Chapter 202 Chapter 201
Rayena held her breath, still threading her hands through his soft, silky hair, listening attentively while he spoke.
"After my mother died birthing me, I was treated like an outcast in her family. Rumors reached me that they had initially planned to kill me after my birth, but my grandfather insisted they wait till my first shift. Whatever beast I transformed into then would determine my fate," he groaned.
Rayena gasped, her heart skipping a beat at those words, but she didn’t utter a word, letting him lay out his past. "What happened during that period?"
"Well, you know... constant bullying, never cared for, and ostracized by the people who should have looked out for me. I didn’t even have a room in the palace during that time," he murmured with a mirthless chuckle. "My grandfather hated me so much, he made me live in the blacksmith’s quarters in the early years of my life, where I suffered even more bullying. I was so thin and malnourished then."
A tense moment of silence passed before he resumed speaking, his body slowly tensing. "Everything changed when I turned eight. A relative took notice of me and convinced the rest of the family to bring me back to the palace."
Rayena started to feel relief, but it was short-lived as Xenon continued speaking. "I thought I would be accepted then. But the reason why she’d brought me back was uglier than I could have ever imagined."
"What happened?" Rayena whispered softly, ignoring the thudding in her heart. A shuddering breath escaped Xenon’s lips, and he curled a hand into a fist, trying to keep those ugly emotions from spilling out.
"Her name was Anastasia..." he ground through clenched teeth, eyes narrowing with rage. "She’d lost her mate during a clash with the weretigers that had once been enslaved and sought to make me take his place."
Rayena’s breath hitched. That didn’t sound good.
"It started out harmless at first... she’d offer to bathe me and proceed to touch, making me repeat the same actions with her, but the demands kept growing, the acts becoming more demeaning."
Cold sweat broke out on Rayena’s body, but she maintained stroking his hair.
"By the time I turned twelve, I had become her boy toy, existing only to give her pleasure."
Rayena couldn’t hold it in anymore. "That’s horrible!" She gasped.
"It is..." he groaned. A chuckle slipped past, but it wasn’t humorous. His body had turned solid rock against hers, his breathing carefully controlled. Rayena forced herself to keep stroking his hair.
"Didn’t other people know what she was doing?"
Xenon scoffed. "If they did, they didn’t care. I guess some were mad they didn’t get to experiment with me because they were still mated and would be caught, so they watched instead." He shuddered, gripping her waist tightly, fingers digging into her skin. "Female werewolves at the time had a strange fascination with male weretigers and would go to any lengths to be with one or have them as concubines.
"Even unmated maids tried their lucks. Although whenever Anastasia caught them—which was always—she’d torture them to the point of death and make me take them anyway. Most of them usually died by then."
Rayena’s hand stilled. Her eyes froze wide, like they’d been nailed open. Whatever shout of horror Rayena wanted to make died in her throat, and only strangled noises slipped past. Xenon lay unmoving atop her, yet she could catch the faint tremor in his body as he recounted the memories.
"That’s... that’s messed up!" she finally choked out, her eyes stinging with tears.
Xenon hissed, suppressing a growl. "By the time I turned fourteen, disgust and resentment had eaten me alive. I hated her. I hated women. The ones who used me, the ones that watched it happen, the ones that ignored my suffering and called it enjoyment. So many times I tried to resist, refuse. But each time, I’d get tortured and drugged into submission and used. Women of any kind repulsed me. They still do," he bit out, fury tainting each word.
Something ran down Rayena’s cheeks. She discovered she was crying and tried to clean it off. But the story wasn’t done. She ignored Xenon’s fingers digging into her skin, her heart breaking for him.
"Then one night, I decided I had had enough. Or maybe my tiger did. While I was still inside the wretched being, I shifted into my tiger form and tore her to pieces. Her screams alerted the inhabitants of the palace, and they witnessed the bloody scene. Seeing I had shifted into a tiger, they deemed me a traitor and made to kill me."
"Did they?!" Rayena asked in panic, already engrossed in his tale.
He peeked at her then, grimacing. "Of course not. I managed to escape with a few other enslaved people from the weretiger clan, and we hid in the forest outside of the realm, coming in contact with other weretigers that had escaped being enslaved."
A deep sigh escaped his lips, and he brought his head back to her chest, laying on it.
"I stayed in hiding, recuperating, training. Returned decades later to exact vengeance and free the weretigers, but the damage from those years in hell was still there. Females still repulsed me, and any time I forced myself to be intimate anyway, I'd either freeze up or outright attack. It's why I stopped. Until you," he breathed.
Rayena's heart skipped a beat. "M-me?" she stuttered.
He lifted himself then, bringing his face closer to hers, gazing into her eyes. She watched the bitterness and rage fade from his eyes, replaced with something softer—something that made her heart flutter. Slowly, he nodded.
"Until you," he repeated, his voice a low rumble. Rayena gasped. "You don't trigger my tiger into rage," he confessed.
Rayena felt her cheeks burn. "W-why is that?"
He shrugged, brows furrowing in thought. "Maybe because you're my mate? The one destined for me," he said after a while.
Rayena's heart fled from her chest, the room blurring around her. "I'm your mate?" she squeaked, eyes wide like saucers. "How so?"
"Well, your scent doesn't repulse me, and you're the only one I feel the most comfortable around. The only female who's managed to trigger my rut and sate it too. Also, my wolf likes you so much, it’s marked you already." He glanced at something on her right neck, and Rayena's hands flew toward it, feeling the strange, pulsing dent on her flesh there. It throbbed with sensation as she swiped her hand through it, and she gasped, looking at Xenon.
A corner of his lips twitched, his eyes crinkling. "You bear my scent now, and I must say, it's divine on you."