Pure Requiem

by Aja James

  I let her absorb what I said. Truly internalize it. I’ve said similar words before, but never this blunt, this brutal. We’ve avoided peeling apart the truth since finding each other again. We wanted to focus on our love for each other instead.

  But love cannot thrive in darkness and willful ignorance.

  I made choices that changed the course of both our lives, as well as the lives of hundreds of thousands of Pure and Dark Ones. Humans too.

  Perhaps she would realize, finally, that I am not worthy of her. Perhaps she would think that my love for her, in the end, was not strong enough for me to swallow my pride and simply kneel at her feet. Watch her fuck other males and even take one as Mate while I await Her Royal Highness’s pleasure like a pampered dog. A bridled stallion.

  Why doesn’t she blame me for everything I did? I do not deserve her.

  But I refuse to let her go.

  I should have died. If not in the Great War, then during the millennia of torture. I’d wanted to die that night she tore into me…the night I gave her all of myself, every last breath.

  She would have moved on, found a better male. She would have healed eventually, the pain of the past a distant memory. My Ishtar is full of joy and light. She would have found love again. Eventually.

  But I won’t ever fucking let her go.

  She’s mine.

  “Come here, ana Ishtar,” I repeat the command, my voice frayed and guttural.

  I will not go to her. She must come to me.

  She must choose me.

  Over and over I will make her choose me. I will lay out all the ugly truths. No more secrets. No more protecting either of our sensibilities. She must take me as I am, with everything I’ve done, and everything I have yet to do.

  I need her to keep choosing me.

  Finally, she speaks.

  “You’re going to keep fighting. You’re becoming the Pure Ones’ General again, aren’t you.”

  None of her statements are questions. I cannot tell from the flatness of her tone whether she is resigned, angry, or something else.

  A shiver of undiluted fear racks through my body. Not even when facing Dark legions or Medusa’s endless depravities have I ever been this afraid.

  Will she choose to let me go? Has she finally decided that this is not what she wants in a Mate? That I am not who she wants?

  “Yes,” I utter, unrelenting. “I will never stop fighting to protect those I love.”

  My lungs freeze in my chest, my heart in my throat, as I await her reaction.

  Softly, almost soundlessly, she slowly comes to me.

  I hold my breath, my fists clenched at my sides to keep from reaching for her.

  Choose me, I silently beseech her in my mind, though I do not telepath the thought.

  Choose me even though I hurt you, even though I made you suffer. Even though I still make you suffer.

  Even though I am not worthy. Choose me anyway. Because you love me as helplessly and as endlessly as I love you.

  At last, I feel her hands grasp my waist gently before clasping together at the small of my back. In the same breath, we shudder together as she lays her head on my chest.

  “Okay,” she murmurs simply against my heart.

  I inhale deeply, once, twice, taking in the air I didn’t even realize I’d been depriving myself, and wrap my arms around her too.

  “But you can’t argue if I want to fight alongside you,” she states mulishly. “And you’re not going on any missions until you can defeat my Great White Beast. Think of it as practice. I’m sure my sis—Medusa’s dragon form is far more ferocious and dangerous. If you can’t beat me, then you won’t be able to beat her. That’s my condition. Take it or leave it.”

  I take another deep breath, this one filled with gladness.

  “Aye,” I reply. “I’ll take it.”

  I feel her tilt her face up to look at me.

  She doesn’t speak for a while. I wonder what she sees.

  “If we’re sharing truths, Ninigiku of my heart, then you must know that nothing I have suffered, as you put it, compares to what you went through. Your sacrifices. I would have endured anything, lost everything, a hundred times over if that’s what it took for your people to have your freedom. For you to be free.”

  “Ishtar—”

  “No, it’s my turn,” she interrupts firmly, squeezing my back with her giant leopard strength, effectively shutting me up.

  “I would never ever get over you if I lost you, Tal,” she says quietly but fervently, her whole body shaking with her conviction.

