Chapter 171: ¹⁷¹: I don’t want you.

Chapter 171: 1?1: I don’t want you.

"I don’t want to do any of this right now, Kael!" I snapped, surprising even myself with the sharpness of my voice.

I immediately tried to wrench my hands free from his heavy grip, hoping that I could at least push him away and regain some control over my senses.

Having him this close to me, close enough for me to practically breathe in his intoxicating scent, was torture for my heart. I was already struggling to keep myself from abandoning everything I had planned for my own sake, and being trapped beneath him like this was making it nearly impossible to think straight.

Yet, no matter how much force I used, I couldn’t even jerk his hands aside.

I stared at our joined hands in disbelief. I knew my strength had diminished considerably since I lost my wolf, but it wasn’t as though I had become so pathetic that I couldn’t free my hands from someone’s grasp.

That was what was different right now, right now the truth was that Kael simply wasn’t himself at the moment.

He was completely different; something foreign, something dangerous, something undeniably regal. There was something about his aura that made it feel as though the power radiating from him belonged to a realm far beyond my understanding. I couldn’t explain it, but I could feel it, and the sensation left me more unsettled with every passing second.

"What did you say, Athena?" Kael whispered. He studied my face as though he had been genuinely shocked by my words, as if my refusal was the last thing he had expected to hear from me.

I squeezed my eyes shut and drew in a deep breath, desperately trying to steady my racing heart. Only when I felt I could trust my voice again did I open them and look into his strange eyes.

"I said I don’t want to do anything right now. Whatever you’re implying with all this..." I stopped mid-sentence, wincing as his fingers curled more tightly around mine. The pressure increased until it began to hurt, and I instinctively tried to pull away again.

"Kael," I continued, forcing myself to meet his gaze despite my growing unease, "I don’t want to have any kind of intimacy with you right now."

I said it aloud, choosing my words carefully to make my intentions clear without being unnecessarily blunt. But inside, I was fighting an entirely different battle.

I wanted to pull him closer. I wanted to bury my face in his neck and breathe in that familiar, soothing scent that was making me crave his presence with an intensity I could barely understand.

And that was precisely the problem. Somewhere along the way, I had started seeing our arrangement as something more than a few moments of intimacy.

My feelings had changed, and I was no longer able to pretend that they hadn’t. Giving in to the desire I felt for him would only make things more complicated, more painful, and far more dangerous for my heart.

I couldn’t afford to forget that, no matter how desperately a part of me wanted to.

Kael scoffed at my words. The corner of his mouth curled into a small smile as he looked down at me, and I immediately recognized the expression.

I had come to understand that his smiles weren’t always meant to tease me. Now, there was something mocking about them, something that made me feel as though he found my reactions amusing.

And this time, it hurt. I hated that it did. I hated that I could still be affected by something so small when I had already promised myself that I would stop allowing his actions to get under my skin.

Why was I even expecting him to be considerate of my feelings? It was ridiculous. I had no right to expect him to understand what I hadn’t even managed to admit to myself properly.

"You’re saying you don’t want to have sex with me, Athena?" he asked, sounding almost appalled by what he had understood from my words. "I mean..." Kael chuckled, leaning forward until his forehead rested against mine.

The moment our foreheads touched, the heat radiating from him transferred to my skin. I couldn’t help wondering how he was even managing to remain conscious with his body temperature this high. It was almost unbearable, and yet he seemed far more concerned with arguing with me than with whatever was happening to him.

"Weren’t you..." he continued, his voice laced with a hint of ridicule that cut into my heart like a series of sharp daggers. "Weren’t you in this agreement with me simply because you were crazy about me? Crazy for sex? The very thing you’re denying me right now?"

He paused, and the mocking tone of his voice only made his next words worse. "I mean, it doesn’t even make sense. A girl like you, who suggested an agreement this appalling in the first place, supposedly for her own interests, all because she’d been crazy about me since time immemorial and would do anything to have me fuck her. And now you’re putting on this act? What is it, Athena? Huh?"

For a moment, I could only stare at him. Then something inside me snapped. "Yes! I was with you in this just for sex, Kael!" I screamed, the words bursting out of me the very second he called my refusal an act.

An act. He had actually called it an act. I was struggling to hold on to the last scraps of control I had over myself, trying desperately to keep my feelings from dragging me into something I knew would hurt me, and he had reduced all of it to a performance.

I had never imagined that Kael would say something like this to me. In the beginning, he had been so considerate, so gentle in the way he treated me. Even when we had established the terms of our arrangement, there had been moments when I had caught glimpses of a side of him that made it difficult to believe he could be so indifferent.

But with every new interaction between us lately, he seemed to grow crueler, his words cutting deeper than the last. And right now, he was being an absolute bitch to me.

No agreement between us, no matter how unconventional or questionable, could justify what he had just said to me or the way he had said it. Every word seemed deliberately chosen to demean me, to strike directly at my self-respect and make me feel small.

I could feel the anger rising through me, burning away the confusion and hurt that had kept me silent until now.

"I started all of this with you because I was a desperate woman who would do anything to get fucked by you!" I screamed again.

I twisted my body, struggling to get him off me, desperate to put even a little distance between us. My hands still ached from the force of his grip, but I no longer cared about the discomfort. I needed him to understand what he was doing to me, even if I had to shout every word into his face to make it happen.

"I know exactly what you’re trying to imply!" I continued, my voice trembling with fury. "You’re trying to make me sound like a slut, a whore! Fine! Whatever you want to call me, I’ll agree to it! I’m a slut! I’m a whore!"

The words tasted bitter as they left my mouth, but I forced myself to keep going. If he wanted to reduce me to the worst interpretation of my own choices, then I would make him listen to the one thing he seemed determined to overlook.

"But even they have something called consent, Kael!" My voice cracked on his name, yet I refused to look away. "Even if we have that fucking agreement between us, I still have the right to consent! I still have the right to say no!"

For all the anger coursing through me, I knew that much with absolute certainty. Whatever I had agreed to before, whatever reasons had driven me to propose this arrangement, it did not mean he could decide for me now.

"And right now, I fucking don’t want to do this!" I shouted, my chest rising and falling with each furious breath. "Get off me! And lie down so I can find you some medicine before you fry whatever little bit of sense you have left in that overheated brain of yours!"

The moment those words left my mouth, Kael moved. Just like that, he got off me. His grip loosened, and my hands were finally free. I immediately drew them toward myself, rubbing them with my opposite palms to ease the soreness left behind by his fingers.

Kael sat up and moved to the edge of the bed, his back partially turned toward me. His sudden compliance was so unexpected that I momentarily forgot my anger.

It was as though something had snapped him out of whatever state he had been in. For a few seconds, I simply watched him, trying to understand the abrupt change in his behavior.

He had been arguing with me, holding me down, and insisting that I cooperate with him. Now he was sitting quietly at the edge of my bed, almost as though he had only just become aware of what had happened between us.

I didn’t know what to make of it. All I knew was that my hands hurt, my heart was a mess, and I desperately wanted a moment to myself after everything that had just happened.

But I couldn’t simply lie there and do nothing. No matter how angry I was with him, I couldn’t forget the unnatural heat radiating from his body or the alarming state he had been in when he arrived.

With a weary breath, I pushed myself up, still rubbing my sore hands as I tried to gather my scattered thoughts.