25. Elhyor
25
Elhyor
A ngélique looks at me with defiance in her eyes, and part of me thinks she should, and the other regrets it.
What am I turning into? It feels like there are two beings inside of me who can’t stop being at war with each other about this girl.
“What do you want?” she asks, and as fierce as she looks, her tone is depleted and she sounds exhausted.
I’m not surprised. She lost a lot of blood. Anyone in her case would be the same, or even worse.
With my hand still wrapped around her arm, I force her to turn so I can look at her back again.
“I’m not going to repeat myself a third time. Who did this to you?” I ask, and unsurprisingly, I’m growling again.
“Why do you care? You’ve done worse today. Why should it matter?” She pauses and then seems to find her snark again. “First, you didn’t want to look at me or even be in the same room as me, but you don’t want anyone else looking at me, either. Now, you think you can bully me into telling me who marked my back, when I’m not yet healed from what you did to my hand? You’ve got to be kidding me.”
She’s not wrong about her current wound.
Except I didn’t know she couldn’t shift. I didn’t know she would have trouble healing.
I know it’s not a good excuse, because I still did that knowing that she would be in pain.
But do I really have to apologize when she tried to kill me less than an hour ago?
I think I’m losing my mind. Or maybe we jumped into a parallel universe or something, because my life doesn’t make much sense right now.
“You tried to kill me. How did you expect me to react?” I ask her with a pointed look.
“I thought I’d be dead,” she answers me without an ounce of emotion.
Wait.
She knew there would be a high chance she wouldn’t manage to kill me. She thought I’d either kill her for the attack or maybe that, if I died, some of my men would kill her in retaliation, and yet she jumped, anyway?
She expected it, and yet she did it, anyway.
What kind of desperation is this?
“And yet, you’re still here,” I answer.
“And yet, I’m still here,” she repeats before adding, “wondering why my back matters when you just added to my collection of scars.”
There’s more than the back?
“Who. Did. This. To. You?” I ask again.
“I thought you said you wouldn’t repeat yourself,” she says with a devious smile, still not answering my question. “I’m tired. May I go to bed? You can lock me in if you want. I don’t care anymore.”
She sounds so defeated that I almost tell her she can go.
Except my dragon side refuses to let it go. It needs to know who did this to her. It needs to maim, burn, and reduce to ashes whoever did that to her, knowing that it would stay.
Because I can see it. Those marks on her back aren’t a one-time thing. Some of the scars cross each other, and the color of some seems to be rosier.
One could make an error once and not realize she would be scarred for life, but it happened at least two other times, so it means the person who did this did it to purposefully hurt her, and they didn’t even give her proper care after.
She looks at my hand still holding her, and with a defeated sigh, she says, “If you’re not happy with his handiwork, you can tell him yourself in three days.”
I’m frozen where I stand, and I don’t even feel it when my hand slips from her arm.
I don’t even want to hold her back.
Her father did this to her.
Her father did this to her, and I told her I was sending her back to him.
If there was ever a fresh row of scars, they would be my fault.
I don’t want to understand her, but if this is what she’s been through before coming to me, how can I fault her for trying to escape her fate?