Page 131 of Taken By Touch and Torment

My gaze flickered to Snow, anchoring myself to her reaction instead. I saw the way she was standing protectively close, pure fury and disbelief in her bright green eyes.

I looked up at Rune. “Can you please go get Isabella’s belongings?” I whispered.

At first, Rune’s brows drew together in confusion. Then he nodded. He exchanged a glance with Snow.

“I’ll be right back,” he assured the three of us.

“You mean the money that I’m owed?” she hissed at me. “For keeping your dirty little secret?”

Rune spun on her, and I grabbed his arm as Isabella flinched and took a step back. He towered over her with a snarl.

“I am not paying you to keep Scarlett’s name out of your undeserving mouth,” he said, eerily calm as his thorny shadows crawled across the ground. “You’re going to do that so long as you want to live to see another day.”

Isabella’s survival instincts kicked in, finally exposing her fear.

“Is. That. Understood?”

Isabella nodded, and Rune turned, kissed my temple, and left without another word.

With Rune gone, Isabella went back to full cunt mode.

I took a steadying breath, moving quickly through an exercise to connect me back to my body. As I regained control, rooting myself to the present, I fundamentally understood that this was a test.

This was a pivotal chance to prove just how much I’d grown.

I straightened my back and lifted my chin. “Let’s say I had gone to visit you,” I said, my voice betraying me with a slight wobble. “How would you have treated me?”

Isabella looked at me like I was both crazy and stupid, as if the question had been spoken in an entirely different language.

“You owe me an apology,” Isabella snapped. “You’re not owed anything, Scarlett. How dare you speak to me like that!”

“You are the only one speaking to anyone disrespectfully,” Snow interjected. “But I could understand how someone calmly questioning you would sound like an attack to you. Given that you’re an emotionally immature, cruel narcissist without an ounce of self-awareness.”

Isabella’s nasty stare moved to Snow, looking her up and down and then ignoring her completely as if she was below even her acknowledgment.

Something was building inside of me, wrestling with the cloudy haze of my fight-or-flight ingrained trauma response.

All those excuses I’d made for Isabella rose from the abyss. That she’d only been a child, incapable of understanding the impact of her actions as her parents fell apart before her eyes.

We were adults now. And all those excuses dried up like sand on my tongue.

I worked every day to be better. For my own sake, for the sake of those who loved me, and for all of Valentin, my home.

I made every effort to heal myself, even when it broke my heart. Even when growth was so painful that I knew it would be easier to cling to resentment and self-pity instead. To wallow. To give up. To fill my heart with nothing but hatred, my veins with nothing but grief. I had more than enough justification to raise my fist against life itself.

And yet I chose to stay heedlessly in love with this messy, unfair world instead.

Isabella had gone the opposite way. Her choices had been her own.

She’d chosen to stay closed instead of open. She’d chosen to be cruel instead of loving, and she’d done so long before she knew I was a succubus.

Some people were addicted to suffering, and it not only made them weak, but it also left them painfully alone.

That was why I had an army ready to jump to my defense, and Isabella stood on this porch spewing hate with not a soul behind her.

“All my life, you have done everything in your power to make me hate myself the way you hate me,” I said, tears burning my eyes. “You were born afraid. Of scarcity, of loneliness. You thought if our parents loved me, then they’d love you less. So you sabotaged my relationship with them at every turn. You told me they hated when I sang. You told them that I was a troublemaker. You isolated me from the other villagers, or worse, actively worked to turn them against me. You made sure I had no one. You hated Jaxon for defying you, for showing me I was worthy of love and friendship.”

Snow was close, but I stood on my own two feet as I addressed Isabella. Even as she stared at me with an unchanging expression, her desires painfully, and predictably, set against listening to anything I had to say.

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