Chapter 26
ANNA
“Tell me the worst thing you’ve ever done.”
The words spilled from her mouth, and she wanted the answer so badly. For weeks she had obsessed over this man, his past, the things that made him cold, and the answers were right here, ripe for plucking.
He’d told her to take what she could. She was merely obliging.
Still, guilt battled with rampant curiosity as the fight against her coercive magic died on his face. Should she pull back? Would he be angry she’d stolen this from him? He’d drawn no line in the sand, but she was probably stepping over it anyway.
“It isn’t a good story,” David said.
“Tell me,” she pressed, weaving her voice with even more power.
In his lap, she pressed her forehead against his.
She’d never been so close to another person, wrapped around him, body and mind.
They synced, him exhaling as she inhaled.
Anna’s heart pummeled her ribs, but she maintained the link between them, silently asking him to bury his secrets inside her.
“My father was a criminal. Is a criminal. From a family of criminals. Drugs, human trafficking, money laundering. The typical stuff. I was just a boy when my father realized I could force others to do my bidding. Back then, it was kid stuff. Play with me. I don’t want to go to bed.
Don’t make me eat that,” he said. “But my father clued in that it wasn’t normal.
He was never loving, but after that, he was fucking crazy.
He wanted to see how far I could take it, so he’d force me to make people take lethal doses of drugs.
He’d ask me to compel people to hurt other people, to hurt themselves.
And no matter what he asked me, I’d always obey, and they’d always obey me.
Over the years, I learned to perfect the voice, because if he didn’t get what he wanted, I’d be punished. ”
Every emotion inside her focused on those words.
I’d be punished.
Sorrow exploded from her core, drenching everything in cold darkness.
David touched her face, his hand cupping her cheek, thumb sliding over her mouth. “Are you sad?”
“Just keep talking,” she whispered.
“He wasn’t the oldest sibling of his family, but when his father died, he used me to take his place.
The uncles fucking hated me, but my father used me to wire the entire organization with psychological terror.
At first, he just wanted me to serve punishments—the guys who didn’t pay or who had crossed the family or whatever—but then he realized he could profit off the torture, too.
He seemed to like people’s pain, and he found friends who liked it, too. ”
Dread lapped onto the shores of Anna’s sorrow, and she wasn’t certain she wanted to hear the next part. Perhaps she didn’t need to know how he’d been abused after all.
“About a year ago,” David said before she could find the words to make him stop, “he hosted a masquerade. They set up cages and filled them with trafficked girls, enemies of the family, professional rivals of his friends. All of his sadistic buddies paid to choose what these people would do to each other. So at the end of the night, I was forced to coerce these prisoners—these people in fucking cages—to—” He broke off.
Swallowed. “It didn’t matter what I asked them to do.
They did it. Some died. Some were irreparably scarred.
Some were—” He shook himself. “At the end of the night, my father clapped me on the shoulder like he was proud and called me his little prince of death.”
Anna’s coercive magic stuttered. “David—”
“That night. The masquerade. That’s the worst thing I’ve ever done.”
Her thumb dragged slowly over his cheek. “Your father made you do it though. It wasn’t you, right?”
He shrugged. “Obedience to authority is a weak human trait. I tried to run away, but he’d told me to stay, and I just…
couldn’t leave. It was a nightmare I couldn’t wake up from.
My name became synonymous with fear, but they all knew I could convince them to put a gun to their own head, so no one tried to kill me.
” He sighed. “I wish they would have. I wouldn’t have stopped them.
I was too weak to do it myself, and it was the only thing that would have stopped the madness.
So maybe that’s the worst thing I’ve ever done.
” He paused for a long moment. “Being alive.”
Anna had no idea what to say. Every cell in her body ached. Each word from his mouth squeezed harder on this nucleus of pain inside her.
Elenya appeared beside them. Anna had nearly forgotten the other woman was in the room.
She slid from David’s lap, resettling in her own chair, nauseated by the amount of pain slicing into her magic.
As she pulled her power away, his emotions woke, temporarily free of ice.
Horror wrestled with dread and shame behind his blank expression.
An entire index of sadness burst apart like confetti, three-hundred and sixty degrees of despair, shock, resentment, insecurity, mortification.
So many emotions, each one hammering nails inside her emotional core that she feared might never be dislodged.
