“What else?” She leaned up and kissed him on the chin.
“I’m angry that you’re pushing me.”
“I know. What else?”
“I’m not worthy of you.”
“That’s a lie and you know it. Now, what else? What was it like earlier making love to me in your garden?”
Something inside his chest began to give away. “Like I’d touched heaven.”
She lifted up on her tip-toes and kissed him on the lips. “What else? How much do you hate yourself?”
“I loathe who I am. That’s what you don’t understand. I let that monster hurt me. Don’t you see?”
“You were a child and he’d tied you down. How was that you, letting him, do anything to you?”
“That doesn’t matter. I allowed it.”
She held his gaze. “That’s also a lie. He was twice your size. He overpowered you, just like he’s doing right now within your mind. You need to release him, Willem, send him out of your head once and for all.”
Davido had said the same thing to him, that if he was to have a chance at normalcy, he had to release the monster who beat and tortured him. With so much at stake, a woman’s love and a boy’s life, he had so many reasons to do exactly that, but he was locked into a pattern he couldn’t escape.
“I can’t do this.” He pulled away from her. “I’m ruined.”
Suddenly, he felt Charlotte’s mating vibration hum to life, something she was doing all by herself. Her powers were growing with every moment that passed.
He gasped, glancing down at his stomach. “What are you doing?”
“Agreeing with you that you are ruined, but loving you anyway.”
Connected on such a deep level, and experiencing Charlotte’s frequency so full of her love, made his skin crawl. “Stop it.”
“No, not gonna happen. You’ll have to throw me off the bluff for me to stop.”
Rage erupted within him and he caught her up in his arms, carried her outside, then levitated. He flew swiftly to the bluff’s edge then straight out over the ocean.
He held her away from him, but she maintained eye contact and used her emerging fae power to keep pummeling his mating frequency with her own.
He shouted, “Get your hooks out of me, Charlotte. Stop doing this or by all the elf-lords, I’ll drop you in the ocean and I won’t feel guilty because it will be your choice.”
Now he’d become the monster.
I’m going to break through your wall, Willem, if it’s the last thing I do.
He scowled at her and released one of her arms so that she had to grab hold of the other to keep from falling.
Yet at the same time, he felt her mating frequency rising in strength. He didn’t know how she was doing it, how she could stay so focused while he held her suspended an entire killing distance above the ocean.
Accept my love, Willem. You’ve become the man your childhood promised before the abduction, now embrace the rest, that you deserve love and connection.
On and on her frequency swelled, beating at his, surrounding his mating vibration until he felt suffocated. He extended her farther away from his body. Stop, he shouted within her mind. You’re killing me.
Suddenly, out of nowhere, Davido was next to Charlotte, hovering in the air. “I’m taking her away from you, Willem. You can’t have her. I’m going to give her to one of the lesser mastyrs of Grochaire Realm because you’re right; you don’t deserve her.”
Charlotte’s eyes were wide with horror as she turned toward Davido. But the troll took her and they vanished.
Willem shouted his rage, turning in a circle midair, as though somehow Davido might have just slipped behind him.