Chapter 35: The Price of Truth
He forces himself to pull away, his body a taut line of refusal against the warmth of the bed. “I can’t do this. I’m sorry.”
His voice is gravel, scraping raw against the quiet of the room. I reach up, my fingers finding the wet trails on his cheeks, wiping them away. I press my forehead against his, our breath mingling, and I can feel the violent tremble he’s trying to suppress. “Please,” I whisper, the word a fragile thing. “Don’t stop. Your fingertips… they felt like healing sparks.”
He pulls away again, putting cold distance between us. He says it again, harder this time. “No.”
I see it then—the brutal force he’s using to chain himself down. The tendons in his neck stand out, his fists are clenched so tight his knuckles are white moons against his olive skin. “Why,” I ask, my own voice trembling now, “do you keep sending me mixed signals, Ren?”
He staggers to the side of the bed, turning away from me to sit on the edge, his back a wall of leather and tension. He looks defeated, his broad shoulders slumped under an invisible weight. “Because I don’t deserve to be loved.”
I move slowly, sitting up. The sheets pool around my waist. I reach out and place my hand on the hard plane of his upper back, feeling the heat through his jacket. He flinches, but doesn’t shake me off.
“Arisa, I’m not good for you. Even this… this is my fault. I hurt you and you ran into the woods. All I do is hurt people. I’m a bad person, Arisa. I’m a killer.” The words are torn from him, low and guttural. “I am worse than you have seen, and I’m eviler than anyone knows. I was raised to be a monster.”
At that last part, he looks back at me over his shoulder. His dark eyes are usually so guarded, so unreadable, but now they flash with a haunting, ruby light—a glimpse of something primal and terrifying held barely in check. I don’t flinch. I hold his gaze, letting him see the steadiness in mine.
He sobs, a rough, broken sound. “I don’t deserve good love. That’s why I stayed with Nanami for so long. Because that’s the kind of love I deserve—unfaithful and fictional love.”
I see it then, the cumulative weight of every secret, every brutal order, every life he believes he’s ruined. It bows his spine. He carries a mountain on those shoulders. I slide closer, my skin brushing his clothed arm. I kiss his cheek, tasting salt and despair. “You are deserving of love,” I say, each word a vow. “Deserving of real love. Nothing you have ever done scares me, Ren. And nothing that you are can scare me away.”
“I will hurt you, Arisa!” he snarls, suddenly twisting to face me, his expression fierce with a warning meant to push me back. “Don’t trust me…”
I feel the wall around him, thick and high and forged from self-hatred. Words are bouncing off it. I know, in that moment, I can only get through with action. With truth of a different kind.
I take a slow breath, my heart hammering against my ribs. “Ren,” I say, my voice dropping to a whisper that seems to echo in the still room. “I want you to touch me.”
He goes perfectly still. He doesn’t pull away, but the tension in him ratchets higher, a wire about to snap.
I press on, pleading now. “Please, Ren. I need you to erase the memory of him on my skin. Give me new memories.”
My eyes never leaving his, I grasp the hem of my hoodie dress and pull it up and over my head, letting it fall discarded to the floor. The cool air kisses my skin. I shift on the bed, peeling my leggings down my legs and kicking them away. I am left in only my simple underwear, pale and freckled and exposed under the muted light. I don’t try to cover myself. I simply lie back against the pillows, my red hair fanning out, and wait.
For a long moment, there is only the sound of his ragged breathing. The candlelight dances over the hard lines of his face, the conflict warring in his eyes—the flicker of red battling the deep, aching brown.
Then, it breaks.
He moves not with the hesitant tenderness of before, but with a predator’s grace, a pounce that is pure controlled impulse. One hand, large and warm, settles on my abdomen, his thumb stroking a slow, burning arc just below my navel. The other cups my breast, his touch through the thin cotton of my bra somehow both possessive and reverent.
I gasp, arching into his hands.
His gaze is locked on mine, watchful, hungry, still afraid. The hand on my abdomen slips lower, teasing along the waistband of my underwear. His fingers trace the sensitive skin of my hip bone, then dip beneath the fabric.I stop breathing.
