Page 99 of Once Upon a Fable

She’d given me something no one else ever had.

She’d given me peace in her violence. Connection in her fight. She’d met my rage with her own, not just letting me fuck her but fucking me right back. Forcing me to take her harder. To snatch up every morsel she offered. To let myselffeelfor the first time in my sorry excuse of a life.

Feel wanted. Feel desired. Feel powerful when I’d been so successfully stripped of everything since I was a kid.

Wedged on my elbows, looking down at blond hair now caked with mud and a pretty face now streaked with rain and midnight, I struggledto stay with her.

To not let my past sweep me away from the most perfect, most wonderful moment I’d ever had.

She didn’t move, even though most of my weight pinned her into the dirt. Her pussy continued to ripple around my cock, echoes of her pleasure.

Pleasure.

She’d found pleasure...with me.

She’d hurt me like they had. She’d left wounds on my body like them. But she’d given me so fucking much in return. She’d shared herself with me. We’d burned together. Westillburned together—our skin pressed tight, our heartbeats quick, our bodies twitching with the aftermath.

And I didn’t know how to deal with that.

Closing my eyes, I shook my pounding head. My temples felt as if pokers stabbed inside me, drilling into my skull. My forehead had swollen, a throbbing bump thanks to her whack with the shovel.

She cleared her throat, wrenching my eyes open again.

Only this time, it wasn’t the girl who’d trespassed in my valley. Not the woman brave enough to fight me—trulyfight me. To meet me in the madness and battle for her life or mine.

It wasn’t Gemma.

But Quell.

The girl who might’ve grown up to look like Gemma with her blond hair and hazel, flickering eyes. A girl who’d wiped away my tears after I’d been raped. A girl who I’d rocked as she’d sobbed in my arms. A girl who’d been utterly destroyed, like all of us.

And fuck, theguilt.

The motherfucking guilt...it crushed me, ravaged me.

I was supposed to keep her safe.

Instead, I’d fucked her in the dirt all because she’d dared stand up to me.

No!

Withdrawing from her wet heat with a wince, I swooped to my feet and almost tripped over my sodden pants still clinging to my ankles.

My heart rate exploded.

Trapped.

You’re trapped.

A snarl crawled up my throat as I bent and tore my feet out of the slacks and threw them as hard as I could. They slapped against a tree, tangling in the branches in the rain. Needing to move, to assure myself I was free, I paced.

I stalked the clearing and dug hands into my hair. I massaged a head that was full of rocks and cotton. Sharp edges and foggy corners, memories and realities, heavens and hells.

Nyx’s blood oath came and went. Wes’s suffering. Jareth’s conditioning. Elise’s initiation. Zanik, Maliki, Sarez, and Neo. Every Fable kid entered my mind and reminded me why I was alone. Why people were dangerous. Why this woman, who’d successfully made mehope, was the most dangerous of them all.

Turning on her, I glowered as she stood gracefully from the mud. Streaks on her thighs and waist, dark blond curls between her legs as she kicked away her own soaking pants.

We stood there, naked and filthy, breathing hard with what we’d done and my mind switched again. What was I thinking? This woman wasn’t sweet little Quell. This woman was too brash, too brave, too damn beautiful.