“Little princess. I’m going to undress you and wash you,” he explains, “and then you are going to sleep.”

She doesn’t respond, merely turning her head to look away from him.

He catches her chin, and when he speaks, his voice is as tender and deep as it was when he promised to love her in sickness and in health. “The answer is yes, Sir.”

The words bring a flicker of life to her face. She looks back to him, as if really seeing him for the first time, and with her chin trembling and her voice thick, she responds, “Yes, Sir.”

He glances over to me. “Wait here, Embry. We have things to talk about after I’ve cared for my wife.”

I nod, lean my head back against the chair, and it’s the last thing I know before the exhaustion takes me.

“Embry.”

My eyes open to see Ash standing above me, a strange expression on his face. His hair is wet and water drops still cling to his bare chest, but he’s put on a pair of sweatpants that hang low on his hips. I steal a look over at the bed and see a slender form piled high with blankets. In the late afternoon sun coming through the window, I see the glint of blond hair on the pillow.

“She fell asleep the moment I laid her down,” Ash says.

“You look like you could use some sleep too.”

Ash passes a hand over his face. “I can’t sleep without her anyway. Knowing the two of you were out there made it more than impossible.”

“She’s safe now.”

“And so are you. Let’s go to my office and let Greer rest.”

We go, closing the bedroom door quietly behind us and moving into Ash’s office, a wood-paneled room with a large desk and several heavily laden bookshelves. He bids me to sit on the couch near the large windows and he sits in the chair next to it. For a few moments, we both look out the window at the tall, leafy trees outside, aspens and maples and oaks, all green and summer and so different from the scrubby evergreens of Carpathia.

Then he moves his gaze from the window to me. “She has fresh bite marks on her,” he says.

I’m still trying to figure out how to answer him, when he says, “Tell me it was you, Embry. Tell me it was you and not him.”

I exhale. “It wasn’t him. I—after I found her—” the tiredness is not helping with the complicated swirl of feelings and fears right now, and guilt infects me. “We never talked about what would happen between the three of us. Rules. I didn’t think it was wrong because we hadn’t laid out any boundaries.”

“We didn’t have time to lay out boundaries.” His gaze and voice are still filled with a cool kind of calm. I resist the urge to shiver or look away, knowing he’ll see. “You fucked her? Just the two of you?”

“It’s not what it sounds like, I swear. Melwas wasn’t able to rape her,” I say all in one breath, “but he touched her. If you’d seen her, Ash—”

He stands up and walks over to a window, pressing his forearm against the glass and leaning forward. The posture highlights the muscles in his arms and shoulders, the place where his sweatpants hang from his sharp hipbones and hug his firm ass.

“What, Embry?” he says, and it’s all in his voice, his wounded, bitter voice. “What would I have done if I’d seen her?”

The tiredness falls away, my place as Vice President falls away, everything falls away, and I do something I rarely ever do unless I’m wrestled into it. I go and kneel at his feet, lowering myself down to press my lips against the top of one foot. There’s a light sprinkling of dark hair near his ankle, the thick cords of tendons, and the clean soap smell of his recent shower.

He freezes as I do this, not saying a word, not moving. I switch to the other foot, letting my lips linger on his skin long enough to feel it warm under my mouth.

Finally he says in an almost indifferent voice, “Did you come? Did she come?”

“Yes,” I whisper against his foot.

“Did you think of me?”

“Goddammit, Ash, you know we did.”

“That’s Goddammit, Sir.”

“You might as well have been in the room with us. Sir.”

“Did you pretend to force her?”

The words puncture me, lodge in me, expertly shot arrows. I look up at him, desperate, and he takes pity on me, bending down to stroke his fingers through my hair. “It’s what she would have needed, little prince. Wanted too.”

I duck my eyes in shame.

“Ah,” he says. “And it’s what you wanted.”

My hands are shaking, and he gets to his knees and wraps my hands in both of his. They’re steady and warm, like him.

“I walked in and she was tied up—I mean, taped up. Ankles and wrists. A gag. She begged me, she cried—” My voice threatens to break, but I keep going, keep confessing my sins to my priest. My king. “I asked you for something like that once—how could I deny her? And she said she needed it, but Ash…I wanted it before I thought of all that. I wanted it the moment I walked into that dark room and my shadow fell across her body.”

“Did you have a safe word?”

“We agreed on snapping fingers because I…I put her gag back in her mouth.”

Ash nods, acknowledging that we’d done it safely, but his eyes are already growing distant. I wonder if he’s imagining it, picturing the lurid, fucked-up scene for himself. “Did you leave her taped up?”