Page 28 of Can't Bite This Feeling
“Father.”
He stops, lips curling into a sneer. “You will come with me, daughter.” His voice is wrong, like something dead speaking through dry leaves. “You were always weak. But I will restore your purpose. You are a stain, but I will cleanse our bloodline of your sin.”
Terror clutches my spine like a claw.
I turn and run, not only from him, but from what he used to make me feel. The shame. The silence. The belief that I was broken for wanting freedom.
The manor’s magic stirs under my feet.
Rapha said the house was built from old stone, warded with shadow spells and protection runes. I sensed the energy but never called on it. Until now.
As I flee through the hall, I whisper to the house, to whatever magic guards its doors.Help me.
A corridor shifts. A door appears where there wasn’t one before. I duck inside just as my father’s monstrous hand swipes at my back.
The room shifts into a dense jungle, another pocket of magic buried in the manor’s twisted design. My bare feet pound across sticks and moss as I duck beneath vines and branches, heart hammering.
Another door emerges ahead. I take it, slamming into the kitchen next. I grab the first weapon I see, a long boning knife, and keep moving.
Passing through a Japanese garden, I dive behind a pagoda, sucking in shallow breaths. I press my hand to the stone, trying to quiet the sob rising in my throat.
Rapha…I scream for him in my mind, calling across whatever bond still connects us.
I feel the tether quiver, but something blocks it. Somethingdark.
I can’t reach him.
Working on some unknown instinct, I gather what magic I can from the shadows, pressing my hands to the ground, whispering in the Old Tongue I don’t remember learning. It answers. I feel it, ancient and electric, twining through my fingers like silk.
But I don’t know how to wield it. Not yet.
A noise. The rustle of a bush. He’s close.
Then everything happens at once.
His hand, cold and dry, closes around my throat, yanking me from hiding.
“Found you,” he hisses. “You think this place can protect you? I built stronger prisons than this for rebellious daughters.”
My scream is raw and desperate… and the magicerupts.
A blast of blue-white lightning explodes from my hand, flinging him backward into a stone wall.
Rapha bursts through a shimmer in the air the moment my father hits the ground.
He looks terrified. Furious.
“Drusilla!”
He reaches for me as Cassian rises, his bones cracking as magic pulses around him like a second skin.
“You filthy demon,” Cassian snarls, launching at Rapha.
They collide, a blur of violence and rage. Cassian’s hands close around Rapha’s throat, but Rapha tears free, slamming a fist into Cassian’s jaw with a thud like stone on stone.
I raise my hands again, summoning that same electricity, this timechoosingit. I release it in a wave. Cassian stumbles. Rapha kicks him into the stone wall, and I hear the unmistakable snap of bone.
But even broken, my father grins grotesquely. “You will never be free of me. I will return. Lucifer has promised it. Your soul is mine by blood, and blood can bebound.”
