The Burning White (Lightbringer #5) - Brent Weeks Page 0,245

chest with an overhand blow that must hurt her more than it hurts me. “Don’t you roll your eyes at me, Andy! Don’t you dare!”

I go flat, a calm to her storm. I drop the paper on the table. I wave a hand to the slaves attending us in the open garden to begone, and a look to Grinwoody to let him know to tell them that if the others eavesdrop, they’ll be beaten and sold to the galleys or the mines. Then I turn my attention back to my love.

“Ask what you will,” I say. “But ask only what you want answered.”

“Did you fuck her?”

“Yes,” I answer immediately. I had thought that was implicit.

She swallows. “Damn you.” She takes a few breaths, but I can’t read whether she’s regained herself. On her head be it. She will get only the truth of me, as I have sworn.

“Did you have to?”

“That was our deal,” I say.

“I know what our deal was. I’m asking you to say it.”

“I deemed it the best course.”

“And how hard was it to convince you, Andy? I know you had many lovers before our marriage. Are you bored with me? I know that since Sevastian died I’ve not been the eager lover I once—”

“Stop! This had nothing to do with you, or that.” I take a breath. There were deeper wells of suffering here than I was aware of. But her anger triggers something at my core, burning and furious.

I beat down the flames. As I so often do.

“Flirtation wasn’t enough,” I say. “I gently floated bribery, but her family is wealthy and she loved her position at the library. There was nothing I could give her. And she was so young and innocent, there was nothing to use as blackmail. I didn’t have the time to hire agents to put pressures on those she loved, or the security that I could do so without her simply reporting it. So I seduced her.”

“Did you enjoy it?” she practically spits.

I go cold. “It had been more than a month since I last shared your bed, and that had been a perfunctory goodbye, not the desperate lovemaking of a woman likely to be driven mad by jealousy, my dear. Yes, I enjoyed the release.”

“ ‘Release,’ ” she says. I used the word to imply that the sex had been a mere physical process, but somehow she turns it into an indictment of our whole marriage. As if I want to be released from her. From my vows.

But I’ve already said more than I would’ve, were I fully in control. “Anything else?” I growl.

“Did she enjoy it? How was it? For her. For you.” Felia has retreated into cold bitch.

I take a deep breath, and then another, until the red recedes, until I can see her with compassion again. My Felia. She has been so alone, and everything she loves has been threatened. First Sevastian taken. Then Gavin’s growing distance. Now this thing we must do with Dazen. And now me.

Felia is afraid she’ll lose me, too.

“Did I give her the first orgasms of her life? Did I turn her into a wanton who craved my cock like the desert-parched crave water? Did she wake me in the morning with her mouth hot on me? Did she beg me for acts that you’ve avoided since soon after we wed? Did she pursue me as you have not in years? Is that what you want to ask? Why don’t you ask this question, instead, and ask it of yourself: in the pursuit of my goals, was I ever a man to take half measures?”

“Never,” she breathes, unblinking, but her hands have gone to her stomach, like a man with a gut wound in war, wanting to know how bad it is, needing to know, but not daring to find out.

“Why don’t you ask what you really want to know? Did I hold her afterward? Did I let her sleep with her head on my shoulder in your place?” All the questions slip from my grasp like hounds eager for the hunt. I can’t bear for her to be dishonest in this. Felia doesn’t care about the mechanics of the thing, where we’d fornicated or how many times I’d brought the girl to the storms and the rain. She wants to know if she can be replaced.

The love of my life is fierce, and she is bleeding, and that’s my fault as much as it is Orholam’s and Orea’s and Ulbear’s.

“Fee,”