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Those words stilled me to my very core. The truth in them. A truth that I wasn’t yet quite ready to hear. My Knowingness urged me to reach out and…
I gripped her wrists in mine, releasing the glamor on my magic but keeping it tamped down on my form, with the exception of my tail that coiled around her waist.
My vision swam, fading to black, as visions of her past played before my eyes. My own rage burned through me just as much as the heartbreak that had my blood running cold.
Memories poured into me… Her, as a child, held in the arms of another young girl as she wept over her absent mother.
Images of male patrons soliciting Mareina’s attention, and being beaten when she didn’t humor them… Or worse.
Mareina trembling in the fetal position in blood-stained sheets, or curled beneath a shower as blood trickled from between her legs.
The most beautiful voice I’d ever heard came from her as she sang before numerous audiences at the Erosyan Temple.
Mareina thieving and sleeping in the streets, fighting off predators.
Joining Zurie’s army.
Falling in love with a female who later died in Mareina’s arms.
Scene after gut-wrenching scene of Mareina having to watch her comrades slaughtered. At times even having to put them out of their misery.
A dark blonde male with golden skin and eyes the same luminous color of the Kahlohani Seaclutching her against his chest as she wept. Both of them covered in blood.
I watched, filled with an overwhelming love - her love - for him, as they saved one another’s lives time after time.
In a dizzying, wholly overwhelming and rapid succession, I felt each and every emotion that she experienced in each of those moments.
“Please. Stop.”
I released my grip on her arm as if I’d been burned. Her emotions that had flooded me drew back like a waning tide at the same moment the bathing room around us returned. Those twin emerald seas, framed by thick dark lashes, glittered and swelled with emotion. Tears threatening to escape, I watched her delicate throat work on a rough swallow.
The breath I’d been holding punched from my lungs.
“Oh god…”
My chest tightened to the point of pain. Mareina’s gaze fell from mine, taking my heart with it.
Oh fuck…
Thesufferingshe had been through. It was like each and every pivotal moment of her life had been stacked in order ascending order and speared through my consciousness to arrive at the resulting female in front of me.
Truly, monsters are made, not born.
And I wanted every crooked, broken piece of her. It was no coincidence that they aligned perfectly with each shattered piece of me.
I desperately tried to harden my heart again to her, reminding myself of who exactly she was. She’d had choices. Just as each of us did. And she’d chosen wrong.
You’d have chosen no differently,my Knowingness reminded me.
I tried to wear a stoic mask to conceal just how rocked I was by what had just happened. Not only the fact I’dexperiencedher memories and what she’d endured at the hands of others but now… Much of the anger and resentment I’d had for her was already slipping away, like blood down a drain.
Chapter
Twenty-Two
MAREINA
My breaths shuddered out of me slow and steady as I gradually managed to quell andre-burymy emotion. Nakoa’s energy had shifted dramatically since he’d witnessed my… origins. His hatred for me was no longer scalding and vicious… Instead, it had been reduced perhaps to a simmering resentment. And he’d hardly looked at me since he handed me a soapy washcloth to bathe myself with. He now stood in front of me, gaze averted as he quickly bathed.
