Page 132 of Taken By Touch and Torment

“I’m sorry you lost your parents young. I’m sorry you endured cruelty at the hands of vampires,” I said. “But none of your suffering was my fault. Being raped wasn’t my fault, no matter how many times you told me it was. You’ve allowed men to hurt me since I was a teenager, and you not only profited off my suffering, but you also kept me wounded enough to believe it was what I deserved.”

I felt Rune at my back, but he made no further movement. He let me handle this myself, exactly how I needed to.

Isabella stammered, that vein still throbbing like it might burst. “You’re a fucking—” She cut herself off before she said the word. “Well, you know what you are,” she hissed.

“Why can’t you hear anything I’m saying?” I asked, a sob building in my throat. “I still have feelings. I don’t have a dark void where my soul should be. I do have a soul, just like you.” As I quoted Isabella’s words she’d written in her diary, her eyes flashed.

“Allegedly,” Snow said under her breath.

Isabella shot her a glare. “Her spell should’ve worn off if you know what she is. Yet you still defend her?” she asked Snow and Rune, completely ignoring me.

“Looks like someone is finally catching up,” Rune muttered.

“You’ve never deserved Scarlett,” Snow said. “And that’s your loss.”

Frustration bloomed in my chest, my fists clenching. I’d poured my heart out to Isabella, detailing years of severe abuse, and she hadn’t responded to a word of it.

“I’m speaking to you,” I spat at her, stupid tears finally rolling down my cheeks.

Isabella took a step back, disgust and a nearly bored-looking annoyance in her eyes as if she was facing down a diseased animal.

“I was still your family, adopted or not.” My voice trembled with anger and grief, intensity rolling off me in powerful waves. “I was still a person. I did nothing to earn your hatred. I did nothing to earn anyone’s hatred in that village. I see that now.”

“Yeah, no,” Isabella sneered. “That’s just not true.” Her voice was teeming with confidence from who-the-fuck-knew-where, considering Rune could obliterate her to ash and guts with one snap of his fingers. “You earned all of our hatred because you were an insufferable whore and man stealer who hurt people for sport. You teased and tormented men just to feed off their souls. You ruined women’s lives with all your temptations and tricks. You?—”

I was close to exploding, to fucking screaming until my throat was raw and bleeding. I cut her off, tired of hearing her twisted web of delusions, lies, and justifications. “I traveled all the way to Aristelle for you. Even after your own boyfriend told me not to go.” I knew it was unnecessary, but I couldn’t help the dig—to see the satisfying confusion in Isabella’s eyes. “Everyone told me it was a deathtrap. I went anyway, all by myself. For you. I made a life for myself in a city I didn’t understand, full of vampires who thirsted for my blood. Vampires who gave me even more trauma to work through with my healer than the heaping pile of bullshit you’ve been serving me my whole life. And, look!”

Isabella jolted at my raised voice.

“I found a way to save you from the trade that is famously fucking impossible to save people from.”

I wiped away my tears before throwing my hands up.

“You’re welcome!”

Isabella just stared at me. She offered me nothing. No apology, no murmur of gratitude. No recognition that she was wrong about me—that I was worthy of love, family, and friends, a home that was healing and warm.

I shook my head, reaching a breaking point. I turned to Rune and lifted a hand. He was quick to place Isabella’s journal in my palm. I was blinded by hurt and rage when I tossed the diary to Isabella. She scrambled to catch it, recognition soon transforming to wrath.

“How dare you invade my privacy, you?—”

One of Rune’s shadows turned razor sharp, stopping a few inches in front of Isabella’s face.

“Consider the invasion a matter of Valentin security,” Rune said, his tone clipped. He pulled his shadow back.

“Oh? Like the slaughter of nuns this morning at one of Helia’s temples?” Isabella snarled.

Snow and Rune both went utterly still, and my face contorted in confusion, shocked out of my heartache.

Isabella waved her diary around as she spoke. “Accompanied by a demand to return a certain Miss Scarlett Hale, servant of Lillian, to her Master, Lillian’s chosen one.”

I heard the thunderous sound of my own heartbeat. I blinked. I thought reaching my limit would allow me to finally rage at Isabella the way she deserved. To hurl the same cruelty back at her that she’d spent years stabbing into my own heart.

Turned out, all reaching my limit did was send me sinking to the cool stone, my knees tucked beneath me. My body shut down, shouts fading to a dull hum. My vision became blurry, the cool air growing entirely unnoticeable.

I stayed there, in between life and death, until the emptiness transformed into conversations and events playing in my mind on repeat. What combination of words could I have spoken to get through to Isabella? To prove my worthiness? To receive her acknowledgment of my pain, her admission of guilt for causing so much of it?

I remembered every cruel word she’d ever told me, each sentence she’d scrawled about me in her diary.

---