Page 118 of Wrath

I stared at a spot over her shoulder, losing myself to the memory.

“You are the first and only person I’ve ever loved,” I said, starting with one truth that was the easiest to give her. “But you aren’t the first person I’ve ever had a relationship with.”

“Is that what this is about?” Her brows scrunched together, and she let out a dry, disbelieving laugh. “Ryland, I don’t care if you had relationships before you met me. I know most of you did. I certainly did.”

I hurried to continue speaking before I could lose my nerve. “She was…human.”

That made Z pause. Her lips tugged down, though it wasn’t jealousy I saw in her expression but concern. For me? For the unnamed human?

“It wasn’t love—I knew that then, and I definitely know it now—but she was fun. Kind. A little crazy.” I chuckled, though the sound was devoid of any humor. “We became friends first before it became something more. We began to see each other secretly. I may not have loved her, but I did care about her. We were young and stupid. Struggling to find ourselves. I thought she cared about me too.”

I gripped the arms of the chair so tightly my knuckles whitened.

“What happened?” Z rasped, pain shimmering in her eyes as if she’d already guessed the ending of this story.

“What happened is that she never cared about me the way I did her. What happened is that I allowed myself to fall for a pretty face and was too embarrassed to tell anyone the truth. What happened is that, because of my actions, she and a bunch of other people were slaughtered.” Bitterness coated my words as I remembered that night many years ago.

The rage coiling around my heart.

The fear.

The need for justice, to avenge my broken pride.

It was why I’d never told anyone the story to begin with.

Pride.

“She contacted me through a note—that was how we communicated back then. We would leave notes for each other under a rock on my balcony. Anyway, she told me she wanted to meet at our usual spot in town. I went.” I squeezed my eyelids shut to block out the memories. “But she wasn’t alone. Apparently, she was a member of the resistance and was assigned to get close to me. To use me to destroy my father and the other kings. When I arrived that night, there were over a dozen humans standing with her.”

I remembered their leering faces. Their malicious grins. Their cunning eyes as they assessed me from head to toe, poking and prodding and searching for weaknesses.

I also remembered the way I froze up, my heart racing, fear rooting my feet to the floor.

“I was terrified,” I confessed. “I thought that somehow, the humans got a hold of my letters and had hurt my friend. But then I saw her standing there, her expression utterly blank, and I knew that wasn’t the case. She betrayed me. I was stupid enough to believe every lie she told me.”

I licked my dry upper lip. “I was only a teenager back then and couldn’t fight back. I could barely control my shadows. So when they came at me, there was nothing I could do. I tried to fight back, but I was overpowered. They tied me to a chair and wanted information—about my father and the kings and their locations. I refused to tell them anything.”

My face began to sting as if I could feel the phantom slash of a whip against my flesh. The slice of a blade on my cheek. The heat of a fire as they held it just beneath my eye.

“They tortured you,” Z whispered.

She phrased it as a statement, not a question, already seeing the truth on my face.

“For days,” I whispered, and swallowed at the reminder.

God, the pain… I still woke up screaming from it on bad nights.

“I don’t know if they got bored or tired of me, but they finally left me alone with threats to come back and finish the job later. I don’t know why they just didn’t kill me. I think they assumed I would break at some point.” I huffed out a bark of dry laughter. “That was why they destroyed my face, you know. Because shadows take pride in their appearance, and they knew fucking mine up would destroy me.”

“Ryland…” Z stared at me, but there wasn’t any pity in her eyes. Only a grim understanding that turned my veins cold.

“She came to me then, after everyone else left. Crying softly. Apologizing. She claimed she didn’t know what they planned to do to me, and she let me go.”

Looking back at that day, I had no idea if she was being genuine or if this was just another scheme from the rebels to get me to lower my guard. I hoped it was the latter. Maybe then some of my guilt would be assuaged.

“But I was so damn angry and hurt and…” I squeezed my eyelids shut to block out the memories. “I killed her. Right then and there. I used my shadows to suffocate her. Then, once she was dead, I went room to room killing everyone who’d hurt me, everyone who’d laid a finger on me.”

Cold wrath bubbled beneath the surface of my skin. I’d never felt so helpless before, so worthless, as insignificant as a pebble in a catapult.

---