Private Tales I've Caught A Monster

[Wren Kingsley]

Her gaze softened then, just the slightest bit, as she exhaled slowly. "You’ve managed to make me want something that I shouldn’t." She shook her head, a small, self-deprecating smile playing at the corners of her lips. "You're impossible, you know that?"

"I'm here. And I’m not running away just yet."

She paused, her fingers lightly tracing the edge of his hand, where it rested against her skin. "I want this too." she sighed. It was the truth. He infuriated her, but she had been drawn back to him again and again. He understood her. She wasn't easy to deal with but he did. He wanted to. But life was cruel and unfair and the more she let herself feel for him the more it terrified her.

Her eyes met his, her voice quieter now, almost vulnerable. "It might not be our life to have. But if it were? If this could be something more... Would it be worth the price?"

She let the question hang between them, her fingertips tracing over his lips, her heart pounding, unsure of the answer herself.

 

[Val]

"I would pay it every time." He said the words without even a second of thought, each of the six readied upon his tongue before he ever had any hope of catching them.

The cocky smile on his had not yet returned. His tone was still that serious steal. Val wasn't joking.

"I didn't get to choose my life." Val frowned. "I was born into what some called privilege, duty, and wealth."

Higher than almost anyone else in Oban. "But to me, It was only ever chains, obligation, and miserly corruption."

The wealth of his family had been taken off the backs of their people. Stripped from the hard work of laborers, farmers, mid-wives and hundreds of others who toiled away day in and day out to ensure Oban survived and thrived.

It wasn't his.

"I didn't choose to help them, Wren." He confessed. "I had to. Still have to. I can't...I can't not. Even when I'm here with you, now, it's this pressing...crushing weight on my shoulders. The thought that I'm not doing enough, that I should be out there, that I should be helping more."

A hint of panic touched his tone, voice cracking. "But I'm just a man, and I can't always give."

Lips pressed thin.

"Just this one time, just one time, I want to take." Val confessed again, head turning away from her in shame.

 

[Wren Kingsley]

Wren’s heart twisted at the rawness in Val’s voice. She could hear the cracks forming beneath his confidence, the vulnerability he was so desperate to hide, breaking her a little more with every word.

She knew the weight of duty, the crushing responsibility that never let go, and seeing him so utterly trapped in it—the way it gnawed at him, even now—made her chest ache.

"You don't have to carry it all, Val," she murmured, though she wasn’t sure if the words were for him or for herself. "I know it feels like you do, but you don’t."

The silence stretched between them, thick with the unsaid, and as he turned away from her, shame creeping into his expression, Wren’s chest tightened with something too fierce to ignore.

Gods, he was killing her.

Without another thought, she reached for him, her fingers brushing his jaw as she pulled his face to hers. She kissed him with a force that surprised her—crushing, desperate, full of all the emotions she’d kept buried beneath her own layers of armour. The kiss was a silent plea, a confession of everything she felt but never dared to admit.

Her heart was a tempest inside her chest, a whirlwind of longing and frustration, and the only thing that felt real in that moment was the heat of his lips against hers. She could feel his breath mingling with hers, the flicker of surprise that crossed his face before he melted into it.

"I don’t care about the price," she whispered between kisses, her hands threading into his hair, pulling him closer as though she couldn’t bear the space between them. "But if I tell you to run, you run. Promise me."

Her body was pressed against his now, their skin heated with the intensity of the kiss. She couldn’t bear the thought of pulling away anymore.

And in that moment, as their kiss deepened, as she poured everything she was into the contact, it felt as though the world outside—of duty and responsibility and guilt—ceased to exist. There was only him, and her, and the unbearable need for something more than the lives they’d been handed.

 

[Val]

Was it selfish? Was it deluded? Was it a fools gambit?

Those questions and more could still have been asked, had been asked a dozen times over already. Swimming through their mouths and even crossing their tongues. The truth that came with them was a pain that neither of them could have denied.

And yet it didn't matter.

Her touch returned to his skin, sending that fire through him as the pads of her finger drew along his scalp. Curling to clutch at his hair and bring him into a deepening kiss even as she forced a promise upon him. Chest burning as their passion and his broken plea drew the air from his lungs.

An ache set into his chest, but Val did not care. He was enraptured by her, enthralled. Even as his lungs struggled for breath he could not pull himself away from her. Could not stop their kiss. His fingers sliding over her body, one hand drawing down her hip as the other slid to the small of her back.

The pads of his fingers pressed into her skin, his touch near bruising as finally he was forced away. Their lips parting only for a brief moment before he manged to gasp for air.

Fingers still keeping her pinned to himself as he finally relented and spoke. "I promise."

Val said as he crossed his fingers gently behind her back. The lie slipping from his tongue with practiced ease, and yet at the same time tortured agony. For he did not want to deceive her, but unable to ever do as she asked.

 

[Wren Kingsley]

Wren felt his promise like a blade pressed to her skin—one that could either protect or wound her, depending on how he wielded it. And gods, she wanted to believe him.

But Val was a liar.

A beautiful, broken, reckless liar.

And she would let him lie to her just this once.

Not because she believed him, but because she wanted to. Because if she let herself believe, even for just a moment, that he could be hers without the weight of the world pressing against them, she might not shatter entirely.

So instead, she kissed him again, her lips catching the last syllable of his false promise, stealing it away before it could settle between them. If he was going to lie, then she would let him—for now. She would let herself pretend that this was enough, that she wouldn’t have to watch him walk away again with the weight of a kingdom’s suffering carved into his shoulders.

So she let her fingers tighten in his hair one last time, let her lips brush his in something softer, something that almost felt like surrender. "You’re a bastard, Val," she whispered against his mouth. "And I hate how much I want you.."

It was the closest thing to a confession she would allow herself.

The hours slipped by in a blur of heated, bruising touches, of tangled sheets and whispered gasps, of skin against skin and desperate, stolen breaths. A reckless indulgence, a surrender to something that neither of them could afford but neither of them could resist. A fever they refused to break.

And then, finally, the world crept back in.

The warm water of the bath had done little to rid her of the ache he had left behind, nor the way her mind still reeled with everything they had spoken of—everything left unsaid. By the time she finally pulled herself from his grasp, the bathwater had long since gone cold, steam replaced by the quiet, languid peace of spent passion.

Draped in black silken trousers and vest, the fabric whispering over her still-warm skin, Wren leaned against the doorway of his chambers, arms folded as she arched a brow at him. "So, are you planning on feeding me," she drawled, a smirk playing at the edges of her lips, "or am I just to starve in your captivity?"