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My jaw shifted to the side as I glared down at her. Hating her. Wanting to tear her apart limb by limb for killing my brother.
But also knowing I could never do that to her.
More than anything else, I hated her for believing I would hurt her.
My fingers flexed at my sides, wanting to touch her, grab her face, convince her I wasn’t the demon she knew I was.
Instead, my hands stayed at my sides, my words grinding out through clenched teeth. “Except I would never let any of those things happen to you. Not by my hand. Not by anyone’s hand.”
A smile, oddly serene, came to her face as she looked up at me. “Empty promises. Don’t bother.”
She stepped around me and disappeared into Netherstone.
Chapter15
{ Ada }
Clarity.
I had it now.
I’d thought Damen had hated me the entire time we were first together, only pretending to like me because I was a means to an end. Hated me for being a panthenite. Or hated me because I had a bomb ticking inside of me that could kill countless people.
But this made so much more sense.
What we’d had together the first time I’d been at Netherstone hadn’t been faked. It had been real. Real and fiery and undeniable how our bodies were connected in some weird, mystical way.
But I had never trusted him. He had never trusted me.
Both of us right on that accord.
He hated me because I killed Rodolfo, and he hadn’t known it until the very end after Cletus had appeared.
What little trust he had in me was destroyed in that instant he realized I killed his brother.
What little trust I had in him was destroyed in that instant Cletus walked into Netherstone.
No way forward. No way back.
Damen never came for me after I left him in the library. Never came to drag me down to the undercrofts and chain me down. Spill my entrails.
Maybe that would come to be. Maybe it would not.
I still didn’t have a fucking clue what was going on in his head.
He never picked up my titanium arm clasp in the library, so I retrieved it and resecured it onto my arm, for what little good it would do. We both knew my weaknesses.
After a day and half of mulling over everything we had ever been to each other, I found myself barefoot in my nightgown and robe in the middle of the night, wandering the hallways of Netherstone, searching for Damen.
Because as much as I was done—no way forward, no way back—there was still something I needed him to know.
I finally found him in the Lamb drawing room, of all places. The very spot we’d first officially met, back when he thought my name Maude.
He sat by the fire in a chocolate brown club chair with his feet propped up on a matching ottoman, and he balanced half a tumbler of amber liquid on the arm of the chair.
The door was open and I knew my steps into the room were silent with my bare feet, but he cocked his head to the left, his eyes drawn to me as I walked toward him.
One cursory glance over my body and his focus went back onto the flames in the fireplace, not acknowledging I’d even entered the room.
