Page 162 of Of Bargains & Betrayal

“Nor?”

I bristled, half from Jasper’s voice and half from the frigid water pouring over my skin. The tub was filled, but my hands were still filthy, and I wasn’t sure how long I’d been standing there. My next breath came as a sniffle, and when I looked in the mirror, beyond the scratched letters for the first time, my dirty face was tear-streaked and concerningly pale. My entire damned body was shaking, too, but it was like I couldn’t feel any of it actually happening to me.

My lips parted, but only a choked noise came out.

Jasper moved across the bathroom in a hurry. He turned me gently, holding my face between the warm span of his palms, and my vision blurred immeasurably.

“Easy,” he breathed. “What’s wrong? Something hurts, or…?”

“No. I…I don’t know,” I rasped. It was a bald lie, but they were the only words that would form on my tongue.

The warmth of Jasper’s touch left my face, but his arms wrapped around me, tucking me against his chest, and I sagged against him. The streaming tears I hadn’t been aware of before came on with force, with body-rattling sobs that stole my breath and made me cling to my oldest friend like he was the only tether in a storm of cataclysmic magnitude, taunting me from the horizon.

He held me through it all, just like he had dozens of times when we were young, before it all got ripped away. Before nothing was ever the same. Before being called the king’s half-breed bastard was the least of my concerns. Before the first in a long line of powerful men hurt me.

It had to be painful nostalgia that had me warbling to him, “I don’t think I can do this.”

“Then don’t, Nor,” he whispered into my hair with so much damn certainty. “Don’t do this to yourself. Maksym will fulfill your bargain whether or not you finish the Agōn Ferr. He’s a man of his word, and I see how he looks at you too, you know? How he⁠—”

“No. I can’t back out of it,” I sobbed right over his placating words that were fucking unraveling me, one frayed strand at a time. “They will never look at me the same, and I—I…” A painful breath sawed out of my lungs, and my entire damned body shook. “I can’t do that again.”

Jasper’s hands stilled in their slow passes over my back. “Again? You mean another event?”

“No,” I exhaled. “The looks and whispers. The fucking humiliation. I finally got away from it. I have to finish the Agōn Ferr. Have to.”

The silence that spread between us then was agonizing; it culminated in a death blow to my heart when Jasper grasped my shoulders and put a bit of distance between us. “What happened to you, Nor?” he asked, his moss-green eye full of so much concern. “What the fuck did they do to you in Odessa?”

I couldn’t look at him. I scrubbed my dirty sleeve over my equally dirty, and now tear-stained face, and I shook my head.

“Nothing,” I whispered.

Jasper wasn’t keen on releasing his hold on me as I tried to move away, but one shot of side eye had him easing away. I turned back to the sink and said a quiet prayer he would just vanish and leave me to have an ounce of peace as I tried to stuff this overflowing baggage back down where it belonged. It went unanswered.

“Something clearly happened to you, Nor.” Goddess, he was persistent. “Something awful.”

A dry laugh clawed out of me, but I focused on scrubbing the blood-crusted dirt from my hands. “Something awful,” I repeated. “You don’t say.”

Jasper sighed. “I can’t help you if I don’t understand what’s eating away at you.”

“I. Don’t. Need. Your. Help.” The words left me with venom I couldn’t control as I fixed him with a stare through the mirror. “I have survived this long without yours or anyone else’s help, and I will continue to survive on my own without a man always thinking they need to rush to my fucking rescue.”

Tension feathered along Jasper’s jaw as he took a step back.

“Right,” he said with a frosty bite. “I’ll just leave if you don’t need me. I’m sure Eilir will be happy to wait on you hand and foot instead, should you decide their help isn’t as far beneath you as mine is.”

Wisps of ink-black smoke kicked up, and he vanished before I could get another word in.

I lowered myself to the floor on unsteady legs.

What a goddess-damned fool I was. A moment of weakness, lulled into false security by how desperate my mind was to trust Jasper like I used to trust Kieran. The sort of true, boundless trust I had never fully found in anyone else.

Something clearly happened to you, Nor. He didn’t know the first thing.

I’d come dangerously close to telling him what happened to me involved a stupid young woman, saving herself for the boy she loved, convinced he would return, only to have her innocence stripped from her in a violent act. An act that branded her as a whore who slept around to get what she needed. The bastard half-breed who spread her legs wide enough to climb rank and title.

No one really knew the truth. Not besides me and the general who viciously assaulted me but told every eager ear at the card tables how the king’s beloved daughter had offered her virtue on a fucking platter in exchange for his military tutelage.

I’d almost unloaded every ounce of that on Jasper.