Too busy following her own rabbit trails of thought, Kohelet didn't catch his scowl over Faolain until she had already uttered the penultimate questions, and though she ferretted his reaction away for consideration later, she did not circle back to it.

"But..." she trailed off in protest, her brow wrinkled with confusion. "You're nothing like him."

She didn't need to elaborate which him she meant. Rougaru was the enemy of Solomon, and while the other residents of Paradise carried a stain by association, Kohelet had not heard many specifics of other threats stemming from Rougaru's herd. She had never met the silver-haired stallion herself, but from the stories she'd heard, she imagined a beastly creature. One that scowled all the time and snarled at and bit his mares. One that treated everyone beneath him as though they were inferior, at all times. One that threatened his herd for the mere crime of being in the way.

Overblown, perhaps, but more or less accurate to the way Solomon spoke of him.

But Fell was not that. He'd been kind and gentle with her from the beginning. Patient as she learned how to speak with him with touch and gesture as much as with her words. He seemed loyal and fierce, and while their relationship was so new that it had barely begun to stand on its own wobbly legs, she knew that she loved him.

She didn't think she could love a monster.

Even so, Kohelet shrank back reflexively from his display - leaning in place without moving her feet - interpreting the baring of his teeth in conjunction with the growl as a threat of some kind, akin to a stallion lowering his head and snaking his herd in one direction or another. Given that she had done nothing to warrant a correction of her behavior, her own ears tucked neatly back and she lifted one pale hoof forward to stamp angrily into the ground below, rebuking his... whatever that was. Kohelet had no experience with Rougaru, nor had she put herself close enough to danger to study the behavior of wolves, and so she could not connect his behavior with any origin point.

Confused and more than a little offended, Kohelet held her ground, fighting against her natural instinct to shrink away from what seemed like a rebuke. She was rarely the sort of mare to fight back when scolded, but it had come from seemingly out of nowhere, and given that it had followed his admission of origin, she was not willing to allow it. It was one thing for her to have fallen in love with the son of a rival family, a la Juliet, but another thing entirely for her to let him bully her around.

"No." No to what exactly wasn't clear, but there was a rare firmness to her voice that helped to hide the quiver beneath. A breath later and she clarified her muddied, tangled thoughts. "You won't treat me like that if you want me to stay."

The words held a power of their own, and while they came from her own dark charcoal lips, she could imagine her mother staying them to her father. The reminder of just who her mother was lent strength to Kohelet's limbs and her position shifted, changing from a mare nearly cowed to one that was dangerously close to fighting back. Her confidence only grew as his body language changed to something more submissive. Emboldened, she allowed her head to raise as she affixed him with a speculative look, more distrust in her eyes now than there had been even in the beginning. Hating each word as she spoke it, Kohelet drilled down to the question that would determine whether she stayed here with the love of the life, or if she had to break her own heart. "Have you come here to hurt my family?"