Page 88 of Summoned
Let them not see the shame.
Let them not see the crack inside me that I can’t hide anymore.
“I knew it,” my father says, victorious. “You can train her all you want, but if the material’s weak, you get nothing.”
Someone laughs in the crowd. My spine curls in. My hands drop to my thighs. I pray to dissolve into the dark.
A victim again.
Tears stream down my cheeks as my mind drifts back into every humiliating memory of my childhood. All the times I stood with hunched shoulders, hair hanging like a curtain, my heart aching. Around me, pencils lay scattered, eyes filled with scorn.
They hate me, not for what I’ve done. But for who I am.
Nothing.
And then… another thought breaks through. That moment when Gaetano made me kneel. He forced me to drop the mask because he recognized it before I did. He already knew there was no substance behind the “Little Baroness.” She was a title. A façade.
But his eyes held no disgust. No pity, nor judgment. They didn’t weigh me as if I were a disappointment. There had to be something else he saw, because desire flickered there. As though he sought to understand me, not to humiliate.
Maybe I’m deluded and blindly searching for a bit of hope to cling to…
No. I’m not imagining it. His gazeheldsomething different. Itfeltreal.
And if the Black Joker can give me that kind of recognition, why can’t my own father?
Icanbe perceived differently.
That single thought drives my fingers to snatch the pencil off the ground. I don’t know what I’m about to do, but I stand up and face him. His gaze falls like a gavel—final and unflinching, full of verdicts.
“I’m your daughter,” I declare.
Laughter ripples around me.
My father presses his lips into a tight line. His eyes travel down my face, my bare body, and rest on the pencil in my hand once more. “My daughter doesn’t crawl across the floor like an animal, naked as the day she was born, clinging to some pathetic little pencil.”
It’s not her fault…” a hesitant voice says. My mother.
“She’s not my daughter. Not the one I raised,” my father says.
A strange sense of clarity rises in my chest, and my grip on the pencil tightens. His words spin through my mind, and this time, they fail to pierce. They leave only silence.
“Dad…” I meet his stone-cold gaze. “I am what I am.” My voice doesn’t shake. “If you can’t accept that… then do me a favor and step out of my way.”
The voices fall silent. The air stills. My own heartbeat stops at the realization of what I did.God! I just told my fatherto move.
His eyes narrow, and his tone drops into a deep growl. “Say that again.”
My insides shiver at the threat he radiates, but there’s no turning back for me. “Get outof my way, Dad.”
The pencil in my hand starts to hum. The air thickens, and the pressure in my chest intensifies. And then—
He’s gone. So is the crowd, the tables—everything’s vanished.
The cave’s darkness spreads out before me. Gaetano stands a few steps away, wearing an expression I can’t interpret.
My limbs are stiff, but I push myself forward, narrowing the gap between us. “I’m here.”
The tears start to flow.