  “There was no love within me for four thousand years while you were…gone. There was only the hope of Inanna. There is no other male for me but you. Not from the first, since I was ten summers and you were fourteen. I told you before that it will never change. No matter what happens, my heart will never, ever change. Not even death can stop my love. Are we clear?”

  I swallow hard, my heart thumping thunderously in my chest.

  “Yes.”

  But she wasn’t done.

  “I know what you suffered at Medusa’s hands,” she whispers huskily. “I saw your dreams, your memories.”

  I shudder uncontrollably at those words, my body bracing instinctively to pull away.

  But she won’t let me go. I’m beginning to realize that she will never let me go.

  “I lived some of them with you,” she continues in that low, raspy tone.

  I want to make her stop speaking, but I don’t. She has a right to speak these truths. I promised myself that there would be no more secrets between us.

  “I know what she did. Endless hours, every day and night. I know how she hurt you. All the ways she…h-hurt you.”

  My scars throb painfully at her words. Outside and within.

  Deep within me where I am broken and bleeding, a ravaged mess of agonized nerves.

  She takes two lung-fulls of shaky breaths and plows determinedly on.

  “I wish I can suffer that pain in your stead, my love.”

  “No—” I immediately growl.

  Never!

  “It’s unfair that you keep it from me,” she speaks over me. “If our places were reversed, wouldn’t you want to share my pain? Wouldn’t you want to help me any way you can? I am strong too, Tal. I can handle it.”

  She sucks in a breath and swallows it down. It sounds as if she’s swallowing jagged glass the way a low groan of pain vibrates through her throat.

  “It hurts so bad. Gods, it fucking hurts! But I can handle it, Tal. I want to. You want to fight for us. So do I. You have to let me fight for you too. Promise you won’t ever hide your pain from me. Not ever again. Promise.”

  I clench my jaw tight and grit my teeth.

  I don’t want to. I don’t want her to know the darkest parts of me.

  Yes, she’s seen my memories. Perhaps even experienced them vicariously through my nightmares. But she doesn’t know.

  “Trust me, Tal. Believe in me,” she whispers, holding me tight. “Believe in me the way you want me to believe in you. I do. I believe in you.”

  She nuzzles her nose and lips along my collarbone through the thin cotton fabric of my shirt, trailing open-mouthed kisses along my throat, over my jugular.

  “I’ve never told you my story. It seems insignificant compared to yours. I never wanted to burden you,” she murmurs against my skin, breathing me in.

  “But then, I realized that I didn’t tell you because I’m afraid. I’m afraid of what you might think. That you’d be disgusted. Not by what was done to me, but by me. Because I’m a ruined, soiled, broken thing.”

  “No…” I protest reflexively.

  “I believe you,” she immediately says. “I believe your love won’t change even if you knew my past. Perhaps we’d even grow closer, because you’d know me better. So, I will tell you my story. Will you hear it?”

  I nod. Of course, I’ll listen. She doesn’t have to ask.

  And as I think this, the irony of
my own reticence is not lost on me. She is teaching me a lesson.

  Reluctantly, I am learning.

  She lays her cheek against my chest once more and wraps her strong arms around me, hugging me snuggly, cuddling close.

  “The Pure rebels broke through the Ivory Palace’s defenses that fateful day,” she begins. “Elsewhere, my mother, Queen Ashlu, fell by my own sister’s treacherous hands.”

  This much I know. Medusa confessed it gleefully when she captured us a couple of years ago.

  “Did you know that Inanna led the charge?”

  I stiffen against her. I did not know. I was already in Medusa’s…possession then. I traded myself for her aid during the critical last battle. It was her Mate’s shadow warriors who changed the tide in the Pure Ones’ favor.

  Ishtar nods slightly, confirming her words.

  “I think I even saw her from afar, our beautiful Inanna. A golden, warrior angel. Fierce and courageous. An Angel of Death sent from the heavens to take her vengeance and justice upon the Dark empire.”

