Page 28 of Cursed Shadows 2

I speak through gritted teeth, “It’s not that you didn’t save me from this. But that you didn’t try to prevent it.” I answer my father, but I address Pandora too. I look over my shoulder at her and my face pulls tight, strainedlike my heart. “Did you know what you were doing with my life, my future when you stopped taking the potion—or when Ronan decided to forget the seed before he visited you?”

Pandora’s dark brown hair is folded back into a plaited ponytail, one so tight that it pulls on the skin of her face. Her chin lifts, a slight reaction, but one that adds to the stern look she gives me.

My body turns towards them, and I take a single step closer to my stone-faced sister. “Did you both laugh at my fate, that I would die doing what you would survive? Your weakling of a sister, right? That’s what you think of me, what you’ve always thought of me. Nari gets what she deserves, finally.”

Pandora moves for me.

I take a hard step back and lean my weight onto that one boot. My sneer falters her.

“Ronan is taking the seed,” Pandora’s tone comes out like a sheet of glass, and I find nothing to be sorry about it. “How this happened, Nari… I can’t explain because I do not know. It might have been a bad batch of the seed. At the bases, we can’t always know what’s effective—”

I lift my chin, as though defiant, as though tears don’t slip from my watery eyes and run down my blotchy cheeks. “How many others became pregnant from that base and the bad seed?”

Her throat bobs—and that hard swallow is answer enough.

“None?” I arch a brow. “Just you? How fucking convenient.”

Father’s harsh scoff silences me.

Even Pandora drops her gaze to the floor between us.

“Our predicament is unwanted.” Father keeps his stance, he doesn’t move for me, doesn’t offer his hand in comfort like he would have done when I was a child. His eyes have darkened into pits of mud. “However,” he adds, and the chill of his voice bolts my muscles to my bones, “it does not excuse the troubling reports I have heard.”

My mind is flung to Daxeel.

I blink on the image of him standing over me, then the flash of him between my legs.

I steel myself against the memories.

I hold father’s stare.

Father fights the snarl that tugs at his upper lip. “You promised you would stay away from him.”

Hands still fisted at my sides, blood pools at my palms, some trails threading through my fingers. Fleetingly, I think I might need a salve for these cuts from the iilra and scribe.

But I force myself to stand in this moment, to weave around the truths and lies I’ll need to quell father’s wrath.

My promise to him isn’t what he thought it was. My wording was careful.

‘Icanpromise to turn my back on him if he speaks to me.’

“Did I?” Droplets of blood hit the floorboards. I only look at father. “I promised I would walk away if he spoke to me. He hasn’t.”

A lie, a lie, a lie.

One I wouldn’t have dared chance with Eamon out in the hall, but he knows—he figured out my deceit and loves me still.

Father knows nothing about it, and so he takes my words as truth.

His mouth flattens into a hard line.

I can’t tell if he looks defeated or infuriated.

He wouldn’t know anything about Daxeel and me. He only suspects, and that’s just not enough.

Beyond our spat in the hall, when I called him a bedder, Daxeel only spares his words on me when we’re tucked away into a private moment, all because he can’t chance any of his own kind seeing him with me like that, forgiving me for my horrors against him.

My voice is thick as I add, “I can’t help that he’s friends with my friends. Trust me when I tell you this, father, Daxeel’s hate for me runs as deep as you wanted it to when you forced me to break his heart.”

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