“Because you can’t beat him,” she replied. Unblinking, her icy blue stare boring into mine. “You have no power, child. No talent or skill.Nothing.”
Breath frozen in my chest, I felt something churn deep inside my heart. Seething where it smoldered, frothed and furious, dangling on the edge of something dangerous. Awoken for the first time. “Nothing?” I whispered, vision growing dark about the edges. Narrowed down to two points of taunting chips of ice, blind to everything else.
“You’re no priestess,” she pressed, pupils little more than tiny pricks of black in an ocean of blue. “Not trained to use the gifts that might have saved us. You’re a plaything. Bound to service an elite.”
Sweat dropped from her hairline.
Tracing down the side of her face, where it was caught in fine lines. Growing larger as it fell, absorbing the anxious moisture gathered on pale skin.
I exhaled through clenched teeth. Her words worming through my flesh and bone, burrowing into the fat. Feasting on greasy suet in such a way that left me breathless and dizzy.
“Just another tool of war for the empire to use,” she continued. “So much potential, gone to waste. Used in the fight against her own people. Who was it that kept you from the temple?” she asked, panting now. Her cheeks glowing with heat, despite the way her eyes chilled me to the core. “Such arrogance could only be the doings of a man. Was it your father?” A short, breathless laugh bounced off my cheeks. My lips. And she said, “Ah, yes,” through a sneer that didn’t suit her genteel features. “It was. I can feel the way it hurts you to admit it. But you know it’s true.”
“Stop,” I gasped, the syllable hardly bothering to cross my clenched teeth. My knuckles bloodless where they were locked around Sasha’s fingers. And just there, splashing at the back of my throat—burning—a cauldron of pure, seething rage begging to be loosed. A beast over which I had no control.
She grinned, then. Cruel and wicked, a sharp thing designed to provoke. “It was your father who left you unprotected, Mila. He all but gifted you to the Caledonians. Ensured you’d be passed around between them, fought over until there’s nothing left but an empty, obedient vessel. A slave. Soiled…used…”
Acid boiled over as I stared into her eyes and saw nothing.
Just another betrayer.
A traitor who promised help but offered only pain.
Embracing the way it burned as it spattered over my lips, I did the only thing I could.
I unleashed the storm…
… and crashed into a wall of pure white energy.
A shield.
Tinged with electric blue.
My knees buckled, sending me crashing to the floor in a boneless heap. Both wrists caught in a frigid vice of bone and ice.
“The elites were born and bred for war,” she said, standing strong. Unbent. Towering above me as power billowed all around her. “But it is only a priestess who can take something corrupt and make it something new.”
And then I knew.
What she’d done.
Why she’d provoked me into violence.
It wasmyenergy she wielded. Dark flames tempered by a master—a woman who needed no power of her own to see me beaten.
Vision going blurry, I took a breath. The first one I could recall thatwasn’tbogged down by the weight of failure and shame. A breath that didn’t stink of poisonous elite energy. It was fresh and crisp. The closest I might ever come to freedom.
“Thank you,” I whispered, and felt the scalding heat of tears when they spilled over my lashes. “I don’t—”
“A shield won’t save you,” she said, and released my wrists. Cupping my face in both palms, her thumbs traced over the wetness on my cheeks. “But it’s a start. Something for us to build a solid foundation upon.”
I nodded, chin dipping as her hands fell away. Unable to bring myself to stand, I dragged my knees to my chest instead. Curling around myself so I might prod at the thing she’d built and stare in helpless wonder.
The beast, too, was held rapt and enthralled.
A tentative knock rapped at the door. “Priestess?”
“Come in,” Sasha said, and reclaimed her seat with a weary sigh I felt echoing through my own chest.
