pulling tight where blood has dried on my cuts.

Ruelle has scooted down in the bed. Her face is pressed to my ribs, her cheek smeared with blood. Her arm lies across my waist.

Seeing her there, marked with my blood—my heart swells, huge and agonized.

Fuck me. I think I love her.

It’s not possible. I won’t let it happen. I need to do something to stop it, or I’ll spend my entire enslaved life being miserable over her. I’ll be pining for her when she makes a match with some noble bastard.

She’s stirring. Blinking. When she realizes she’s touching me, she sits bolt upright.

And promptly retches and vomits into a nearby vase.

“Gods,” she groans. “My head.”

“You drank a lot. Perhaps not a lot by a soldier’s standards, but more than you usually do, I think.”

She looks at me. Takes in my wounds, the feathers, the knives I laid on the bedside table.

She doesn’t speak. But by the look on her face, I know she remembers most of it.

Grimacing at the pull of my bloodied cuts, I rise and shuffle to the privy to piss. I wash up while I’m at it, and freshen my breath. By the time I return, Ruelle has already called a servant to take away the smelly vase and the stained bedding. The servant raises his eyebrows, but doesn’t comment on the state of things. I’m not sure whether he’s from the Royal Seat, from another noble household, or from a nearby town—but he has probably seen worse during his years of service.

After Ruelle takes her turn in the bathing room, she faces me, arms folded. “I let myself get out of control last night. It won’t happen again.”

“You were nervous about today. I understand. No apology necessary.”

“I wasn’t going to apologize. You’re my thrall. I don’t have to apologize to you.”