  I hear pride in Ishtar’s voice, despite that her own daughter led the battalion that destroyed her home.

  “I defended the palace as best I could, with what soldiers the queen didn’t take with her. But my heart wasn’t in it, Tal. I don’t think I truly wanted to win. Even before I met you I wanted the Pure Ones to be free. I never understood why Dark Ones had to subjugate all other Kinds. And when I met you, I couldn’t think of anything else. It was borne of sheer selfishness—I simply wanted you—but I wanted you to be free so that I could Claim you fair and square.”

  She huffs in self-deprecation.

  “I have never been as noble as you, my love. I only thought of my own needs.”

  This is so blatantly untrue, I want to interrupt her speech. But she squeezes me tight and cuts off my breath to speak.

  “It’s still my turn,” she reminds me stubbornly.

  I grunt my acquiescence and let her continue without interruption.

  “It wasn’t the Pure Ones who destroyed my home, you need to know that. It was never your fault, however tangentially. Not even a little. My sister killed my mother. My sister turned into a monster of her own making. It was never you who took them away from me. Perhaps they never loved me the way I loved them. As families ought to love each other.”

  As if she can’t help herself, her hands unwind from the small of my back to travel underneath my T-shirt, stroking up my abdomen to my chest, skin to skin.

  She needs the intimacy of feeling my naked skin against hers. I realize that I need it too.

  “You taught me how to love, Lord Bright Eyes. If I never met you, maybe I would have become like my mother and sister one day. You saved me with your love.”

  That’s not true. Ishtar has too much innate goodness to ever become like the Dark Queen and Medusa. But I am mindful of her storytelling, so I keep my thoughts to myself for now.

  “You have the most heavenly smelling skin,” she murmurs, pushing my shirt up, burying her nose in the groove of my pecs.

  I can’t help a little huff of laughter at her distraction.

  For some mysterious reason, this amazing, beautiful, loving female wants me with keen desperation. I feel it whenever she’s near. She wants to touch me all the time.

  For the first time since we were innocent children, I want it too. Not for Mating as her male. Just to give and receive affection.

  To give and receive pleasure.

  “Continue with your story,” I remind her, grasping her busy, searching hands in mine, holding her still.

  “Take off your shirt,” she orders, as if it’s a fair trade for her to keep talking.

  Despite the heaviness of the topic, somehow, she makes my mood light. I grab the back of my T-shirt and pull it over my head in one smooth motion.

  She wraps her arms around me again and purrs with gratification against my now naked chest.

  “And then what?” I urge her. “What happened after the Ivory Palace fell?”

  “The Pure Ones left,” she replies. “But the humans stayed. They looted everything of value. What badly wounded Dark Ones they rounded up, they tortured and killed just for fun. It must have been the bloodlust from battle. Or perhaps the millennia of servitude turned them mean. They took advantage of our weakness and ganged up against us. They reveled in their newfound power over what was once the most dominant predators on earth.”

  “They tortured you?” I ask bluntly, wanting to recall the words the moment I said them, but wanting to know her answer more.

  I need to know.

  “Yes,” she says simply, emotionlessly.

  “I was in my Great White Beast form. They trapped me in an iron net. I’m not sure how, but it felt like it had magic in it. The more I struggled, the more it caged me in, making me grow smaller, until I was normal leopard-size. They taunted me and prodded me with spears, sticks, burning rods, wooden pikes. Even children threw stones at me. I tried to keep my animal form. I knew that the abuse would be much worse if I took humanoid form. But I was too weak from blood loss and the pain of my wounds.”

  She takes a deep breath, and her nails claw into the skin of my back, as if she is desperately clinging onto a lifeline, something to remind her that this was all in the past, so that she can speak about it without breaking.

  “When I finally transformed, well, what I expected to happen happened,” she growls matter-of-factly.

