Page 61 of Shattered Jewel

The room tunnels into a rush of blood in my ears, his cruel bluntness wrapping around my heart and squeezing like a cold-blooded serpent.

“You had it all this time? Why did you keep this from me?”

Even as I ask it, I have the uneasy certainty that Maverick’s death is far more complicated than I was led to believe.

“Because, beastie.” His tone descends to a threatening purr. “You’re on a need-to-know basis.”

I shake my head, my pulse thrumming erratically against my throat. “That’s not your decision to make. I’ve shared everything with you. Everything I know. Every part of—” my body.

An ironic smile dances upon his lips as he reads the angry flush in my cheeks. He leans back against the desk, sprawling in an audacious display of arrogance. “Yet the decision was made.”

My gaze flits between the concealed amulet in his grasp and his triumphant grin. A surge of rage fills me, simmering in my veins, threatening to explode. I force my hands to relax, but my control is fading fast.

“I am not just your plaything, Kaspian. This is real to me. This affects me brutally.”

His laughter fills the room with a sinister melody.

“Oh, beastie,” he murmurs, idly threading the amulet’s chain between his long fingers. “You’re not my toy. You’re my pet.”

“And what are you to me?” I challenge him, my voice hitching. “Nothing, that’s what.”

He stills for a moment, his heavy-lidded stare locking onto mine with a weight that chains me to the spot. Then he straightens, towering over me like a colossal statue carved from merciless pain.

“The real question is,” Kaspian says with a nasty grin, “why did Maverick keep all this from you? The dutiful sister who idolized him?”

“Don’t you dare talk about my brother like you knew him,” I spit out, my voice shaking with so much wrath, it’s about to fracture my heart. “Unlike you, I loved him.”

The green in his eyes swirls with onyx. He moves so suddenly, all shackled energy and deadly grace as he backs me up into the wall and frames one side of my face with his arm.

“And how did that work out for you?” he sneers, his breath coating my lips. His words slither out, his forked tongue coated with venom. “Did your love prevent his death? Did it bring him back? Face it, Elara, love is nothing.”

He moves with such deftness that his hand clamps around my jaw before I can blink, his thumb and forefinger digging into my cheeks. “You are nothing.”

Kaspian’s statement clangs within my skull the same way Cav’s did when he said something similar. It’s like they want me to hate them. It validates what squirms within their souls, the parasite the Sovereigns implanted there, telling them they are worthless, and thus all others should be treated as such.

Especially those they start caring about.

“Let go!” I try to pull away from him, from the terrible meaning in his words, but his grasp is a bruising vise.

“I think not,” he says with deep-seated scorn. “It’s time you faced the truth. Maverick was part of a secret society that deals in blood rituals and murders. Your loving brother played a dangerous game and lost because he didn’t have the emotionless strategy required to win. You are weak, just like he was. I will never be so fragile that I’d cry just because someone is being mean to me like you are right now. Why don’t you go tattle to Mommy or Daddy? Or big brother? … Oh, wait. You can’t.”

His words slice through me, cauterizing my weakness for him as they cut.

“I hate you,” I hiss through blurred vision, but I blink furiously, refusing to give Kaspian the satisfaction of witnessing more tears.

That awful not-smile of his returns.

“No, you don’t,” he says, releasing his grip on my face and pushing away from me. His cool and clipped voice is stripped of all emotion—or any semblance of humanity. “And you despise yourself for it. I’m the only one willing to give you the brutal truth, yet you still want me.”

“Shut up!” I shout, leaping toward him with such force that his back presses against the edge of the old wooden desk with an abrupt thud.

Kaspian doesn’t wince or recoil under my weight. He chuckles darkly under his breath as his free arm folds around my waist and locks me against him. “Careful now. You’re making me hard, beastie.”

A hint of mirth plays on his face, but something else controls it, malevolent and cruel. It sends a clear message:

The real test of my survival starts now.

Chapter 16

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