His touch is exploratory at first, a slow, torturous mapping. Then his fingers find their mark, a gentle, circling pressure that makes me cry out softly. He kisses me then, swallowing the sound, his mouth a desperate, claiming counterpoint to the deliberate slowness of his hand. It’s a kiss of shared breath, of tasted tears, of a precipice we’re leaping from together.
He draws the pleasure out, his fingers working a slow, devastating rhythm. Every time I tense, nearing a crest, he slows, changes the angle, denies me. He is drawing out more than just physical release; he is pulling every hidden fear, every buried want, to the surface.
“Ren…” I moan against his lips, my hands tangling in his dark hair.
“I’m here,” he murmurs, the words a rough vibration against my mouth. His eyes are dark now, the red completely banked, replaced by a depth of focus that is solely, terrifyingly on me. “I’m here, Arisa. Let me…”
He doesn’t finish the sentence. He doesn’t need to. His touch says it all. This is an apology. This is a confession. This is a rewriting. His fingers slide deeper, curling inside me, and the world narrows to the point where our bodies meet, to the healing sparks that seem to fly from his skin to mine, burning away the old ghosts, searing in something entirely, dangerously new.
The coil of tension in my belly tightens beyond bearing, and this time he doesn’t pull back. He watches my face as I shatter, his name on my lips not a scream, but a sigh of surrender. He follows me over, his own body shuddering as he collapses against me, his face buried in the crook of my neck, his breath hot and fast on my skin.
For a long time, there is only the sound of our breathing slowing, syncing. The candle guttering low. His weight is solid, real, anchoring me to this bed, to this moment, to him.
Finally, he shifts, lifting his head. He looks down at me, his expression unguarded, ravaged by vulnerability. The harsh lines of his face are softened, his eyes searching mine for any sign of regret, of fear.
I lift a hand, tracing the line of his jaw. I see the boy who was raised to be a monster. I see the man who carries death in his shadow. And I see the person who is, for the first time, too exhausted to hide from me.
He opens his mouth to speak, perhaps to apologize again, to push me away once more with words.
I place my finger gently on his lips. “Don’t,” I whisper. “Just stay.”
He hesitates, then lets out a long, shuddering breath. The fight leaves him all at once. He nods, a barely perceptible movement, and then he gathers me against him, turning us so my back is against his chest, his arms a protective cage around me. His lips press once, softly, to the crown of my head.
In the darkness, wrapped in his heat and the scent of leather and him, I feel a different kind of spark. Not on my skin, but deep within my core—a slow, golden ignition that has nothing to do with his touch and everything to do with the look in his eyes before he hid his face. It feels like a door, long locked, has creaked open an inch.
And outside the window, in the bleak moonlight, the shadows in the corner of the room seem to ripple and sway, not from the draft, but in time with the steady, finally peaceful beat of Ren’s heart against my back.
And outside the window, in the bleak moonlight, the shadows in the corner of the room seem to ripple and sway, not from the draft, but in time with the steady, finally peaceful beat of Ren’s heart against my back.
That rhythm, that syncopation of shadow and pulse, was the last thing I remembered before the dark behind my eyelids became absolute and dreamless.
I slept. Not the frantic, fractured thing I was used to, chased by visions of purple hair and falling through time, but a deep, liquid plunge into silence. My body, for the first time in months, simply stopped. It unclenched. The constant buzz of wrongness in my veins stilled into a quiet hum. I didn’t stir until the sound of water pulled me up from the depths.
The alarm clock on the stand glowed 0500 in harsh red numbers. An hour and a half before the barracks alarm. The sound was coming from the adjacent bathroom—the hiss of a shower, water striking tile. I rolled over in the tangle of sheets.
There was no shower curtain.
The bathroom was all polished black stone, steam beginning to fog the mirrors. Ren stood under the stream, his back to me. Water sluiced over the incredible, defined terrain of his shoulders and back, tracing the deep channel of his spine. It flowed over the powerful curve of his ass, down legs corded with muscle. The view was arresting, a study in coiled strength even at rest.
