American Prince

She rips her hands out of mine with force, and I’m stunned by it, stunned and scared. This is my Greer, my quiet professor, my reserved, austere political princess. I’ve never seen her like this—violent and incoherent to reason. It scares me. It makes me want to castrate Melwas with my bare hands. It makes me want to fuck her.

“Greer,” I say, closing my hand over both of her smaller ones and trying to shove down that despicable part of me. “It’s over now, I’m here, we’re going to get you out of here—”

“What would he have done if you hadn’t gotten here?” she asks, still in that thin, wild voice. She looks up at me. “What would he have done to me if he could?”

The question is too dangerous, too close, and I’m grateful the dark room hides my face, my body. “It doesn’t matter, angel. He can’t do it now.”

“It does matter,” she says. “It does. He touched me and said things to me, and I can still feel him, his hands and his erection in my back and his voice in my ear.” She swallows, the following words quavering and weak. “It’s like he began casting a curse on me and it’s no less powerful for being unfinished.”

“It is finished,” I promise her. “We’re so close to safety.”

“I felt so helpless,” she continues, tears still leaking from those sweet, silver eyes. “There was nothing I could do, nothing I could say, no way I could stop him. I was going to try to fight back, before he left, but even then, even if I had fought him off, there were all those men outside…”

She’s trembling. Violently. And I hate myself for it, but those violent shivers both tear my heart in half and make my cock throb.

“How am I supposed to leave here like this? Leave here with only the things he made me feel and think?”

“We’ll talk to Ash,” I say a little wildly. Don’t make me do this, don’t make me answer these questions.

“Ash isn’t here,” she says. Her body arches the tiniest bit—agitation or frustration—and the silk pulls against the taut lines of her body.

I groan at the sight, turning away from the bed, and she reaches up with her bound hands and captures one of mine.

“Be Ash for me,” she begs, eyes wide and moon-silver in the dark. The light catches the now-drying tear streaks on her face, and for a moment I’m plunged into the past, into a moonlit Carpathian forest with my shoulder and calf torn open with bullets and Ash stalking around me like a hungry wolf.

You think you want to give that to me? Ash had asked.

No. I want you to take it from me, I’d said.

My voice is sharp when I answer Greer. “What?”

I feel her cool fingertips run up the inside of my wrist. “If you don’t want to take care of me, then pretend you’re Ash,” she says. “He would do it.”

“Do what?” My voice is still sharp but low now, and I can see her body respond.

“Show me what Melwas would have done to me.”

I hear the echoes of a long-ago Embry in her voice, remember that night where I begged Ash to wreak his violence upon my body because he’d needed the release and I’d needed the defeat; I’d needed to feel both alive and conquered. “God, Greer, that’s…that’s fucked up.”

“I know it is.” And it’s the way she says it that really gets its hooks into me, because it’s not ashamed—but it’s not cynical or devoid of emotion either. She says it like someone would ask for a kiss after a hard day, like someone would nestle into the hollow of your arms seeking comfort. It’s the woman I love sad and scared, and nearly inconsolable, when normally emotion never seems to touch her. “Please see it like I do. Melwas was going to hurt me, and there’s nothing I could have done to stop it, but if you—if you do it, then I’ll know I can stop it. I will want it and it will be mine, something I control. I get to—” she searches for the words as I search for my breath, for my self-control “—I get to rewrite it. It becomes mine,” she repeats

“You want me to pretend to—” I can’t say the words, they turn to vinegar in my mouth. I rephrase. “You want me to pretend to be Melwas?”

“Pretend to be Ash being Melwas…if it makes it easier.” She closes her eyes. “This isn’t easy to ask for, Embry, but if I leave here without—”

I pull free from her hands and go to the door.

“Embry?”

I shut the door, pressing my forehead against the cool wood for just a moment. “We have to be fast,” I say, hating how my heart hammers with excitement. How eager my body is.

“Yes,” she whispers, her voice as eager as my body. “As fast as you like.”

You’re going to hell, Embry Moore. Not just for doing this. But for liking it.

But I already knew I was a bad man, right? I was already going to hell.

I click on my shoulder mic, my forehead still against the door. “I have Mrs. Colchester. We’ll be at the rendezvous point in thirty minutes,” I tell Wu. He radios back that he heard me. I unclip the mic, take out my earpiece, and I turn around, facing her. It’s almost completely dark in the room with the door closed, the only light coming from the full moon outside. It changes things, that kind of light. Witching light, my aunt Nimue used to call it. The kind of light necessary for performing deeds that couldn’t be done in the light of day.