Page 20 of Stealing the Troll’s Heart

Her shoulders drop, and a look crosses her face that I don’tlike. She doesn’t want to see me go, that much is obvious. I rub her back.

“You’re coming, too,” I say. I lift her up with my hands and start to move inside her again. “I’m keeping you. Forever.”

Her expression changes again, and I’m surprised when I find it’s not a happy one. She stops me with a hand on my arm, and slowly, disengages herself from me. But my cock is huge and swollen and covered in her, and it’s desperate for release. I try to pull her back, but she isn’t having any of it.

“No,” she says, getting off the bed.

“No?” I reach out and grab her more firmly. I’m not going to let her wander off now. But she lets out a little hiss and buries her nails in my hands. I recoil.

“What’s wrong with you?” I ask, incensed. She’s clawed me before, but only ever when I’m inside her and her arms are wrapped around my neck. I have a number of long scratches across my back.

“No touch,” she says. She still hasn’t gotten a handle on the grammar yet. But she sits back down on the edge of the bed, just far enough away from me that I can’t sweep her back up again into my lap.

She’s never told me not to touch her. In fact, whenever I’ve touched her before, she melts into my hands like butter on a warm day. My Telise is pliable, soft, and as eager to be wrapped around me as I am around her. What have I done to earn this kind of insult?

My cock is starting to quiet down now that the atmosphere has shifted to something darker. Rather than touching her, I run my hand through her long hair, stopping at the knots like I always do to wrangle them out.

“Mine,” I say again. I want her to say it, too.

But she just shakes her head and repeats, “No.”

My mouth feels dry. When she looks up at me, hereyebrows are drawn together the way she does whenever she encounters a word or a drawing she doesn’t understand. “Not yours.”

The low growl leaves my mouth before I know what I’m doing. Telise’s frown deepens.

“What do you mean?” I ask. “Of course you are.” Doesn’t she understand? The way our bodies work together, how our spirits have chosen to tangle up as they have, it’s obvious. She is supposed to be with me, to go where I go. We are linked now, inextricably.

But Telise simply shakes her head again and rises off the bed. “No. I’m not.” She turns away so I can’t see her face any longer and starts to put her pants on.

This isn’t right. This isn’t right at all.

First, the panic sets in. Then comes the anger. I get up and seize her by the shoulders, and she gasps at the power behind my grip. “Mine,” I reinforce the word again, and lean down toward her so she can see that I’m quite serious. This is no game. This is my life. “My mate. Forever.”

“Mate?” She repeats the word. It’s one I’ve never taught her. I pull her waist against me and lean down, pressing my face to her hair. The way my tusks frame her head, it’s like we were made for this.

“Mate. You and me. Forever. Mine.” I don’t know how else to convey it.

She pushes on my abdomen, hard, and I take a surprised step back. Her face is red, and her eyes are as sharp as razor blades. I don’t understand why she’s reacting this way. Doesn’t she know?

Something shifts inside me as she refuses me again. It’s a bone-deep kind of fury, that rises to the top like a dragon about to unleash hell.

Chapter 10

Telise

Raz’jin keeps repeating this one word, as if saying it different times with different intonations will change the fact that I don’t know what it means. But I’m getting an idea. “Wife,” maybe? Whatever it is, I’m not interested.

I don’t belong to him, and certainly not forever. Where did this idea even come from?

Don’t get me wrong—I want him. I loved having him, over and over again. I enjoyed getting to know him, and learning from him, and spending time with him even when he wasn’t sucking between my legs or driving into me with his cock. I have a very deep affection for him, that much is true.

But beyond that? It’s not possible. I always knew it wasn’t, and I thought he did, too. Now I’m starting to wonder how he thought this would end, and I’m concerned that the truth of the matter was not shared between us.

“No,” Raz’jin growls. “Mine.” He repeats the word again,gesturing at me and then himself. He wants me to go with him, to leave Eyra Cove at his side on the last ship out of here before we’re all frozen in for the winter.

And the more I push him away, the more I refuse to abide by this decision he’s made—all on his own, I might add—the angrier he gets. I’ve only seen him this angry the once before, when I dropped from a tree branch and kicked him square in the head. When I held that knife to his throat, he had glared down at me with a look very much like this one.

We were clearly on completely different pages about what this relationship looked like and how it would end. That was a grievous error.

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