Page 158 of Promised to the Alpha Prince

I didn’t know how I did that either.

But one minute, I could feel her in the bond, and the next minute, it was gone. Our connection, our bond, our everything. I’d just severed it.

I sat up straight, panicked, feeling around internally for her, trying to reconnect.

She was similarly distraught, letting out a sound of dismay. She started to cry. “What did you do?” she whispered. “What did you do?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know. I didn’t mean to.” I tried to relax, to reopen it, but I… I couldn’t relax.

Tears were streaming down her face.

I pulled her close, wiping at them. “Oh, Aurelie, you just… you attacked me—”

She pushed me away. “Why? What is wrong? Is it like Johannes said, something to do with that time the alpha made you have anal sex?”

“No,” I said. “Why bring that up?”

“Why won’t you talk about it?”

“I just didn’t like it,” I said. “It’s not…” I squirmed on the bed, feeling naked and vulnerable and terrified. “Look, it’s just, being fucked, it’s a position of, um, submission. It’s like being… being… I don’t know. But that’s not me. I’m not…”

“The woman?” she said. “The omega?”

I got off the bed and started trying to put my clothes back on. They were all ripped. I tossed my boxers, annoyed. “Look, I’ve bent a lot for you. I publicly declared in that press conference that I have a male lover. I told everyone that I have gay sex. The whole fucking country, including my fucking father, and that’s not nothing, Aurelie. I never wanted to do something like that, and if you and him hadn’t left together, if you hadn’t kept defying me—”

“You’re a bisexual man!” she exploded. “You like having sex with men. Why are you ashamed of it?”

“I’m not ashamed,” I said. “But my dad, he thinks of it in this way.”

She eyed me from the bed, her voice quiet. “It’s about your dad. Of course it’s about your dad. Duh. Idiot, Johannes, you’re an idiot. Why would it be about anything else?”

“I don’t feel attraction to my own fucking father!” I exploded.

“No, that’s not what I meant!” She was yelling, too.

“What did you mean?” I spread my hands, shaking all over, my soft dick bobbing around and making me look comical, even in this moment, where I wanted so much to be a pillar of strength, unassailable. Fuck.

“Your dad thinks it’s a sign of weakness to be gay,” she said. “Because gay men are not the pinnacle of the patriarchal hierarchy, I guess. No, maybe it’s more elemental than that. Sexually submitting to another man is weak. Getting fucked is weak. Because if you do the fucking, you’re the one who’s in control, and if you take it, you’re… the bitch.”

“I don’t believe that shit,” I muttered.

“Huh,” she said. “Could have fooled me.”

“I don’t,” I protested. “Nikolai could destroy me with his thumb and forefinger. Literally. He knows ways to kill men that are just about putting pressure on certain places on their neck. He’s not weak, not even a little bit weak, and he, you know, bottoms. It’s not like that. I just don’t… like it. You’re making it into this significant thing, and it’s not.”

“Maybe I would agree with you if you weren’t this same way about everything else in your life,” she said. “You can’t be weak, ever. You can’t even be weak with me. You resent the way you want me. You resent your desire for me.”

“I don’t,” I said, a little petulant.

“It has power over you. It makes you weak. Therefore, everything you do is a fucking compensation for that.”

“You know, if I wanted to get your amateur psychology diagnosis, I would have asked for it,” I snapped.

“Here’s the thing, Dmitri,” she said. “You are weak.”

I drew back. “What?”

“You’re a human being, and you need to be vulnerable sometimes,” she said. “I’m vulnerable sometimes. If people are going to trust each other, they have to be vulnerable with each other. That’s why I don’t trust you. Because you never show me any of your weaknesses.”

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