With my eyes downcast, all I can see are his shins and ankles and feet, dusted with that coal-black hair I adore so much. I focus on that as I answer, “Maxen.”

“Use it if you need it,” he says, and it’s still Ash for the moment, still the man who can’t sleep without me next to him. “I’m going to push you. It’s going to be hard.”

“Why are we doing this? Sir?” I remember to add.

He leans forward; I see the ends of his fingertips in the field of my vision. “Because you think that I think you’re weak. Because right now, you’re afraid that you are weak. Because your pain belongs to me and no one else, not even yourself. Because…” he takes a breath, and I can almost feel the pain, the need, radiating off him. “Because I almost lost you, Greer. Believe me when I say that I wish holding you for a night was enough to relieve this ache, this new distance between us, but it isn’t.” His fingers tangle gently in my hair. “I need it too, you see. I need to have it this way.”

I lean into his touch as much as possible, pushing against his hand like a cat. “So it’s for both of us?”

“Maybe me more than you. Embry told me what happened in Carpathia, what you asked him to do.”

Embry shifts behind us. I glance up at Ash, alarmed, but he trails a finger down to my lips, pressing its pad against them. “One demon at a time, Greer.”

“No one can wrestle one demon at a time,” I say from under his finger. “Demons link arms, join hands. They’re a package deal.”

He sticks two fingers in my mouth, silencing me. “Not today, not for you. I’m glad Embry was there to give you what you needed. I’m not angry…jealous, perhaps.” He looks at Embry while taking a deep breath and then looks back to me. “Okay, yes, I’m very jealous, but he saved you from Melwas. I would have given him anything. And you…you’d been through the pit of hell—do you think there’s any balm, any comfort I could refuse you after that? We won’t even think about it today—today is about having you here at my feet, where we both know you belong. My jealousy will keep for another day.”

I give his fingers a long suck, and then I nod. This is for both of us. One demon at a time.

I can do that.

He leans back. “Do you want to walk through what I have planned?”

I bite on the inside of my lip, my mind torn. Professor Greer wants to walk through it. In fact, Professor Greer wants to say Maxen right now and demand a back rub instead of a scene. But the more elemental part of me chides Professor Greer’s cowardice. In eight months, Ash has never harmed me, never pushed me where I didn’t need to go. If he thinks I need this, then I have to consider that he might be right.

And I do need it. In a way I can’t properly explain. I need something rough. Something grounding. Pain to drive out the pain.

Finally, I shake my head, still looking down. “I don’t want to know. I just want…” Fuck. Will I never be able to express what that unwanted touch made me feel? “I just want to feel like I’m yours. Not his.”

I don’t have to say his name for Ash to understand. His hands curl into fists. “You’re not his,” he says fiercely. “You’re mine.”

I nod, although tears are burning at my eyes. It’s such a basic truth—Melwas doesn’t have the power to change who I am, who I give myself to, how I crave my sex—yet right now the nettle cloak is back and it stings. Would Melwas have tried to rape me if I didn’t have Ash and Embry’s marks all over my body? If I didn’t have that undeniable scent of submissive on my skin? Was it something about me that invited his assault?

A finger comes under my chin, still wet from my mouth, and my face is lifted to my husband’s. It’s not Ash I see there, but my Sir.

“Tell me one thing you are remembering about it,” he orders, his gaze implacable and searching. “A color or a smell or a taste—”

“Apples.” I shudder out the word like it’s poison in my mouth. “There were apples at dinner before he brought me back to my room, and I could still taste them while he…” I trail off.

Ash releases my chin and looks over at Embry. “Kitchen. You know where they are.”

I hear Embry leave the room, and after he’s gone, Ash taps his fingers on his bare thigh. I stare at them, not dropping my gaze to the floor nor looking up into his face, staring at his hands and thinking about apples instead. The sour taste of them, how they brought saliva flooding to my mouth, how I couldn’t make that taste go away no matter how much I swallowed. How I could still taste them when Melwas touched me.

Ash’s fingers stop tapping. “Say it, angel.”

“I don’t want to do this,” I blurt.

“Because you think it won’t help? Or because it will be hard?”

“Both. That it will be hard and it will be for nothing.”

My chin is lifted again, and green eyes bore into mine. “That’s a risk I’m willing to take,” he says. “Because it’s my risk, isn’t it?”

I frown. It certainly isn’t—it was my body that was forcibly subdued and exposed to Melwas, it’s my mind and my memories blighted by it—and—

Cruel fingers reach down and pinch an exposed nipple. I squeak, a squeak that turns into a long cry as my husband twists my nipple hard. “Did that hurt?”

“Yes, Sir,” I gasp.