She can’t hurt me.
“Why aren’t you healing?” Dex’s voice sliced through the fog.
She’s gone.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?”
Fucking breathe, Pandora.
My lungs spasmed as I sucked in a sharp, greedy breath in the form of a gasp. My muscles wouldn’t stop shaking.
“What’s wrong with Pandora?” Reed’s voice sounded far away. “What did you do to her?”
Dex’s growl reverberated within the stadium. “I did what I was supposed to do for the exercise, you fucking asshole!”
“Sounds like the princess is giving us a show,” someone snorted.
“Who cares?” another drawled. “Nobles can be so fucking dramatic.”
“Don’t talk about her like that!” Reed shouted.
“Oh, so now thehuman’sson is taking up for her?”
“Someone take her to Darkmore’s office,now,” Ashenfell snapped.
“Darkmore? Of course. Nobles stick together, huh?” someone chuckled humorlessly.
“I’ll shadow-travel her there,” Dex mumbled somewhere around me, and warm arms banded around my waist, hoisting me up to my feet.
Numbness spread through my body like a drug, but the plus side was that I couldn’t feel the pain.
“I doubt she’ll want you to,” Reed interjected. “I’ll take her there.”
“I’m faster.”
Shadows enshrouded us, and my heart felt like it was about to burst as I clung to Dex. I had never been shadow-traveled before, but I’d seen my mother do it countless times.
I killed her.
She can’t hurt me anymore.
But shadow magic still could. Fearsplintered my heart as Dex stepped out of the shadows and into Hunter’s office.
I only knew it was his office because of his voice. My vision was blurred with my tears, and darkness crept in.
“What the Fates is this?” Hunter’s anger was palpable in his tone.“What did you do to her?”
“It was the exercise in Demonic Feeding. I didn’t do anything I wasn’t instructed to do.” Dex scoffed from above me, his fingers digging into my thigh as he cradled me to his chest.
He was so hot, and sweat dripped from my skin, mixing with my blood.
The weight of the past pushed into my skin like the shadows had, and it felt like I was being suffocated.
A strangled cry tore from the depths of my soul as his shadows brushed against me, unleashing a torrent of pain and anguish that I’d bottled up for the past two months.
“Fuck, trouble,” Dex hissed.
I shoved my fingernails into Dex’s arms, fighting against him and his shadows. I needed to get away from his shadow magic.“Let me go!”
