Fable of Happiness (Fable #2) by Pepper Winters

She stiffened, understanding what I’d offered her even though it cost most of her hate. “I didn’t ask you for anything. I didn’t want anything.”

“And I didn’t want you to keep hating me for doing something I didn’t mean to do.”

She bit her cheek, her eyes narrowing. “What are you saying?”

I sighed, running a hand over my face before I looked back up at her. “I didn’t mean to hurt you...in the river.”

Silence.

Stagnant, pregnant silence.

Slowly, she crossed her arms against her stomach, not bothering to cover herself up, either still too angry or too far removed from needing clothes at this point. “Why?”

I frowned. “Why what?”

“Why did you then? If it was an accident?”

I shook my head, bracing against the memories swarming thanks to her question. The answer was there, waiting for me to open the door and allow the nasty recollection back into my comprehension.

But that was the thing.

I didn’t want to remember.

I knew I’d recalled something sick. Something that a guest had done to me or some punishment that’d drawn my blood. The problem was, there was not a thing on this godforsaken earth that would make me willingly drag that memory back again and let it have free rein inside my head.

No way.

“Doesn’t matter.” I shifted on the ground, preparing to gather my balance and stand. “What does matter is I didn’t mean to hurt you, and I’m sorry.”

“Tell me what you saw.”

I pushed up, swaying a little as I locked my knees and stood tall. “No.”

“If you want me to forgive you, you’ll tell me what you remembered.”

I smiled thinly. “I guess my apology is moot then because I refuse to go back there.”

She sighed heavily as if she was used to me deflecting, as if she knew me better than I knew myself. “Have you read The Cost of You? It’s a psychological text in the library. While you were unconscious, I read a lot. I skimmed every book I could that might help you.”

It was my turn to cross my arms. “I have.” My cock still hadn’t deflated and the urge to snatch her around the waist and finish what I’d started hummed in my blood. “I’ve been here a lot longer than you, remember.”

She nodded as if pleased I knew the book she was referring to. Frankly, it was text-heavy snooze-fest about patients who moaned about their problems. It was men with lots of doctorates and monikers to their names, professing their professional opinion on how to help people with trauma. There’d even been a workbook in the back to help the reader get over their own trauma, to see if the author’s method of treatment could work.

I’d laughed when I’d found it. Was the book one of Storymaker’s inside jokes? Why else have a book on trauma in a house of slaves? However, curiosity got the better of me and I’d skimmed the questions.

I’d promptly shoved it back on the shelf and never read it again.

“If you read it, then you’ll know how dangerous it is to suppress things that frighten you.”

“Frighten?” I sneered. “You saying I frighten you, even after I confessed to wanting to pleasure you over my own needs. I hardly think you should be afraid of me, more like grateful that I’ve acknowledged my mistake and wanted to make amends.”

She held up her hand. “I’m not afraid of you. Well, not as much as I once was, at least. And we both know I wasn’t talking about me.” She stepped closer, the chain whispering through the grass. “I’m talking about you. You’ve suppressed so much you can’t even distinguish what’s real and what’s not anymore. You strangled me because you thought I was someone else. You had hallucinations and personality switches while recovering because your mind can no longer keep the past from the present. If you don’t permit yourself to remember, then—”

“I’ll never willingly remember,” I snapped.

She sighed again. “In that case, we both better come to terms with how this will end then.”

I frowned. “How what will end?”

Her chin tilted up, and a chill ran down my back. Naked and sun-painted, she looked otherworldly. She looked as if she had a crystal ball and wasn’t just giving hypotheticals but a horrifying future that would come true. “You’ll make another mistake.” She shuddered, rubbing her arms as if she’d scared herself with the weight of her premonition. “You’ll hurt me, even if you don’t mean to. You’ll kill me because you’ll see them and not me. And then, you’ll be alone again. It won’t be because I ran. It won’t be because I got up the courage to hurt you to earn my freedom. You’ll kill me and be the only one to blame for your loneliness.”

I choked on my own spit. I fumbled for a refusal—something to prove how wrong she was. However, she merely turned her back on me again, grabbed her damp shirt from the top of my clothes, and shrugged it on.

It didn’t matter that she had no skirt, boots, or underwear; the way she walked with her spine dead straight and her aura of righteousness made her look like a queen. An already dead queen as she walked away until the chain pulled tight between us, and she could go no farther.





CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

WE WALKED BACK TO the house in silence.