Chapter 949. One Got Sunlight, I Got The Storm, Noted The Difference
Iris didn’t answer immediately. She stood there, breathing hard, her heart hammering against her ribs like a trapped bird.
Her mind screamed at her. ’You’re weak... You’re compromised...’
’He’s inside you even when he’s not.’ The shame burned hotter than the pain.
She felt exposed, as if the junior guard could see through her training leathers and see the bruises on her hips, see the dried semen staining her skin, and see the utter ruin of her dignity.
"Fuck," she hissed internally, the curse echoing her own self-loathing.
She felt like a fraud, a broken weapon pretending to still be sharp.
"Fine," Iris said aloud, her voice clipped and dangerously cold.
She forced herself to reset her stance, her boots scraping against the stone floor with unnecessary aggression. "Again."
"But—" the boy started, hesitating. "That was a clean hit... I shouldn’t have--"
"I said again," she snapped, her eyes flashing with a desperate, wounded anger. "Unless you’ve forgotten how to hold a sword, don’t question my readiness!"
"Move!"
She needed the pain. She needed the impact to be harder, faster, and more brutal.
She wanted to swing her blade with enough force to break something, to shatter the numbness that was settling over her soul.
She wanted to fight until her muscles screamed louder than her memories, until the physical agony could finally drown out the psychological torment of being Rex’s plaything.
She needed to prove to herself and to the ghosts of the men she once respected that she was still Iris, not just a vessel for his cruelty.
She caught the next exchange properly, her blade meeting the wooden practice sword with a sharp, satisfying crack, and the one after that. For three consecutive passes, she forced herself into the rhythm of violence, using the familiar sting of exertion to anchor her soul. But the anchor was dragging.
Her attention kept drifting, pulled like iron filings to a magnet, toward the far side of the training hall. There, Rex was running footwork drills with two of the newer guards.
From this distance, he looked like the paragon of discipline he claimed to be. She found herself transfixed by the patient, almost surgical way he corrected a recruit’s stance and the easy, predatory authority in every movement he made through the space.
He moved with the grace of something that knew it was at the top of the food chain.
’Look at him,’ her inner voice sneered, venomous and broken. ’The monster who broke you last night, pretending to be a teacher now...’
Yet, she couldn’t stop watching. She lost track of her own opponent’s approach entirely, her blade lowering slightly as she traced the line of Rex’s shoulders.
She didn’t hear the junior guard’s sword whistling through the air until it was inches from her guard.
"Commander? Iris?" The boy called her name twice, his voice tinged with genuine alarm. "Commander, please! Are you with us?"
Iris snapped back to reality as if she had been electrocuted. Her heart hammered against her bruised ribs.
"W-What?! H-huh... y-yeah... I’m here," she snapped, though her voice lacked its usual steel. "Focus on your footwork, not my face."
"Again!"
It was not new, exactly this magnetic, nauseating pull toward him. She had first noticed it days ago, a strange, unwelcome tightness in her chest when Sela had made an offhand comment about how unfairly good-looking he was.
At the time, Iris had dismissed it with practiced cruelty toward herself, telling herself it was merely grief finding strange, twisted places to leak out a phantom pain from a wound that refused to heal.
She had believed that lie and she had clung to it like a lifeline. She believed it considerably less now.
Now, she knew that the tightness wasn’t grief. It was something far more dangerous: recognition.
Her body recognized the predator, and despite the terror, despite the violation, there was a dark, shameful part of her that craved the attention of the storm.
The drills broke for a short rest as midmorning approached. Iris retreated to the edge of the hall, seeking the shadows to catch her breath and compose the fragments of her dignity.
Her lungs burned, and her hips throbbed with every shift of her weight.
That was when Diana arrived.
Diana swept across the training floor with the unhurried confidence of someone who owned the ground she walked on. She looked fresh, untouched by the morning’s sweat and steel, crossing directly toward Rex.
Iris watched through narrowed eyes as Rex turned when Diana reached him. Whatever correction he had been midway through delivering to the guards simply ceased.
