Chapter 3 #2
Then Damien’s hand landed on my shoulder, steadying me. Letting me know I wasn’t alone in this.
My survival instincts kicked in. I felt my expression harden into the disdainful mask I’d perfected years ago.
“What did you just say to me?” I kept my voice low while my mind raced. Who’d heard her, besides the two younger girls at her back?
I scanned the surrounding faces without seeming to, searching for signs of shock or recognition. Most of the other students in the line looked amused at the spectacle of a provincial nobody insulting me. Good.
No one looked as if they believed her.
She was backpedaling now, stammering about island customs, her face flushing a blotchy shade of red under her unfashionably tanned skin. She was plain, with large hazel eyes and the most ridiculous clothes, the kind I saw the peasants wearing on market day back home in Demirkalé.
I could barely hear her words through the roaring in my ears. How did she guess?
I’d spent my entire life religiously dyeing my telltale hair and maintaining the most powerful glamor I could sustain without drawing attention to the magic itself.
Father had spent years teaching me to move like a human, to suppress the fluid grace that came so naturally to my mother’s people.
And now this girl—this nothing from nowhere—threatened to unravel it all with a single comment.
Damien, my faithful friend and self-appointed bodyguard, shifted closer and upbraided her for her insolence. His protectiveness warmed and steadied me.
At the same moment, I saw that rich upstart Elio Ferraro moving away from the girl.
For all his overweening airs, he was smart to distance himself from potential contagion.
I studied the girl, noting every detail I could weaponize against her: the old-fashioned brown braids crowning her head, the outmoded cut and garish embroidery decorating the skirts and bodice of her peasant gown, her tanned, freckled complexion, the calluses on her fingers that spoke of manual labor.
Each word I spoke next was calculated, calibrated to humiliate without revealing my own panic. Using every clever turn of phrase in my arsenal, I mocked her appearance, her accent, her obvious backwoods origins.
With each barb, I felt the crowd of onlookers shifting more firmly to my side, their snickers washing over me like a balm.
As I spoke, I watched her eyes—those dark-lashed, dangerous hazel eyes that had seen through my disguise. They widened, filled with hurt.
She looked like she was about to cry. Once the tears came, she’d be publicly humbled. Disarmed. And I could dismiss her existence.
But the tears never came. Her eyes narrowed, and her expression went from hurt to thin-lipped anger. No submission. No fear.
My stomach twisted. She was a nobody. She wasn’t supposed to defy me.
I’d been very young, but I still remembered Father’s face the night he’d returned home after losing his Imperial Council seat, his face flushed with shame and rage.
“This is your fault,” he’d hissed, gripping my shoulders so tightly they bruised. “Your mother’s blood is our shame, and our secret. Never let anyone suspect what you are, or they’ll destroy you. And me.”
He’d slapped me when I’d cried, when I’d asked why being half-Fae was so terrible.
Later, I understood. The Dominion feared what it couldn’t control, and the Fae, with their wild magic and ancient ways, were beyond the reach of the dominus and his mages.
So I’d learned to hide in plain sight. I’d perfected my human persona. Over the past year, I’d built a fortress of admiration and fear around myself at the academy. I’d become what I needed to be—feared, admired, untouchable.
Until now. Until this poorly-dressed fishwife came out of nowhere to mock my attempts to hide what I was.
I finished my public evisceration to an appreciative chuckle from Damien.
The other students hungrily watched me putting an impertinent commoner in her rightful place. Perfect. The more witnesses to her humiliation, the less credible any further accusations she might make later.
Most first-years—especially commoners—would be in tears by now, desperate to escape their humiliation. But this girl stood her ground, her face a deep, unflattering shade of red now, her eyes blazing with defiance… and rage.
I felt naked beneath her gaze, as if she could see straight through to the truth I’d spent my life concealing. A bolt of genuine fear shot through me. I couldn’t kill her—not here, not without consequences—but I needed to neutralize her.
Before I could move from insults to threats, Damien stepped in.
“I swear, Luk,” he drawled, crossing his arms and looking down at her as if she were a beetle or worm in his path. “Things have never been the same at this academy since His Imperial Majesty’s father allowed the commoners to invade.”
A murmur of agreement rose from my peers. As always, Damien had struck just the right note—reminding everyone that she was an outsider, here on imperial sufferance.
I waited for her to apologize again, to lower her gaze and retreat.
That was how this dance always went—I struck, they yielded. It was the natural order of things here at the academy.