Chapter 20
TWENTY
EUN
I stood at the door to my suite, my hands limp at my sides, my stomach churning like I’d swallowed glass, my wife's words crystal clear as the servant exited the room.
Everything I knew about her was a lie.
My father had laid it out like a feast I never asked for: the leadership of one of his companies, full support, resources, protection.
I wouldn't have to marry Barathice, but I would pass that obligation on to my future children, dooming them to a life I grew up in and wanted to escape.
And the worst part, the part that twisted the blade, was that the company he wanted me to helm was focused on manufacturing artificial meat for predators.
It was everything I’d dreamed of wrapped up in everything I hated. A way to change things from the inside. A product that could shift the balance, ease suffering, and replace blood with something clean.
And I hadn’t even known it existed.
He’d started it for me, as a way to reel me back in.
He had listened to what bothered me, what the public was clamoring for, and pivoted.
Now that I had a wife with traits they deemed desirable, the worst of my complaints, the forced marriage to Barathice, was no longer a requirement.
I could have wealth, power, and the utter privilege to run a company that produced something that could do good in the worlds.
All I had to do was pass the burden of forced marriage and generational control onto my children and feed them into the family that used addiction and wealth to try to control me.
I had married a woman who wanted the same, who wanted to control me, to force me to live a life that provided her with wealth.
She didn't care about our future children.
All she cared about was herself, and I was so blind as not to have seen it.
I didn’t know how I could face her.
She wasn’t what I thought she was. She wasn’t a soft, innocent prey creature clutching at safety, needing my protection.
What she did at that table…
It was grotesque.
All this time, I thought she was a sweet, innocent thing that desperately needed me, and all this time, she was a predator, lying in wait, ready to trap me.
The man I called my Uncle, his friendship and support in helping me get free from my family, was just another trick, another way to control me, to keep tabs on me until they found a way to force me to come back.
I couldn’t trust anyone in my life, especially not the woman who I thought was mine.
I stared at the door that lay between us, to the bedroom where my wife waited for me.
I didn’t have to go in there.
I could’ve gone to one of the many guest bedrooms and avoided her. The house was big enough for us to exist like ghosts, haunting separate wings, never crossing paths. If I really wanted to, I could abandon her in this house, leave her here for my family to play with like a new toy.
But that would’ve been cowardice dressed as strategy.
She was my wife.
Even if it was a marriage of convenience, inked in desperation and sealed to protect her, it was still a vow.
It was still real to me. I couldn’t pretend that was the only reason I’d choose her.
I wanted her. I took her, raw and bare. I was desperate for her.
I didn't have to marry her after I took her, but there was no part of me that would have chosen differently.
My desire for her struck me like lightning, bright, undeniable.
I had wanted her from the start. The only thing that held me back was the fear that I would harm her.
And the second I saw that I could have her, keep her, that I wouldn't hurt her, I'd leaped for her claws bared.
Avoiding her now, because she’d revealed a side of herself I hadn’t expected, would be idiotic.
Even if it was a side that terrified me, because it mirrored the part of childhood I loathed the most.
My mother stepped out of the room, closing the door behind her.
Her eyes lit up as she saw me there, hesitating at the door.
My feelings toward my parents were always mixed.
I couldn't remember my life before them, except for the cold dark of the box I had been transported in.
For the longest time, I thought they had saved me.
I thought they had rescued me from a fate worse than death, lifting me up from nothing to be raised as their own.
I loved and adored them, even tried to steel myself to the thought of a life married to someone who I knew hated the idea of marrying me just as much.
Then I found out that they had ordered me, like a product.
They bought me for a breathtaking sum, and I still didn't fully understand why.
I didn't know anything about my species or why my parents thought I was so special.
Part of that was my fault. I could have made an effort to leave the system and its controlled news sources, but leaving my family to go try to support myself was daunting enough.
I thought I had found a reason good enough to leave all of this behind.
