he blows out a breath through his nostrils. “Because you make me feel lesser all the fucking time,” he says.
“I do?”
“Yeah, you fucking do.”
“How? Why? I don’t understand. I’m plain, and boring, and scared, and you’re … you’re … glorious.”
He barks out a laugh. “You don’t act like you think I’m glorious. You act like you think I’m someone who should do better.”
Shit, he’s right. Didn’t I just think I wanted him to be more? I’ve been both putting him on a pedestal and trying to knock him off it from the get-go.
I cross to him now, suddenly aware that he might have hurt me, but I’ve also been hurting him. I do think he can be better, but that’s a shitty way to treat someone. I have to either accept this man as he is, or walk away. I can’t stay by his side, constantly expecting him to change.
The realization hits me hard. All the way through this, I’ve put the barriers between us as purely down to him, but I’ve been building quite a few of them myself. Great big steel barriers made from my belief that he’s better than this deep down. As if he isn’t good enough the way he is.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “It’s not that I think you’re a bad person, or that I want you to be someone else because I disapprove; it’s more that I want you to be safe. I hate that this life always puts you in danger.”
“Cassie, I am what I am. This life never lets you go, not easily anyway. Most people who leave it, they leave in a box.”
The thought makes me shudder.
“Come here,” he pulls me in. “You’re right about one thing.”
“Oh, what’s that?”
“I did want to make you crawl to make you lesser, and I’m sorry.”
I don’t say anything for a moment. This is important, and I don’t want to fuck it up. Konstantin is not the sort of man who apologizes often, and I don’t want to take that apology and make it a slap in the face.
“It’s okay. Sometimes I want to make you lesser too because you’re so much. Too big, too handsome, too confident, too rich.”
“Is that why you seem determined to disapprove of all this?” He waves his arm around him.
“No, I disapprove of all this because I see it as trapping you in a dangerous life, and I don’t want anything to happen to you. It’s not about some form of reverse snobbery; it’s about me wanting you free.”
“I am free,” he says with a laugh. “I’m the motherfucking king, Cassie. You don’t get any freer than that. I’m the one who gives the orders, and I clawed my way to being that person. I’m not the one taking orders.”
I get what he’s saying, but I see it differently. “But, if you’re a king trapped in endless wars, then you’re just another soldier at the end of the day. Another potential casualty, which breaks me a little bit every day.”
I’ve admitted how deep my feelings for him run. I don’t expect any such declarations in return, but I hope articulating it won’t make him retreat and put up those walls again. He doesn’t. He pulls me in and kisses me. It’s deep and languid, and I want to drown in it.
“I can’t get enough of you,” he says as he pulls away to kiss at my neck as he talks to me between each soft touch. “Every time I fuck you, I think this might be the time I slake my thirst, but it only makes me want more. I want to fuck you until we’re both unconscious from it.”
“Sounds like a good way to go,” I say with a smile as he licks along my collarbone. I whimper at the sensation as he places a small bite on the skin at the side of my neck. I run my hands down his big body, and for some reason, I say the thought in my head aloud. “I wish I could tame all this power and harness it for a short while. Why is it always you men who get to tie us up?” I muse.
He stills, and I do too. Shit, will he think I’m crazy? I mean, it’s not that kinky, but in Russia he has said before they have very traditional attitudes about male and female roles.
“You want to tie me up?” he asks.
I swallow down a dry throat and nod. I want to feel free