Page 52 of The Winner's Kiss
“No.”
“Did I hit you?”
“Kestrel, no. Why would you ask that?”
“I remember you bruised.”
“You didn’t do that. You wouldn’t.”
“Well,” she pointed out, “I have hit you in recent memory.”
“That was different.”
She remembered how powerless she’d felt when she’d struck him. She thought she understood what he meant. “How was I, then, when I owned you?”
There was no sound but the leaves and Javelin’s hooves on the dirt. The trees thinned. Arin’s house rose into view.
Kestrel said, “You hated me.”
He stopped the horse. “Please look at me.”
She turned in the saddle and did, meeting his gaze.
“At first I hated you,” he said. “It was for what you were, not who you were. I didn’t know who you were. And then I did, a little. You seemed kind. Kindness isn’t good in a master. Not to me. It’s another way of making you beg. You become grateful for things you shouldn’t be grateful for. When I was a child I was so grateful for it. Then I grew, and I almost preferred cruelty because it was closer to the truth, and no one hid behind the lie of being nice. I broke rules. Especially with you. I kept pushing for you to punish me. I tried to force your hand. I wanted you to show your true self.”
His expression was difficult to read. The crook in her neck was painful. She dropped her gaze to Javelin’s mane.
“But this was your true self,” he said. “Intelligent, brave, manipulative. Kind. You made no effort to hide who you were. Then I found that I wanted you to hide it. This was the luxury of your position, wasn’t it, that you didn’t have to hide? It was the doomed nature of mine, that I did. And that’s true. Sometimes a truth squeezes you so tightly you can’t breathe. It was like that. But it also wasn’t, because there was another reason it hurt to look at you. You were too likable. To me.”
She wasn’t sure what to say.
“I’m trying to be honest,” he told her.
“I believe you. But it’s hard to believe you could have really known me. Some of what you say doesn’t make sense.”
“Which part?”
“My character seems contradictory.”
“Why?”
“I don’t think you can be manipulative and kind at the same time.”
He laughed. “You can.”
There was a silence. Javelin shifted beneath them.
Arin touched a fingertip to the nape of her neck. He found, beneath the edge of her dress at her shoulder, a healed scar, thin and long. The skin where the whip had fallen was deadened, but the skin that bordered it was alive, and shivered. She was glad that she no longer faced him.
“You are changed,” he murmured, “and you are the same. Honorable. I honor you.”
That shiver dissolved into fear. Fear, for the fork in the path that loomed in the forest behind them. For what it meant that Arin knew her before and knew her now and honored her.
She did not ask him to honor her. She was suspicious of honor.
She nudged her knees into Javelin’s sides. Arin’s fingertips fell away. The horse headed for the stables.
Arin said nothing more to her that day, beyond an offer to curry Javelin. She accepted. She wanted to be alone. Even when she retreated into the house, her skin felt vibrant. Wakeful, unruly. Like it would give her no quarter. It would insist and insist, all because of a touch that had seemed intended to soothe.
