“What do you expect me to do with her?” Hunter replied.
“Take her to the cells.”
“Where they’ll all gawk at her? Try to form a relationship with her?”
“Then let Erik and Sloan have her.”
“No,” he barked. “I want her exactly where I can see her.”
The pounding in my head continued steadily and powerfully. Whispers made it difficult to focus on the words, and the growing pressure pulled me down to my knees. They hit the hard flooring, and I hissed in pain. Neither of them moved to help me up.
“What are you planning to do?” Larkin asked. “She’s already a liability. She’s not coping.”
I planted my palms on the ground and tried to force myself back to my feet. The muscles in my arms shook until I quit trying and stayed on the floor. Bashing my head against the wall seemed to be a better option with every passing moment.
“If I had it my way, she wouldn’t be here,” Hunter muttered sulkily.
Fear ricocheted in my heart. Even with the council voting against it, Hunter remained staunch in his belief that I shouldn’t exist.
An image of Cass and Sophie pushed its way to the front of my mind. I wanted my brother. I didn’t want to die. There were people who would ask questions. Or did the Gods have a plan to silence them? Could they make people forget I’d ever walked the earth?
The heat surged through me as my aura spanned out across the room. Hunter and Larkin hid behind their own, filtered in a weird mixture of blue, silver, and gold.
“Sorry,” I managed to eke the word out weakly.
It felt too late to pray. Even sat on my knees before Hunter and Larkin, sorry was the only word that could spill from my lips. Requesting mercy, begging for them to spare my life — these were the pleas that should be formulating to make sure I walked out of this house alive. But they disappeared before they had the chance to flourish.
Pride was a sin, and I’d meet my end, thanks to it.
“We need to get her to control it,” Larkin hissed at her husband. “And I’m not teaching her.”
“You’d have to possess some maternal instinct to even take an abomination under your wing.”
Larkin looked like she’d been slapped before storming out of the room. Hunter watched her leave before turning on me and I scuttled backwards, terrified of being left alone with a God who seemed intent on murdering me.
“Mallory did a good job in hiding you,” he said, stepping towards me. “Right under our noses.”
He looked pissed that I’d managed to escape him for years. It must have been a blow to his ego that someone had tricked him. Tricked all of them.
“What to do with you now?” he mused.
I didn’t have an answer for him. There was too much missing information to allow me to come up with a plan to save myself. And I didn’t trust myself not to make it worse. All it would take was for me to say the wrong thing to seal my fate.
Hunter walked out of the room, locking the door behind him, and I sat back, pulling my knees to my chest and resting my head against them.
We need to get her to control it.
Control.
There were distinct moments in my life where I felt like I’d lost control. When Cass left for the States, the moment the police knocked on the door, Ethan’s figure growing smaller as he drove off in his car. And every time, I’d regained the control that I craved and carried on with life. There was no situation that I couldn’t dig myself out with logic and reasoning.
But this was beyond my scope. Completely out of my depth, the only way I could describe it was a descent into madness.
There was no chance to catch my breath, no escaping the uncertainty that my future held. The people I relied on, Cass and Gray, couldn’t be reached for help. I was stuck until Hunter and the council decided how they would deal with me.
Time became a strange concept. Seconds felt like hours being stuck alone with my barrage of thoughts and the ceaseless whispers. My fingers tangled into my hair, and I tugged hard, wishing for everything to just stop.
The lock clicked, and I heard footsteps coming towards me, heavy and slow. I jammed the heels of my palms into my eyes and wiped them down my cheeks, trying to erase the evidence of tears. My vision was spotty but cleared soon enough.