"Your wife is quite reasonable," my mother said with a smile. "You'd do well to listen to her."
"She is a surprise to us both," I said.
She gave me a knowing look.
As much as I was raised by tutors, my mother still had a hand in my upbringing.
Warmth flowed from her when I fit into the mold of her choosing, and the chill of her disapproval was a cool sting that lessened as I matured and realized how calculated she was in both of those choices.
A part of me still craved her affection, but that part had grown smaller and silent when I first fully realized that she didn't torment the servants because she had high expectations.
She tormented them because she liked the flavor suffering brought to the meat.
I opened the bedroom door and stepped inside, closing the rest of the world out behind me.
Leija stood before the mirror, and for a moment, I forgot how to breathe.
The gown she wore looked spun from moonlight, liquid silver that clung to her body like it worshipped her, pooling at her feet like mercury longing to return to the stars. Gemstones glittered along her neck, her wrists, her ears. No expense had been spared to adorn her, and the message was clear.
It was a declaration.
She had been accepted, bought, and paid for.
And the ache in my chest, sharp and radiant, like my heart was breaking into a thousand pieces, dropped to the ground to shatter right after I'd just finished patching it back up.
Even as my body lit on fire at the sight of her, a cold numbness grew inside of me, a sick gnawing in my stomach that I had made a choice I didn't know how to escape from.
It was true, what my mother had said at dinner.
Leija was perfect.
Perfect for what my family needed.
In a world shifting beneath our feet, predators had to project gentleness, benevolence, whether they felt it or not.
The charities, the synthetic meat companies, the public displays of restraint…
all of it wasn’t born of compassion, but of strategy.
The prey species outnumbered us by a vast amount, and there was only so long a population could be devoured before it rose up and slaughtered those who preyed upon them.
The world had shifted towards the demands of the meek, and the ruling predator families had to put on the right appearances if they wanted to stay alive, let alone in power.
Leija looked like prey in every way. Her soft features, her round nails, her small teeth. The curve of her form, the warmth of her presence, every part of her whispered of gentleness, of submission, of soft flesh that was waiting to be feasted upon by the strong.
And yet she had eaten meat like she’d been born to tear into it.
Her eyes caught mine in the mirror.
“Eun,” she said, and the sound of my name in her voice, so soft, so relieved, wrapped around my ribs and pulled. It was like a tether catching a falling star.
I stepped back, my hand brushing the doorframe.
I shouldn't have come in here. Just seeing her was too much.
A sudden wave of conflicted emotion rose in my chest like a storm surge, overwhelming, inescapable.
She looked so small, so radiant, her body draped in silver light.
Every instinct in me screamed to go to her, to hold her, to bury my face in the curve of her neck and stay there until the world made sense again.
But when I watched her eat, it was clear that it was not the first time she had eaten meat.
She watched me from where she stood, the distance between us so vast, yet so familiar.
I couldn't run from this, I couldn't run from her.
So I asked the only question that actually mattered.
“Leija,” I said, barely more than a whisper. “How are you feeling?”
"I'm..." She held out her hands, fingers trembling slightly as she searched for the word before she rejected it. "How I'm feeling doesn't matter. I've convinced your mother that we'll be back tomorrow, so we can leave tonight. There is a car waiting for us."
"How you're feeling is the only thing that matters," I said, keeping my voice steady.
She deserved the space between my assumptions of her intentions and my rejection. She deserved this moment to tell me if she was the person I always knew her to be, or if she had been a paid actor this entire time.
I owed her the space to say her piece.
If she was gleeful or joyous, or horrified or scared, any of those emotions would tell me a different story about what was going on inside her head. All I had to go on was that single, horrible moment where she suddenly showed herself to be everything my parents wanted and everything I feared.
"I feel like I would like to go now," she said. "Being here is a lot."
At least she didn't want to stay.
"Are you overwhelmed?" I offered, bridging the gap between us.