AllFreeNovel
Share Us
When neither of us speaks, I risk asking the question that’s been plaguing me the most.
“What would you be doing right now, if you had a choice?”
Her jaw tightens, and she gives a bare shake of her head. “I’ve told you before, I did have a choice, Remy. Then and now.”
Thinking back to when Lady Delmara arrived at court, to the first time I heard her stepdaughter mentioned, I do a quick mental calculation.
“Ah, the life-changing decision you made when you were all of ten years old, you mean? Well, I’m sure there were a plethora of options available to a girl on the streets.”
“Nine,” she corrects. “And no, not a lot, but there were options and I chose that one.”
I sit up, settling in to have yet another argument. “Why are you so determined to make yourself the villain?”
She mirrors my posture, backing away and not bothering to pull the sheet up. With some effort, I force my gaze back to her increasingly irritable face when she answers. “Maybe the better question is, why are you so determined to make me the victim?”
An exasperated sigh escapes my lips, and she shakes her head.
“Because then you don’t have to feel bad about yourself for wanting me.” She scoffs. “Because it’s so much easier not to think about the fact that while you were here learning to be the perfect prince, I was learning to kill and torture and seduce.”
“You did what you had to do to survive, Aika,” I tell her.
She practically growls in frustration. “No. Zaina did what she had to do to survive. I didn’t want to merely survive. I wanted to rise in her ranks. I wanted to make her proud, and I didn’t feel guilty about the things I had to do to accomplish that.”
“But you do now?” I push.
She looks away, then back to me. “Whether I regret my decisions or not, you don’t get to pretend them away. You can’t just take the pieces of me you want and deny the rest of them to make yourself feel better aboutthis.”
I want to argue with her some more, to tell her that being a child who is brainwashed by a madwoman is still a form of being a victim, but my mind catches on something else. Something important.
“You used the past tense.”
The aggravation on her face melts into confusion. “What?”
“You said ‘wanted.’ So what is it you want now?” I remember, too, the way she said she had a choice, then and now. She separated them. “What is it you choose now?”
Even with all my powers of observation, I don’t know that I would have seen her tell if I wasn’t looking for it. But there it is, a tightening of her eyes, a hesitation before her next breath. If nothing had changed, she would just spit that at me, but she doesn’t. She hedges.
“It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t change anything, not who I am or what I’ve done.” She’s out of the bed before I can respond, throwing on her robe and heading to let her illicit new pet outside.
It’s just as well since I’m not sure what I would have said.
She’s at least partly right, because given the chance, I would absolutely scour the image of her torturing a man from my brain forever.
But I’m beginning to understand who she is, that the things she says aren’t always in line with the things she does. Like when she insists she’ll never go against Madame, but does just that for the sake of me and her sister and hell, a random orphan she’s grown attached to.
Like when she claims she did terrible things without hesitation, but I witnessed her remorse with my own eyes.
But she’s also wrong, because if she’s finally acknowledging that she can choose to walk away from Madame, away from that life…
I’m not sure how yet, but I think it could changeeverything.
CHAPTERTHIRTY-THREE
AIKA
The air from the balcony is cold enough to send shivers through my body, but it’s still preferable to continuing my conversation with Remy.
Here’s to hoping he’s actually considering what I said instead of trying to soothe his conscience about sleeping with me last night. I don’t know how else to explain to him that he doesn’t get to take the pieces of me he wants and treat the rest like it’s too hideous to look at.
