"Because his belief that he knows me better than I know myself and his narcissism got the best of him...You have to realize, he doesn't have something like this.  I don't know if he's ever had something like this.  He's used to betrayal and power plays, so he would expect that's what I would do.  I would see this as power play and I would walk away.  He doesn't have intimacy with other people."  He had sex, but he did not have close relationships with the women he fucked.  She might have been the closest thing he had to an actual companion, and that was a stretch at best.  It was also probably why he wanted her.<br/><br/>"Is it still a test if we run?"  It was a question she asked the moment he brought up that possibility again.  Up to this point she had not wanted to consider that option.  It felt like the right thing to do was to run back and try to save her parents, but that could just end with all of the dead.  If Geraint really was some sort of special person, then Blackvayne would keep her parents alive as leverage.  In pain, perhaps, but alive.<br/><br/>"So where do we go if we run?  We can't go back to the witches, and a lot of the southern parts of this part of the world is a wasteland."  She still wanted to consider going North, even though that did feel like a fairytale.<br/><br/>"I sound horrible for saying this, but I don't think I can save my parents.  Not as things stand.  If we go back there, we're stuck in his hold and he will use that.  We both know it.  The best case scenario is that he lets them go back to their lives and keeps us as some kind of perverse pets.  The worst case, he kills us."  She sighed, but she was resigned to the reality of their current situation.  They could not go back, they had to find a new way forward.