He set the lesson aside without a second thought, his entire focus shifting as if the rest of the room had suddenly gone dark. In that moment, Rex was a man who had found his sun, and Diana was the only thing that mattered to him.
Rex leaned down, murmuring something to her too quietly for Iris to catch across the echoing hall, and Diana erupted into laughter. It was that specific, unguarded laugh she rarely granted anyone else, a sound of pure, unguarded delight.
Then, Rex did something that felt like a physical blow to Iris’s stomach: his hand came up to brush a stray strand of hair away from Diana’s face.
It was an absent, automatic gesture, but it carried more tenderness than most people managed in an entire lifetime of conversation. It was intimate and it was gentle.
It was everything Rex had refused to be to Iris.
Diana didn’t flinch. Instead, she leaned into his touch with the instinctive vulnerability of someone who trusted that hand completely, a hand that Iris knew could crush bones and claim souls with equal ease.
A bitter, acidic taste rose in Iris’s throat. The contrast was unbearable: the tenderness he showed Diana versus the brutal, possessive violence he had unleashed on Iris.
One received the sunlight; the other received the storm.
Iris couldn’t bear to watch any longer. She tore her gaze away, staring fixedly at the scuffed stone floor, feeling the familiar, hollow ache return to her center.
She forced herself to look away, tearing her eyes from the sight of them as if the image itself burned her retinas.
’I’m giving them privacy,’ she told herself, the lie tasting like copper and ash in her mouth. ’This is the decent thing to do...’
’Two people who care about each other, sharing a moment of quiet in the middle of this chaos...’
’I am being a good commander... I am being a good friend...’
But the words felt hollow, like echoes in a tomb. "Privacy" was a coward’s word for avoidance.
She wasn’t giving them privacy; she was fleeing from a mirror that showed her exactly what she lacked.
Desperate to ground herself, she busied her hands with a task that required none of her skill. She grabbed the leather wrap at her wrist, the one that was already snug, already perfect, and began to unlace it with unsteady fingers.
Her hands were shaking. She blamed the adrenaline from the drills, blamed the morning chill, and blamed the lingering soreness in her abdomen that made every breath feel like a transgression.
But deep down, she knew she was lying to herself again.
’Why does it hurt more than a blade wound?’ she wondered bitterly, her nails digging into the leather. ’Why does seeing him touch her feel like he’s reaching inside me and twisting what’s left of my heart?’
She focused on the ritual of the wrap, pulling the leather tight, tighter than necessary, until the pressure became a dull sting against her skin. She needed that sting.
She needed any physical sensation to drown out the psychological hemorrhage happening behind her ribs. She refused to look back.
She refused to acknowledge the way the sunlight caught Rex’s profile as he leaned toward Diana, or the way Diana’s eyes brightened.
She stayed anchored to her own small circle of pain, staring at the worn floorboards, counting the cracks in the stone as if they were a lifeline.
’Don’t look back, Iris...’
’Don’t give him the satisfaction of knowing you’re watching...’
’Don’t let him see how broken you are...’
She convinced herself that by ignoring them, she was winning. By turning her back, she was asserting her independence, re-establishing the boundary between her trauma and their happiness.
She convinced herself that if she could just keep her eyes fixed on her own hands, on her own equipment, on her own body, she could pretend the night before never happened.
She could pretend she wasn’t a woman who had been claimed and discarded, while Diana remained the woman who was cherished.
She convinced herself that she was fine.
But it did not help as much as she wanted it to.
The silence of the rest period felt heavier than the noise of the drills. Every muffled laugh from across the hall felt like a slap; every glimpse of Rex’s protective stance felt like a serrated blade sliding between her vertebrae.
The more she tried to compartmentalize the humiliation, the more it bled through the cracks. The more she tried to deny her own jealousy, that toxic, shameful cocktail of anger and longing, the more it poisoned her thoughts.
She was not giving them privacy. She was trapped in a prison of her own making, where every heartbeat was a reminder of what she had lost, and every second of silence was filled with the ghost of his touch.