So… he knows what I took.
He looks at me again, hands casually placed back in his pockets. Trying to make sure I don’t see him as the threat that he is. “I think you know why I’m here.”
“Do I?”
The lake answers for me, lifting in small tendrils that lick around my ankles. He watches them with curiosity, like a man admiring something he already believes he owns.
“You’ve grown stronger. Just like your father.” He pauses, gauging me. “But not quite like him, are you?” He cocks his head, as if he’s assessing a future opponent.
“Why don’t you come a little closer and find out.” Scratch that—current opponent. I glare at him.
He stares at me, and I wonder if he sees the daughter of the friend he murdered in cold blood or only the weapon he wants to possess.
“I have his eyes, you know,” I say in a voice that sounds nothing like mine—cold, detached, a dagger sheathed in silk. “Do you see him when you look at me?”
I catch a flash of regret, but he holds my gaze, unflinching. “I did what I had to, and I think you know that now.”
“You mean killing him?” I want him to admit it. I want him to look me in the eyes and admit that he killed my father.
“If it weren’t for me, you would still be locked in that glass prison of his. Being eaten away from the inside by a power that has always been yours to claim.” He looks at me with something close to reverence. It sickens me.
The water quietly draws up the backs of my legs and into my hands, then moves to coat my body in a shield so clear it’s almost invisible.
Thorne’s expression doesn’t change. “He made his choice.”
“Say it.”
He tilts his head. “Why?”
I raise my hand. The water rises, lifting in suspended orbs, bright with a strange shimmer—like glass ready to break.
“Say it.”
A pause. Then?—
“Yes.”
I don’t just see my father’s death anymore. I see my whole life rewritten by his hands.
It detonates something inside me.
A wave explodes from the lake, roaring as it crashes toward him. Thorne raises a hand and slices it with a blade of wind, splitting the water down the center. The air hisses where his magick touches mine.
I don’t stop. I summon the lake again, my fury climbing with the tide. A cresting wall surges up behind me—taller than the trees—before I slam it down on top of him with all the force of a broken heart.
The forest groans with the impact. Water surges around us as I slam my hand to the ground. Thorne disappears beneath the now-frozen water.
But not for long.
A cyclone explodes outward. Thorne steps through the vapor, dry, untouched, the water spiraling around him as if afraid to touch him. “You don’t want to do this, Celeste.”
“Wrong again.” I grit my teeth as I raise a spear of ice and fling it. He deflects it with a twist of his hand, sending it careening into a tree, bark exploding.
Thorne moves in a blink. One moment he’s at the forest edge—the next, he’s at my side, windstepping, as if time and space have no rules. I guess not when you control the air in which it exists.
A blade appears at my throat, invisible but sharp enough to draw blood. I hiss at the sting as a bead of red slides down my neck.
“Celeste, you have no idea how long we have waited for someone like you—someone with your potential. You could change everything.”
