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One quick glance up at him and my stare fell onto the packed snow in front of us, the fresh footprints I’d just laid now upside down. “I did.”
“I will be honest with you, Ada. I don’t like you.”
I looked up at him, annoyance brewing in my chest. “You don’t know me.”
“But I do know that I don’t like the peculiar hold you seem to have over my father. He is a man that is critical in leading our world, critical to maintaining our way of life, and he has been more than distracted since you entered his world.”
“But it’s been years since I have been at Netherstone.”
“Yes. And for years we have been paying for that fall-out. For a while, when I first realized that he had taken to you, it was fine as you were contained here. Then you went to Sardinia with him and Venetia and that became a fuck-fest to clean up. Then Netherstone imploded and slid off the side of the mountain, and it has been a shit-show ever since because of you.”
“Because of me? That seems to be a stretch.”
“Correct me if I’m wrong, but you left him. Left Venetia. And she ripped the very ground apart with her power. Because ofyou.And ever since then, my father has been far too preoccupied these last four years trying to find you, while simultaneously going through every scrap of rubble from the castle and rebuilding this damn thing. He’s been so distracted some of us have worried about his sanity.”
He thought Damen was unstable? Damen seemed pretty well stable when he found me on that beach and stuck chloroform into my nose to knock me out. That had been pretty well calculated—and the insane rarely calculated well.
My fingers flicked into the air between us. “Damen is fine.”
“Is he? I have my doubts. But I also have faith in him, so I have held together our empire in his stead while he was distracted by the likes of you.”
I shoved my hands into the pockets of the peacoat. “Which is why you are now here at Netherstone? Business?”
“No. I’m here because I got word that he had found you and brought you back here. Word that Venetia was at the Panthenite Academy, of all things.”
Hell. Word travelled fast on that one. I looked up to him, meeting his glare. “She will be safe at the Academy, I swear it.”
“I’m not worried about her safety. I’m worried about her making another mess that needs to be cleaned up.”
Instant ire spiked hot in my veins. Damen’s son or not, this guy was an asshole. “Venny’s not a fucking two-year-old that is spilling her oatmeal on the floor.”
He motioned to the left and we turned around a corner. “No, she’s a fucking volcano that explodes whenever and wherever she wants to,” he shot back. “I’ll take the two-year-old.”
My mouth clamped shut, my glare shifting forward. Venetia was dangerous when she wasn’t in control. I knew that. But I also knew how hard Venetia had worked to gain control during the past few years. Something I doubted I could convince Leo of.
His stare ate into me, his lips twitching to the side like he was trying to read something in me. Hell, maybe he was. I had no idea what powers Damen’s children possessed.
“You defend Venetia like she’s your own.”
I glanced at him out of the corner of my eye, then set my stare straight ahead. “That’s because she is—my own as much as my own child would be.”
His strides even, he continued staring at me. So much so I was beginning to regret not separating after we first bumped into each other.
“Like she’s your own? Why would you care enough about her in the first place for that to even happen?”
“Because she needed someone, and I was that someone.” I sliced a look into him. “Don’t say shit about Venny when you don’t even know her.”
“I say shit about her because it’s true.”
“So you’d rather just wipe her from the earth?” I was going to tear his fucking balls off.
His eyebrows arched. “What gave you that idea?”
“You clearly hate her.”
“It doesn’t matter what I think of her.” His shoulders lifted in a resigned shrug as we turned to the right. “She’s family.”
“What in the bloody hell does that mean?”
