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“Torture is in the eye of the beholder. Is there a point to this lecture, Prince Lee?”
His eyes narrowed. “No one calls me that.”
“But you are.” I liked the fact that it bothered him. “At least you are to the rebels. You could have kept your royal status had you not run from Myrddin.”
“Yes, I’m sure he would have handed me a crown.” Lee chuckled again, but there wasn’t a lot of humor in the sound. “And I am more than a prince, Liv, and you should remember that. I know my reputation, but you underestimate me at your peril. And torture is torture. I know Sarah was still affected by the months she spent down here years later. Mia would wake up to the sound of her mother screaming and her father soothing her. It took us a while to figure out why she did that. Lily was there, too. They would have been there forever if it hadn’t been for Felix Day.”
“Their mother signed a contract,” I replied. “Rather like Gray’s. They were literally conceived to serve on the Hell plane.”
“And in witch law at the time, it was acceptable to sell a child’s soul, a child’s entire future.”
I shrugged, not liking the fact that there was a big part of me that agreed with him. I didn’t want to agree with a rebel. “I didn’t say it was fair, and we don’t do that anymore.”
“It’s happening every day, Olivia, but that is not why I brought up the practice. I suspect you’ll lie and tell me I know nothing about your world. Myrddin is perfect and wonderful and would never do a single thing to hurt any of us.”
When it was put like that even I had to admit it sounded stupid. “I never said he was perfect.”
He held a hand out, forestalling me. “You’re in a cult. I get that. You got brainwashed or something, and you’re perfectly happy to walk around like a moron so you don’t have to face what you’ve done.”
He was playing on the razor’s edge of my temper. “I’ve done nothing.”
He nodded as though placating me. “All right. You’re perfect like Myrddin. The rest of us can’t touch your marvelousness. Awesome. You know it’s normal for amazing people like yourself to be feared and reviled.”
I waved that off. “It’s jealousy.”
“It’s not,” Lee returned. “It’s fear for some, and pity from me.”
My hand came up of its own volition, willing a fireball to strike him.
Nothing happened because I was impotent. Rage seethed inside me, and I could see plainly what I wanted to do to him.
What I’d done to many before him at my master’s behest.
“It must be hard to not be able to kill the way you have these last years,” Lee said with some small amount of sympathy. “That would bother me, too. My point is Lily doesn’t do that. Lily saw the worst of the world and turned from it. Unlike you, who had a minor trauma and threw a fit about it for twelve years.”
“Minor?” I wanted to wrap my hands around his throat. How fucking dare he? “I was violated on a level most people can’t understand.”
“Really? Most women can’t understand what it means to be violated?” Lee asked.
“They took something fundamental from me.”
“Like your childhood?”
I wasn’t playing this game with him. “Like my soul.”
“No, they didn’t take your soul,” Lee countered. “You gave that away. They took your residual magic. If you’d been patient, it would have come back.”
I was confused at why we were even having this conversation. It annoyed me, sent my nerves firing off like something was wrong with my brain. “It wasn’t coming back, and how do you know any of this?”
“Because you were my case. When we came back from Wyoming, I was worried about you. You were one of my favorite people. In the idiocy of my childhood, I thought we were a team, you and me and Casey and Kelsey. We saved the world. I thought I could save you. So I did some research about what happened to you. I talked to witches and read up on the subject. I can explain what that coven did. They scraped your cells of the magical energy they contained, but cells regenerate. The scientific term is apoptosis. Your cells didn’t actually die, but they were damaged. However, what I learned was the DNA of a supernatural creature will heal itself. Your magic was written into your DNA.”
“They meant to kill me.”
He nodded in agreement. “Yes, that’s why they stabbed you with a big old knife right in the chest. That’s what would have killed you. The truth was they could have stabbed you anywhere. The spell would still have worked. And that was only what? An hour or so? Lily was in Hell for what seemed like forever having her body ripped apart, her magic feeding demon after demon, and I’m fairly certain there’s a reason she’s celibate to this day. She didn’t have an angelic presence beside her the whole time. She saw the darkest things a being can see and when she was freed, she found the light.”
I hated every word that came from his mouth. Mostly because they were like a mirror. “There was no light to be found.”
“Because you’re weak. That’s what I learned. I saw you as this incredibly strong woman like Kelsey or my mother. I put you in that class. But your goodness was a façade. It’s easy to be good when you’re surrounded by it. It’s hard when the world falls apart and you find yourself on the wrong side. Some fought. Like my grandmother.”
