97 It was to Keep You Safe

The smile that floated across her lips was a bit self-deprecating as she marched off in the huff of her anger.

After the betrayal that nearly killed her one would think that she would show more caution when handing out her trust to another person. Instead, she blindly let herself sink into Li Yu Rong's clutches while he, all the while, was grooming her to be nothing more than a tool to vent his sexual needs.

As soon as that nasty thought crossed her mind, it left almost as quickly as it appeared. After a while of walking and thinking and cooling herself down, Nastasia began to consider things from a more logical perspective.

Although she was one taken by flights of fancy, jumping from one interest to the next, she was a rather level-headed and logical thinker. However, this type of thinking only applied to everything that lied outside of hobbies and work. Her family was accustomed to it, yet this type of her always made it hard for outsiders to reconcile that part of her with the part that switched interests at the drop of a hat.

Nastasia's fast jaunt away from the safe-haven slowed to a leisurely walked as she thought over it all. Her suddenly slowed pace brought to her attention the presence trailing at her back. Although she felt more assured having Li Yu Rong following her in this dangerous place, she made no moves to turn around and acknowledge him.

She kept on as if unaware that he trailed her back at a steady distance that neither grew nor shortened in length.

As she considered their time together, her anger cooled by a fraction. She was still quite miffed about being called a pet. Especially since it held the connotations of being a person's private prostitute. But, she wasn't one to let emotions get the better of her when it involved human interactions and couldn't help it as her brain began to analyze everything from their first meeting to their present moment; clearing up her anger even more.

All because of a key point that had been contained in the bomb of shocking words that ageless elder dropped. This was a role in their society that was accepted and okay to practice; especially if she went by the reactions of everyone that heard she was Li Yu Rong's pet. Although the women taken from the Spirit Realm were probably less than thrilled to fill it, they were made to do so.

If all Li Yu Rong had been trying to gain was a pet to sate his urges, then there had to be a slew of women he could choose from to play his needed role that would be better suited to it than her. A person without a common language and one that brought him trouble the moment they met.

The moment they met....

This part brought Nastasia back to the moment that soldier, who turned out to be a man called General Bai, chased her into Li Yu Rong's garden.

The memory of it, though it happened what felt an eternity ago, clearly flashed across her mind. It played with such clarity, each word coming to mind as if it happened yesterday, that Nastasia was startled. Even though she had a good memory, remembering word for word an incident that occurred many months ago, when she was dumb to the language, should have been impossible.

Agh, this was all making her brain hurt.

Fed up with all this thinking and wondering and her new discovery that she also started to consider, Nastasia stopped in her tracks. Turning around to face Li Yu Rong, she decided to give him a chance.

"Explain yourself."

At this sudden turn of events, Li Yu Rong's brain stalled as it tried to understand what she was asking. It was a rather long couple seconds that ticked by before he was stumbling over himself to quickly give an acceptable answer.

Finally decided on what to say, he carefully explained. "With your hair and eye color, the humans thought you were a demon. Being that they are incapable of the telling the difference, even if I were to insist you were human, it wouldn't be believed." He would have been forced to treat her as a demon. Although he wasn't fully bound by the Palace of the Four Gates, there were certain imperial orders he would be hard-pressed to ignore.

"Without a probable and believable reason, you wouldn't have been able to stay with me. The fate of a demon that broke through the gate and ran rampant wouldn't be pleasant. Worse than becoming a servant for pleasure, labor, or protection, you would have been used in the palace to test things." Things like weapons, poisons, new arrays and the like until her body broke down and disintegrated. The thought sickened his stomach and shivered his spine. "In light of that, it would be better to keep you as mine.

"The easiest cover, the one that would be most accepted as truth, was to say that you were my pet." Honestly, he had thought of other ideas to help her away from the clutches of General Bai, but none of them would have allowed for him to keep her. Asya was human, and without good reason, a human couldn't say within the Palace of the Four Gates. "I never had any intentions of using you in that way."

That moment of warmth she gave him in their first meeting, a feeling no one else had ever given him, melted his frozen heart by a bit. That euphoric emotion, Li Yu Rong desperately didn't want to lose it.