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“Well?”
I shiver. “I…”
“I recall you having no issue speaking before, Dahlia…” he growls.
My name coming from his lips sounds like a curse.
“So, unless you’ve gone mute—and if you have, we most certainlydohave reason to celebrate—then I’m curious why it is you seem to be un-fucking-able to articulatepreciselywhy it is you are in my grandmother’s house, drinking her champagne, and mingling withmy fucking family.”
Speak. Say something. Anything. Give him ANYTHING.
“I…” I swallow. “I was just leaving.”
His face curdles into a snarl.
“The fuck you are.”
Wait, what?
“I promise,” I whisper. “This was a mistake. I made a mistake. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to.” Fear has me rambling. His proximity has my brain glitching out like the Matrix. “I’m going now, I promise.”
I knew the risk. I didn’t care. I was blinded by my desire to finally have friends.
“I’m leaving—”
“Ah,notmute,” he murmurs almost to himself, like he’s making a scientific observation. “But maybe you’ve had a head injury, or something genetic has turned you fucking stupid.”
“I’m not stupid.”
I spit it with utter clarity, my voice laced with fury. It’s an automatic response over which I have no control, because being told I’m stupid, or being questioned as if I am, is a huge trigger point for me.
It’s been like that since grade school, after Nasser died and Mom and I were finally free from his wrath and reach. She enrolled me in this super ritzy and exclusive private school for London’s “most gifted and promising” young students. Because, as it happened, I amverysmart.
I’m a little too smart, to be honest.
Except “gifted and promising”, in most cases, really just meant “filthy rich and insufferable.” And when those little shits found out who I was—and who my parents were—it was open fucking season on Dahlia Roy.
Back then, I’d completely shut down in the face of any bullying. So when they’d lay into me, I’d close myself off and stop talking. Which of course only got them accusing me of being deaf or mute. But then they found their favorite one: that I wasn’t responding to their bullying because I was stupid.
It lasted until I was in Year Ten. At that point, I was a year younger than everyone else in my grade, I was the top of the class by a mile, and I had zero friends.
But that’s also the year I stopped accepting it when people called me stupid.
One of my teachers, a Mrs. Willard, found me in the bathroom one day, trying to get the chocolate milk that one of my bullies had dumped all over me out of my uniform. And I’ll never forget what she told me:
“Dahlia, my, dear. There are a lot of things those little beasts, and other older beasts, can and will call you over the course of your life. Some of it may be true, even if it’s cruel and beyond your control. But you are not, and you never will be, stupid. Don’t let them have that one.”
A week later, I got my first and only detention, for hitting a girl for calling me just that. The bullying never really stopped entirely. But after that, they stuck with rape-baby, mafia whore, and the rest of it, and they never called me stupid again.
I never once regretted the decision that led to that detention. But the second I open my mouth and spit the words at Deimos, I feel nothingbutregret.
His eyes narrow. And his outrageously perfect lips curve into the closest thing to a smile he gets.
Which is objectively, genuinely terrifying.
“Thereit is,” he purrs roughly, his teeth flashing. “There’s that fight I remember so well.”
I swallow with difficulty. “I—just let me go, please. I’ll leave right now, okay?” I choke out. “And I never…I mean, I’ve never said anything to anyone about—”