“You aren’t weak, David,” his mother said, ignoring the emotional assault. “I thought Xandra would keep you safe. You were to stay with her and obey. You surrendered to them both because I told you to. ”
Silent, shattering on the inside, David stared at her. His already pale features drained of color. The seconds dripped from the walls, silent and painful, while he refroze the glacier that surrounded him.
He opened his mouth to speak twice before a single word emerged. “Obey?”
Elenya crossed her arms, and Anna pressed against the safeguards surrounding the woman’s emotions, desperate to know how she was feeling in this moment. What had it done to her to learn what had become of her son? No matter how she pressed, Elenya’s emotions remained intact behind their barrier.
“I thought you’d be safe with Xandra,” she said, and while her emotions remained hidden, a thin slice of anguish broke through her words.
“I wasn’t with her. I was with him.”
Agonized creases formed on her brow. “I’m so sorry, my son.”
David stood to face his mother. “I am not your son.”
“You don’t want to be, but it doesn’t change the fact of it. You’re mine, love. If you had a son with a destiny like yours, you’d try to steal him from it, too. I never wanted this for you, but there are things you must know—”
His green eyes turned to chips of ice. With one cold look in Elenya’s direction, he left the room, sparing no further attention for Anna. The main door closed behind him with a soft, controlled click.
Elenya cast a vacant look after him, her gaze haunted by grief. After a time, she sighed. “He’s very alone.”
“Yes,” Anna whispered.
Sparkling mint eyes met Anna’s, the same color as her son’s. “He appears taken with you. Perhaps you could try harder not to dislike him.”
Anna grimaced. “I don’t dislike him. We were…mad at each other.”
A moment passed, and Elenya nodded once.
After weeks in her company, Anna had come to know her very little.
The woman kept herself bottled as tightly as her son, but when they weren’t hidden behind her barriers, her emotions burned with love for him.
Instead of embracing it, he ran from her.
An ache pulsed from the sadness of it all.
Neither of them deserved the pain they’d been dealt.
The door opened again, and David reappeared in the archway between the study and the sitting room, lancing Elenya with a glare. “No, actually. You leave. You’re the one who fucked up.”
The woman straightened, hope flashing in her eyes.
David’s gaze shot to Anna as she stood. “No. You stay.”
Skin prickling, she sank back down.
His hands clenched at his sides. “You coerced me into obeying him. Do you have any idea what kind of power that gave him?”
“I do now. It was a mistake. I’m so sorry, David. I thought she’d take care of you.”
“I really don’t want your apologies.” The words weren’t sharp. More…resigned. He rubbed his eyes.
“But I’m—I’m just so sorry,” she whispered, and one slip of her shield allowed Anna the pleasure of bathing in Elenya’s endless remorse. It was spiked with icy bits of despair and shame, almost painful as it coasted along Anna’s skin.
David could feel it. He had this magic, too.
But he ignored it and pointed at the door. “Please leave.”
The rays of guilt and regret radiated from Elenya in cold waves. David closed himself behind ice the way he always did, the way he’d learned from a lifetime spent alone, endangered, and used. Crystallized in a cage of control.
Couldn’t they see how much they needed each other?
“I don’t want you as my mother,” David said, blank-faced. “You gave me up. You don’t get to change your mind about wanting me just because it’s easier now.”
A handful of seconds passed before the older woman slipped from the room, utterly silent. Afterward, David did nothing but stare at the wall in front of him, eyes distant.
Anna stood. Why had he returned? Why had he wanted her to stay?
She took hesitant steps toward him, waiting for him to yell at her, to ice her out. She’d taken something he clearly hadn’t wanted her to have, and she was desperate to apologize. Whatever punishment he chose, she’d take it without complaint.
“I shouldn’t have done that,” she said into the quiet.
He didn’t move. Didn’t blink. “It’s my fault for making this a lawless venture. I underestimated you. Won’t happen again.”
I underestimated you. Her hard work had paid off, and she glowed beneath that veiled insult. She still had a long way to go, of course, but she’d broken through his defenses faster than she imagined.
“I’m sorry I did it,” she said, “but I’m not sorry I know this about you.”
He gave her the mask-like smirk. “Excited to tell everyone how I’m exactly who they think I am?”
Was that really what he thought?