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She heaved a sigh, looking to the left and then back up to me, and the slightest quiver shot through her lower lip. “Was it all a ploy by you, the first time around?”
“A ploy?”
“The hatred that you looked at me with after being in my mind through Oriane. It was such a pure, raw hatred that I couldn’t believe you had managed to hide it from me for so long—the entire fucking time I was here at the castle, you played me. Because that hatred in your eyes was real. So real I could feel it in the air. And I’d never seen it in you until that moment after you were ripped out of my mind. Like in that moment you couldn’t hide it anymore.”
“It was real.”
Her eyes widened with a gasp.
She wanted an answer? She got it. I wasn’t about to lie to her on the matter.
She swallowed hard, her voice breaking. “Why—why do you hate me?”
I stared down at her, willing everything in my body to cold indifference.
“You killed my brother, Ada. You killed Rodo.”
Chapter14
{ Damen }
There it was.
The truth that I had sat with for four years.
Four years of hating her for what she’d done.
She’d killed Rodo. The only one in my family that had ever mattered. That was ever worth mattering.
She instantly recoiled at my words, her spine hitting the glass behind her. “What? How? No—I never… I’ve killed a lot of malefics, but I…”
Her head shook and I could see her mind working, calculating, going through all the many faces of the malefics she’d killed in her days, searching for one that looked vaguely like me.
“You killed him,” I repeated, the harsh edge in my voice all she needed to hear to know I spoke the truth of it.
“No…I…” Her head still shaking, she shifted on the window seat, curling into the corner and propping herself against the wall, drawing her legs up to her chest, her arms wrapping around her shins. Tiny.
Then her eyes suddenly closed in a wince, her head clunking back onto the wall, exposing the long length of her neck.
“He was there, wasn’t he?” Her eyes stayed closed as her voice dipped into a haunted whisper. “He was there in Cletus’s torture chamber when I exploded and killed everyone around me.”
“He was.”
Her hand went to her forehead, her thumb running up the middle of it. The wisp of a memory from long ago. “He was the one trying to heal me?”
“He wasn’t there torturing you, I can guarantee that.”
Her eyes flew open and her look pinned me. “Can you?”
My hand gripped onto the corner of the wall and I leaned over her, rage carving my voice into a deadly missile, so much so, she flinched with every word impaling her. “I can guarantee it.”
Her head instantly bowed, her arms tightening around her legs.
Three deep panicked breaths that she heaved out and in, and on the last exhale, her body seemed to deflate.
She lifted her head, sniffing a harsh inhale, her stare on the opposite end of the window seat. “I killed him. I did that. I’m sure you’ve been looking, searching for me for a very long time—to find his killer.”
There wasn’t bravery in her eyes at the statement, just defeat.
