Page 598 of Flirting with Darkness

…it was gone.

It was utterly gone.

Just like his father had told him it would, the protective, magical wall around the clock and archway had disappeared.

A voice rose in his ear.

The ritual is almost complete,she whispered.

Somehow, that time, he knew who she was.

Maybe he’d always known.

Maybe he hadn’t been able to face it.

You have no time left, my darling. You must choose. You must choose now! Everything depends on this! Everything!

He fought to breathe, gripping the sword more tightly in his hands.

He could feel it, though, that tension.

He could feel the part of him tempted to remain here, as his father said, to be trained by him, to learn his power, his means of commanding the natural and unnatural worlds. To be a rich prince in a new, wild land. To command armies, influence kings.

To belong somewhere. Finally.

To know who he really was.

But a much larger part of him recoiled at the idea.

Everything about this felt wrong.

At the very least, none of it felt right for him.

He could feel the woman there with him now, watching him, waiting to see what he would do. The young, beautiful version of her still lived behind his eyes. The version his father had taken brutally, then discarded without a word of kindness, without any attempt to help her or ease her pain. His father had done all of it deliberately, not with malice but with selfish indifference. He had thought to break her. He said it himself. He had hoped to break her so badly she would be incapable of loving her son.

He'd wanted his son deprived of that love, deprived of those “softer, more womanly sentiments and affections” in the hopes of making him “strong.” The Count thought by depriving him in such a way, he could forge in Ghost a man more like himself.

But he failed.

His father failed in that attempt entirely.

In the end, his mother beat him.

In the end, she was too strong for him.

Ghost had thought his mother neededhimto avenge the wrongs this man had done her. Ghost had come here to kill the monster who raped and abused and degraded his mother so terribly, all while she was still only a child. He had vowed to make things right for her, for both of them. He vowed it, he thought, because he loved his mother so dearly.

But he had been wrong, too.

His mother hadn’t needed him for this. His mother outmaneuvered and beat his father before Ghost was even born.

Why would Ghost evenconsiderletting this cold-hearted snake of a tyrant teach or give him anything? Why would he think heneededteaching by this man, when his mother had already taught him everything he needed to know?

No, he would not sell his soul.

Not to this man.

Not to this.

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