Fable of Happiness (Fable #2) by Pepper Winters

“Goddammit—” he grunted, spearing deep, ensuring I would always know what it felt like to be taken by this lonely creature.

I didn’t think it would take him long to come. He’d been on the knife-edge the moment I’d sank over him, but watching him combust, hearing him gasp with bliss and knowing I granted that pleasure made my core clench in need.

There was something between us.

Something that hissed and licked and sparked.

And I wanted to feel what he did. I wanted to explode in his arms.

Like all the secrets of tonight, I had another. One I would bury deep, deep down because I would never admit that taking him this way had turned me on. While I’d ridden him, he’d worshiped me. I’d been his everything. I’d felt invincible as he’d forbidden himself from touching me until the very end, allowing me to rock and coax, greedily taking every inch of what he offered.

That was a heady thing indeed, having control over a man who’d only moments ago attacked me.

He’d gifted himself to me entirely, wholeheartedly.

Not as a slave who believed he didn’t have a choice but as a man who’d only just remembered how to live.

I gasped as the truth of that crowded my mind.

Kas was rough and wild and unstable, but perhaps that was the healing process for someone who’d only just come back to life? He’d spent a decade just existing, turning off his humanity, willingly slipping into silent loneliness and endless monotony.

Maybe I didn’t continually hurt him like I believed, but maybe, just maybe, I was making him come alive again. Maybe he’d begun the journey back to being healthy, to being whole.

Maybe this is the turning point, and everything will be better now.

He jerked one last time with a soft grunt, then his arms fell away, and his head tilted to the side. If shame had a color, he’d be painted in it from head to toe. He gulped. His hips shifted beneath mine, trying to disengage.

He couldn’t look at me.

His cock still rippled inside me.

But the longer we stayed joined, the more he withdrew until goosebumps scattered down my spine.

My heart pinched, and I couldn’t stand the feeling of him distancing himself from me, not after everything that’d just happened.

Shifting on my knees, I pushed upward.

His body slipped from mine, and I winced with frustration as I stepped away.

My own arousal still hummed in my blood, unsatisfied. A part of me wanted to be selfish and return to him. To find an equal completion.

But if I did that, then I would be as bad as the guests who’d used him. Whatever the reason he’d just pulled away, I had to accept it and not push. To push was to get hurt. I was sure of it.

Wrapping my arms around myself, I shivered with ice, becoming suddenly, horribly unsure.

Had I done the right thing? Had we reached a turning point, or had I just made things a hundred times worse?

I shivered again, fear rising as my mind raced for my own safety.

I should run before he snapped again.

I should—

Enough.

I gritted my teeth and stopped my unraveling thoughts.

This wasn’t about me.

It’d never been about me.

Even when he’d thrashed in his nightmare and pinned me to the floor. Even when he’d bound me in a chain and thrown me in a basement...none of this was about me.

Everything was about him.

God, how had I not seen it? How had I not understood the only way to earn my freedom was to give Kas his, entirely and completely—to teach him that he could leave. That no one would hurt him. No one would chase him. Whatever prison this valley had become had a door that only he could open.

He hissed under his breath, his haunted, color-shadowed eyes latching onto the trail of white as it oozed down my inner leg. He’d marked me. Come in me. Stark evidence that I’d given myself to him and he’d given himself to me.

He watched his release roll all the way to my knee before his face twisted, and once again, he came apart.

His legs shot up, his arms wrapped around his knees, his head bowed into the cage as if he couldn’t cope without a prison. “Leave,” he whispered, sounding wretched and wrung out.

I had so many things to say. Things he needed to hear. To listen to and believe.

He hadn’t forced me.

I’d done this.

I’d willingly chosen to let him climax inside me.

I’d done it so he could rest. So he could fall asleep later tonight and not be terrified of his nightmares.

“Kas...I—”

“Leave!” he thundered. His shoulders rolled, and he shook his head, never raising his eyes from his knees. “Please...”

“But...I don’t understand.”

He swallowed a snarl, shame once again dripping off him. “Look at what I did to you.”

I glanced at the wetness on my inner thigh, remembering how he’d told me that the bastards who’d brought him here had taken away his right to bear children. They’d stolen so much from him. They’d reduced him to nothing.

Yet here I was trying to teach him he was worthy, unable to understand why he couldn’t accept my one token of kindness.

“I think we should talk about this,” I whispered. “We need—”

His head snapped up, self-hatred glowing in his eyes. “I can’t be around you. I can’t look at you and not despise myself for what I did.”