But not with my hands...
It was as though all the fury, all the fears I’d let out were being pulled to me and then pushed out, like a tide.
Every painful memory.
Every night my mother had slept at my bedside, waiting for a fever to break.
Every bruise my father had left behind.
Every ache and pain my body imposed on me.
I unleashed itall.
The dagger dropped from the man’s hand. He fell, hitting the ground with a thud, and began to convulse.
The rope around my throat loosened. My skin itched where the coarse hairs had dug in.
As I gasped for air, the man behind me stumbled backward. When I glanced back, he landed on the ground, writhing and screaming. Both of their shrieks filled the room with agonized pleas.
“Stop! Stop!”
“Sources. Oh, Sources!”
I wanted them to hurt.
The boy groom—Hurley—watched, his mouth gaping. I had no voice, but I mouthed the word, “Run.”
The boy scrambled away from the door, tripping before he tore down the hall.
I didn’t know what I was doing to these men.
But a child shouldn’t witness it, even if that child likely had something to do with this attack.
A feral part of me felt fed—a part that craved violence. A side of me I’d never met nodded and encouraged me.“You can kill them...” the feminine fury whispered. “It would be so easy.”
Their fate lay in my hands.
I didn’t know how long I watched the two gasping, flailing men.
“Sybilla!”
Krait’s voice woke me from my wrath and pulled me from the web of pain I wielded. Standing over the two red-eyed, bawling men, I held my hands down toward them. I looked at Krait and then at the men. Piss had soaked through their pants. The dagger and rope lay on the ground.
What had I done?
Then, the world snapped back into focus.
It was a light and heady feeling—as though I hadn’t just twisted pain into the minds of others.
The men stopped screaming, but they stayed on the ground, twitching and trembling.
Krait looked me up and down before his Shadows snaked across the floor like dark vines and wrapped around the men’s necks. He slammed them both up against the far wall, away from me. The paintings that had hung there clattered to the ground, shelves snapping and breaking beneath the men’s weight.
He took a step toward me. “What did they do to you?” he shouted.
Chapter 13
Krait
