Page 105 of A Debt of Shattered Hope

I was shaking. I couldn’t imagine lying down with someone knowing they killed your entire family, a family you had known, and calling it love. Even as I stared the man who had killed my entire family before I had even known them, I would never call what I had boiling within me for The Raven love. I was a twisted fuck, but I wasn’t that twisted. Was I?

“No. I killed them.” His head was bowed. He couldn’t look at me. “He might have ordered it, but they would have been safe if I had not done what I did to the House of Magic.”

“Who issued the order?”

Ice churned in my veins and tumbled over cliffs.

“He did.”

“So, you were following his orders. So, he punished your entire family for you following his orders and you . . . you fucked him after? For how long?”

“He swears that he did not issue the order to raze the House of Magic. He swore that the order was to bring the House of Magic to heel. Not to destroy it.”

“And you believed him? How long?”

“He swore it.”

His voice was whisper thin, merely a suggestion of an echo of the strength he held.

“I could swear that my tits are as big as watermelons, and that doesn’t make it so, Raven. You know that as well, as I do. How. Long.”

He pursed his lips, gnawing on the edges of them. “A little over a hundred and fifty years.”

“So, you played his fucking whore for over two lifetimes even after he punished you for doing what you were told to do? That’s fucking sick. No wonder we fit together so well.” I looked away from him, hating the fact that I saw so much of myself in him at this moment.

I knew that he had destroyed everything. I knew that he was the reason that everything in my life was shit, yet even now, I longed to touch him, to kiss him, to climb on top of him and make him forget that Daróg even had existed in his heart once.

“You don’t understand, Sóna. I loved him.”

The fact that he said loved and not love shouldn’t have made my pathetic heart kick at the cage of my ribs. And yet it did.

I was pathetic.

“He’s a monster,” I hissed, finally looking at him.

Pain throbbed hot in his eyes, contorted his face, and sank its hooks into me.

“He is. And so am I, little bug.” He rose, taking the cloth with him. I followed him all the way up as he towered over me, just an enormous, wounded boy I recognized as far too familiar. “I cannot change my past, Sóna. As much as I wish I could. Now more than ever. It’s impossible. And I have spent and will spend, my entire life since then paying for my mistake. I am haunted by the ghosts of my past but with you . . . I . . . I don’t know I thought I could be different. I thought I could be seen as different. I hoped you’d never find out.”