But my breath caught on details I’d never seen before. Etched into the skin across his shoulder blades and down the line of his spine were intricate, swirling shapes. Runes. They looked burned in, old and silver against his olive skin. Interspersed among them were scars—thin, razor-like lines, a few thicker, jagged tears. A history of violence written directly onto him.
He reached up, a tendon in his arm flexing, and turned the water off. The sudden silence felt louder. I snapped my gaze away, heart thudding, afraid he’d feel the weight of my stare. I focused on the room, the monochrome order of it.
My gaze landed on his desk. Something familiar sat atop the clean surface, stark and out of place. A jolt went through me. It was my sketchbook. The one from my locker. I hadn’t seen it last night in the dimness, but there it was. The bent corner, the smudge of charcoal on the side—mine. A few loose papers I’d hastily stuffed inside peeked out from the edges, rumpled, as if someone had gone through them carefully.
I slid from the bed, the sheet wrapped around me. My boots and clothes were a pile on the floor, my underwear the only thing I wore. The stone was cold under my bare feet as I crossed to the desk. I needed to confirm it was real.
It was. I touched the cover. It was definitely my book. The papers inside had been shuffled. My breath shallowed. A cocktail of violation and dizzying curiosity churned in my gut. Who had he shown it to? Why was it here?
I didn’t hear him approach. The first I knew was the heat of him at my back, the scent of clean skin and soap. Then his arms wrapped around me, solid and damp, his hands coming to rest on the desk on either side of the book. His chest was a warm, hard wall against my spine.
He reached down, his fingers—those fingers from last night—calmly flipping the sketchbook open to the first page.
There she was. My pencil rendering of the woman with the severe beauty and the falls of purple hair, her eyes like chips of glacial ice. He was silent for a long moment, his breathing even against my ear.
“Where have you seen her before?” His voice was low, a morning rasp stripped of its usual edge. It was just a question. But it felt like a trigger.
I froze. Every muscle locked. The memory of Xenon’s silencing rune, the threat in the common room, flashed like lightning behind my eyes. Ren felt the rigidity in my frame.
He noticed the freeze. One hand left the desk, coming up to gently push a strand of my unruly hair back from my face, tucking it behind my ear. The gesture was so at odds with the tension in the room—a gesture of comfort, of patience.
I gulped. The truth was the only thing I had. “In my dreams.”
I tilted my head back to look up at him. Something tugged at my brain, a connection straining to snap into place. I remembered staring into his eyes last night as I came apart under his touch, the raw, unfiltered intensity in his gaze.
Now, that same gaze, focused on the page, reminded me viscerally of the woman on it. The same piercing quality, the same unnerving depth. It was in the shape of them, the way they seemed to see through the paper.
“That’s Clarissa the Cold One,” he said, the name dropping between us like a stone into a well.
He looked around the room, his eyes scanning the empty corners. He released me just long enough to raise his right hand. With a swift, precise motion, he drew a sigil in the air. It hung there, glittering with a dark, liquid light for a second before dissolving. The Silencing Rune. The air immediately felt thicker, muffled.
I flinched, a spike of pure fear shooting through me—Xenon had used it to trap me, to threaten me. Ren saw it. He shook his head once, a sharp negation.
“Not like that,” he murmured. “Never like that with you. Just for privacy.”
He placed his hands back on the desk, caging me again, but his voice was the closest to broken I’d ever heard it. He spoke into the space above my head.
“She’s my mother.”
The words landed. They rearranged the room. They rewired every interaction we’d ever had.
“This,” he continued, the pain in his voice sanding the words rough, “is what I meant when I said I was raised to be a monster. I was born of the shadows. She raised me… sculpted me… to inflict conflict on this world. To be a weapon in a war that started before either of us drew breath.”
His eyes, when I dared another glance upward, were pained oceans of black and bruised violet, reflecting the bare, ugly truth he’d just laid bare.