“Their favorite pastime was to strip me naked and leave me to freeze my balls off.”
“Jesus.” Exhaling raggedly, I sat back down on the bed. The weariness returned, dampening the anger until it returned to a simmer.
r /> The silence was broken when Ren said, “I know that I’m only aware of about one tenth of the shit you went through there, and I’ve wanted to know all of it. Every single damn horrible thing so that I can be there for you, but I’ve waited, because I wanted you to be ready—to be at the point where you can talk to me. So it shocks the shit out of me that you were going to run without me, without even telling me. That you didn’t want me beside you, no matter what.”
Anything I was about to say turned to ash on my tongue. That wasn’t how I meant for it to come across. Not at all.
He swallowed hard. “And you know what I just now realized? You’ve been running without me this whole time, haven’t you? There’s never been an us. There’s been you and then there’s been me chasing you.”
Tears crawled up the back of my throat as I rose on shaky knees. “That’s not how it’s been. Ren, that’s—”
“It’s not? You might want to think about that.” He stepped back, opening the door. “The fucked up thing, Ivy? You were willing to stay, but not for me—not for us. And that’s not because you’re trying to protect me. You were bailing on me. You were bailing on us—if there ever really was an us.”
Chapter 12
I did a lot of thinking that night.
It was all I did.
And for once, I didn’t spend the night thinking about what had happened or what could’ve happened while the Prince held me captive. I wasn’t even thinking about getting stabbed. Instead, I lay there, my thoughts consumed by what Ren had said as I stared at the bland white ceiling.
Ren had left and hadn’t come back to our room, and I didn’t sleep, nor did I put all my clothes back in the dresser. Instead, I’d created myself a little bug-out bag, stashing about two days’ worth of clothing in the bag and placing it back in the closet just in case we ran out of time.
Then I’d waited.
Part of me had expected Ren to return, but the other half knew that what I had planned cut him deep and a few hours wasn’t going to stitch the hole I dug open in him back together. I hadn’t meant for everything to turn out the way it did. I just wasn’t . . .
God, I just wasn’t thinking straight.
Now that I was here, all alone, with nothing but my own stupid head to keep myself company, I realized that the whole take off running with no idea where to go was incredibly stupid and cruel. So damn cruel, not just to Ren but also to Tink.
Ren had been right about what my leaving would’ve done to them. It would’ve been terrible, and even though I’d had the best of intentions, in all honestly, they were panicked intentions.
I gave way to panic, and the idea of running was at least doing something other than sitting around and twiddling my thumbs.
Or getting stabbed.
You’ve been running without me this entire time.
It took several hours for me to work through the denial of that statement. Had I been running from him this entire time? I didn’t want to believe it, because it was so terrible.
God, it sucked ass to admit it to myself, but it was true. Even from the beginning I’d made everything exceptionally difficult for Ren. It wasn’t because I wanted to be a challenge. When I met Ren, he was the first guy I was interested in after the death of Shaun. I’d been so closed off, so awkward at being interested in a guy. Things had been easier between us when I finally opened up to him—when I finally allowed myself to fall in love with Ren.
But then I found out I was the Halfling.
That was when I started lying to him—when I started running. Maybe not physically but definitely mentally. I hadn’t told him about seeing the Prince outside Cafe Du Monde. I’d hid the truth of what I was until I virtually blurted it out to him on the damn street. Ren had been trained since birth and he was a member of the Elite. He knew how to take care of himself, but I’d blindsided him, bringing his biggest fear to life. Not only that, but I’d constantly cut him out of decisions. It wasn’t like I had to include him in everything. Lord knows Ren never expected that from me or anyone, but when you are with someone, when you love them, you include them.
You’re a team.
You don’t hide things from them. You sure as hell don’t lie, and you don’t compare them to a monster.
I’d screwed up, more than once, and long before the Prince had dug his claws in me.
Now the gulf between us truly seemed unsurpassable.
No wonder Ren felt the way he did. We never really got the chance to have normalcy in our relationship. To go out on dates and spend lazy weekends at home, exploring each other and inevitably getting on each other’s nerves. We hadn’t gotten the chance to have normal fights, about what to eat or if we wanted more in the future. We didn’t get the chance to build any amount of trust, which was why I was amazed by how accepting and patient he’d been up until a few hours ago. We were still . . . new at us, and we never got a chance to fully take off and become anything.
Everything had been rocky in the beginning, ragged in the middle, and now . . . at possibly the end . . . it was a catastrophe waiting to happen.
We were broken.
It wasn’t all on me. Ren taking part in that compulsion and allowing me to feed on him wasn’t a small misdeed. I got why he did it. I even understood it, but it still happened and it was still between us. But other than that? I was woman enough to know it was on me.
And I had no idea if it was fixable or if Ren wanted to repair the damage, but I did know that it wouldn’t matter if Ren ended up killed or if the Prince was somehow successful when it came to getting himself a bouncing baby. Our relationship was the least of our worries. Not that it didn’t feel like my chest was being cracked open and my heart spooned out of me. It did. It hurt just as bad as getting stabbed in the back.
I needed to focus, though. I needed to get my shit straight before I could even think about getting my house in order.
The Prince was going to find me. Eventually. Because at the moment, I was an easier target for him than to find another halfling somewhere in the world, especially since the Elite made it their duty to straight-up murder any they came across.
For the whole baby Armageddon to work, the baby-making between the Prince and I had to be consensual. He had to know that was never, ever going to happen, so what could the Prince hope to accomplish? The only reason he’d gotten me to agree to stay with him, to be with him, was to free Ren.
He had collateral.
And Drake still did.
It was in the wee hours of the morning when it struck me that I’d been wrong about the Prince killing Ren on sight, and that realization was what had me pacing the room until the sun began to rise.
The Prince wouldn’t kill Ren. Oh no, he would use him against me, just like he’d done before. The Prince would do the same with Tink if he discovered his presence. He still had the means to control me. All he needed was to get his hands on one of them.
Stopping at the window, I lifted my gaze to the fading stars.
I was back to square one.
Even if I left here, the Prince would still go after Ren, because he knew it would draw me back from the ends of the Earth. He’d do what he did before, use Ren, and even though I knew what was at stake, I loved Ren. I couldn’t be the reason he was hurt. Not again. Never again after Shaun. That was my weakness.
Not Ren, but my past.
Shivering, I saw that there were only three options before me, and as the last of the stars twinkled out, I knew running wasn’t one of them.
Find the Crystal and complete the ritual.
Figure out how to weaken the Prince and kill him.
Or go down the path that had stopped Tink from telling me from day one that I was the Halfling. The same path Ren and Tink had yanked me from a few days ago, which was to permanently remove myself from the equation.
I looked like crap as I stared in the mirror, having had only a few hours of sleep and still no sign of Ren. The healthy glow from sucking the essence out of him was lost in the
dark shadows under my eyes and the, well, slightly shimmery skin that wasn’t actually a shimmer. Tink had been wrong about that. So had I.
It was a very faint silvery sheen that only looked shimmery. I knew this because I was standing in front of the long mirror attached to the back of the bathroom door, buck ass naked for a while now.
Before my skin started to look like I had covered myself in Urban Decay eye shadow, staring at myself completely naked wasn’t something I did often. I mean, I really didn’t need to check out