  “I think half of the human soldiers and maybe half of the entire village at the foot of the Ivory Palace took a turn with me. Several turns. For many months. They kept me weak enough to control, starving me, torturing me, so that I could never heal enough to shift into my stronger forms. And they held me down and fucked me with my neck and limbs in shackles while others gathered to watch the show.”

  Fucking gods!

  I wrap my arms tighter about her as she takes in deep gulps of air, breathing me in, as if fortifying herself with my scent.

  And then, surprisingly, I feel her hands snaking down my spine, beneath the waistband of my trousers to cup my naked ass.

  “I love that you don’t wear underwear,” she mumbles and nicks my nipple with her sharp little teeth.

  I huff a startled gasp at her sudden detour. If she’s trying to distract me from the gruesomeness of her tale, it’s…somewhat working.

  “I love these muscled globes,” she purrs, kneading my flesh covetously. “Have I ever told you that you have the most magnificent bottom of any male I’ve ever met?”

  “Ishtar…” I rumble, trying to remind her to focus on her story, even while my own concentration scatters like a flock of startled birds at her knowing, needy touch.

  She squeezes my buttocks hard enough to make me grunt, and keeps her hands there while she stretches up a little to bite a tendon in my neck.

  “I need a distraction from the darkness of my tale,” she admits huskily. “You don’t mind being my distraction, do you?”

  In response, I lift one of her thighs so that I can notch my erection against her core, aligning our bodies where she needs me the most. Even through our clothes, her wetness and heat drench me, begging me to plow inside her and stake my claim.

  I move to pull down our clothes to do just that, to give her what she needs, to give her my strength, but for once she stops me. She wraps one leg around my hip to keep my sex pressed tight against hers, as she also keeps her hands filled with my ass.

  “Not yet,” she whispers. “Not here. I have plans for you. But I’m not done with my story.”

  “Go on, then,” I encourage her softly.

  “One day, I don’t know how, I managed to save enough strength to transform into my kitten form just as a little girl walked by my cage. She had blonde hair just like I imagined our daughter would. I wasn’t planning any heroic escape; even if I had the strength, I didn’t have the spirit. I just wanted to make her smile when she came closer and said ‘pretty kitty.’”

  Ishtar tucks her face into th
e crook of my neck and sighs.

  It’s a sigh of relief, for I gather that this is the point in her story where things start to get better. It’s a sigh, too, for the comfort of being able to share her story with someone.

  With me.

  “She pets me through the bars of the cage, her small hand and arm able to fit between the metal. It was just a few moments of reprieve. But it was enough to remind me that there is still innocence and kindness in the world. She went away after that, and I never thought I’d see her again. Many days later, or perhaps it was weeks, she came back one night with keys. She opened my cage and set me free.”

  I breathe in deeply my own breath of relief and kiss the top of her head, then her temples.

  Her body relaxes against me, no longer tense as a board. It was difficult for her to share her tale, but she did it bravely.

  Does she expect me to do the same?

  “After that, I spent countless years in my animal form, living truly like a wild beast in the mountains. But I was free. I was alone, as well. And I was lonely. I’ve never been on my own before. I’ve never spent so long in my animal form before. Things weren’t easy, but at the same time, they were easier than life spent as a Dark One. I had less emotions in my animal form. Less troubling thoughts. Slowly, I regained my strength. And, well…the rest you kind of already know.”

  I kiss her mouth gently, chastely.

  “Thank you for telling me,” I rumble low.

  “Thank you for hearing me,” she responds readily. “It wasn’t nearly as difficult as I thought it’d be. You still love me as you always have, right?”

  “I love you more.”

  She smiles against my mouth and kisses me less chastely this time, licking the seam of my lips with her tongue.

  “Will you let me love you back?” she whispers, her voice laden with desire and need. “Will you let me have all of you, Tal? Even the darkness and the pain?”

  I take a deep breath and brace myself.

  We’ve come so far. I do not want to let her down. I will not let my demons win.

  “Yes,” I decide with finality. Irrevocably.

  “Then come with me,” she entreats, pulling away from my body and taking my hand in hers.