Page 118 of Stormbreaker

“I have nothing to say to you,” my father starts, his green eyes flashing and his voice chipped with ice. “You made your choice. I have no children left.”

The words are uttered with such final certainty that my heart hammers in my chest.

“That’s it?” I whisper. “You’re just writing me off? I’m your daughter.”

My father’s gaze tracks over me, his attention pausing on the purple ribbon around my waist, his mouth pressing into a bloodless line.

“Mom?” I ask as she stands silently, clutching my father’s arm. She shakes her head as my father shoves her behind him.

“I warned you about what would happen,” he says. “I cannot have a child pledge to Aria.”

“You could,” I answer. I can feel tears coating my cheeks. I didn’t even realize I was crying. “It’s your own stubbornness that’s getting in the way. What difference does it really make?”

His glare hardens. “If it makes no difference, pledge to Fiama.”

We’ve gathered an audience, and this might be the most humiliating moment of my life.

“I wanted to pledge to Fiama,” I answer. “But you drove me to this. You won’t let me join the Storm Guard, and I never wanted to marry Knox.”

A few gasps circle around the room. I’m making everything worse with every word I say. My father tips his head and studies me, really looks at me for maybe the first time in my life.

“Knox is why you did this?”

“I tried to tell you,” I say. “You refused to listen. You never even asked.”

“You won’t make this my fault, Poet.”

He says it with such vehemence that it punches me in the gut. I glance at my mother peering over my father’s shoulder.

“Don’t look at her,” he says to me. “You won’t find an ally there.”

I swallow the growing knot in my throat.

“Poet, just pledge to Fiama,” Knox says. “This can all be over. You can continue cadet training, and when the time comes, we’ll discuss your role as a Breaker, okay?”

Didn’t he hear what I just said about marrying him?

However, I acknowledge that if I truly want to make things right, this is the perfect solution.

I look up at Knox. His expression is full of something earnest, but the thought of going back to him makes my stomach turn. They expected me to fight to become one of them, but they won’t fight for me at all.

In fact, the moment I stepped out of line, they wrote me off like I never mattered.

Until now, I guess I never truly understood that my worth to them was found in my compliance. Not my presence.

“No,” I say to him, then turn to my father. “I won’t pledge to Fiama. If you want to cut me out of your life, then so be it. But you chose this, not me. You won’t make this my fault, either.”

I blink back my tears and exchange a look with my mother before I meet my father’s eyes again. His jaw clenches, and the look he gives me unzips something down my spine. Like my insides are falling out, but they aren’t viscid and warm; they’re hard as bricks.

A testament to the girl, the woman, I was forced to become.

Neither one of us blinks. Neither one of us will be the first to crack.

I get my stubbornness from him, and maybe that’s always been to our detriment.

I don’t know if we can ever recover from this.

But the moment is over.