Those eyes of hers condemned me, too. Looked at me like I’d somehow betrayed her even though I owed her nothing.

“Don’t look at me like that,” I ordered her before I could stop myself.

“Like what?”

Like I’ve somehow failed you, I said inside my own head.

Her hate I could withstand. Easily.

Her hurt, it turned out, was something else entirely.

I’d never felt less myself than I did in that moment, in the entrance hall of my childhood home with Torrance, her eyes so warm yet so wounded. Never felt less sure. Less strong.

Am I the weak one? I queried myself silently again.

I found that I could not confront the question.

And perhaps, in that, I had my answer.

OceanofPDF.com

OceanofPDF.com

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX Torrance

“So, is it interrogation time now?”

My question seemed to surprise Wylfrael, as if he’d forgotten all about that.

“No. Tomorrow,” he said. He dragged his hand down his face in a bizarrely human gesture of agitated weariness. “I will take you back to your room to rest now.”

“Rest,” I said sarcastically. “Ah, yes. It’s so easy to rest while I’m being held prisoner by the one who killed my friends.”

His wings pulsed.

“Your friends started firing on me the moment I appeared. They wanted to kill me on my own land. Should I have let them do it?”

“I don’t mean the soldiers!” I cried. “I mean the other civilian women! The ones without weapons! The ones like me.”

He stared at me for a long moment before saying, “I didn’t kill any of the weaponless ones.”

I swallowed hard, my heart slamming. Could that be true? Could I have been wrong about what he’d done? Could my friends still be out there somewhere after escaping on the ship?

“Are you lying?” I asked, squinting at him as if I’d somehow be able to see the truth on him, in him, if only I looked hard enough.

“What reason do I have to lie?”

“To make me trust you.”

He smirked, but it was a cold, mirthless expression.

“I don’t particularly care if you trust me.”

“Well... alright, good. Because I don’t.”

“We understand each other, then,” he seethed. “You do not trust me. I do not trust you. Why are we still standing here discussing this?”

“Patience isn’t one of your strong suits, I take it,” I muttered under my breath.

His jaw worked.

“It used to be.”

His words from earlier echoed. This day has worn my control thin. Something was bothering him more than my comments and questions.

“What happened while you were gone today?” I asked slowly. I was terrifyingly aware of how far I was pushing. But the idea that he hadn’t actually killed my friends, that he might not be quite as evil as I’d once thought, emboldened me. I didn’t think I could hold back the question even if I’d wanted to. Something about him had changed for the worse, which I hadn’t even known was possible.

I knew I was right on the money when his eyes flashed and his nostrils flared. His hands jerked forward and then closed into fists, as if he wanted to throttle me and barely stopped himself.

“It’s none of your concern,” he bit out.

“It is my concern,” I countered, my voice cracking, “if it makes you more violent in your dealings with me. You’re angrier since you got back. Rougher. My ear...” I resisted the urge to reach up and touch it. “You could have warned me. At least tried to communicate with me about what you were doing. You can obviously understand me now, which makes me think you had to do the same thing to yourself. Why couldn’t you have done it in front of me? Put the thing in your ear where I could see it so I could get some context!”

“You forget yourself,” he warned. “You are not here to get context. You are a criminal, here to give me information.”

“You’re punishing me for something I’ve had no hand in!”

He cast a meaningful look at my hands. “Did you only grow those now? Did you not have hands attached to your wrists when I found you where you should not have been, plundering my world?”

“Well, yes! But I had no choice! I didn’t choose to come here. I was forced to! The people with the guns who were firing at you, they kidnapped me. Took me from my home. Brought me here against my will, along with all the other women on the ship.”

“Well, isn’t that rather convenient,” Wylfrael said flatly. “You want me to believe that you have absolutely no responsibility and can be blamed for nothing. You are an innocent victim, wronged both by your own people and now, because I have imprisoned you unfairly, by me.”

I wanted to cry hot, raging tears at the way he so easily dismissed the truth. My truth. The trauma of what had been done to me becoming a fake sob story in his eyes, something cobbled together to save my own neck.

My eyes filled, but I bit down on my tongue as hard as I could, using that sharpness to distract from the distraught panic rising inside me. My throat was too tight to say anything more, so I simply stared at him, refusing to blink and let even a single tear slip out.

Wylfrael faltered, a slight furrow forming between his brows.

“Shoshen said he heard you wailing last night. Why?”

I swallowed, feeling like my throat was full of stones. It took a moment before I could force out a reply.

“Why do you even care?” I said hoarsely.

“Because you are under my keep and my control. If you are ill, or injured, I need to know about it.” He left the door he’d just closed and crossed the space to me. “You may not have understood me before, but I already told you I will not kill you.”

“How very generous,” I whispered. But there was no bite to the words. My fury was fading into something more like melancholy. Or maybe even numbness. “Is that why you woke me up and stayed in my room all night?”

“Yes. Your breathing didn’t sound right.”

He cares if I eat. He cares how my breathing sounds. It really doesn’t seem like he wants me dead...

Maybe he was telling the truth. Maybe he really had let the other women, my friends, live, just like he was letting me. That was a tiny spark, a flicker in the numbing dark descending all around me. It gave me enough energy not to give up entirely. It wasn’t exactly hope. But it was something.

“I wasn’t wailing,” I muttered, sniffing hard. “I was weeping. And I like to think I kept it quite quiet and dignified.”

“Loud enough to be heard through the crystal door,” Wylfrael replied, looking unconvinced. “Weeping... Why do humans weep?”

For a moment, I wanted to scream, to say that it was all because of him. But instead, I just looked down, down and away from eyes that both demanded and beseeched.

“We weep for what we’ve lost.”

Though I watched his boots, I could feel his gaze raking over my head and face, like a physical drag. One of his black boots twitched forward, like he was going to take a step and collapse the final distance between us.

I wondered if he’d touch me. Hold me the way he’d held me upstairs when I’d been hurting.

In a vague and distant way, as if this were all happening to someone else, I wondered if I’d let him.

His foot stilled. He didn’t move except to say, “I have lost things too, little human. More than a mortal like you could ever even hope to fathom.”

He’d called me a mortal... Did that mean he wasn’t?

I am not a monster, but a god...

“The length of someone’s life doesn’t tell you anything about how much is in it – how much there is to lose,” I retorted, ripping my gaze up from his boots to his eyes. “I’ve lost my family, my friends. Everything!” I gestured wildly about the space. “This is all yours, isn’t it? Your castle, your servants. Your world.”