Page 57 of Cursed Shadows 2

I can’t keep weeping into the chest of my dearest friend, hoping that fate will steal me away for a better life. I can’t keep pinning all my hopes on Daxeel who loathes me still. And I can’t let anyone else get hurt in their attempts to protect me.

“No.” The word is spoken as firmly as my jaw is set. “Father will see.” He has to. “I have to try. I need to at least try.”

And if I don’t, and our marriage comes to be, I will be the one to pay for what Eamon did. I will pay for his violence with Taroh’s violence.

“Go on without me. I’ll meet you up there,” I tell him.

“Nari—” It’s all he manages before I turn my back on them, then storm back down the stairs.

I leave them for the tower.

And I take my future into my own hands as I march for theoffices.

Closer to the first passage, just two phases away now, the offices are flooded with energy. It’s a taut, tense energy that has me rigid on the wooden chair.

But it’s more than the shouts and rustles of paper behind me in this once-ballroom that has my shoulders curved and my hands clasped too tightly on my lap and my bottom lip nearly bruised from all the anxious chewing.

Opposite the desk, father reclines in his chair. It’s not a relaxed posture, it’s exhausted. His cheek is turned to me, and his eyes are fixed on the dust of a bookshelf.

Everything I told him, from Taroh’s first attack on me ten years ago and how Daxeel saved me, to the slurred words Taroh just fired at me, keeps father in a pensive silence.

I omitted my renewed relationship with Daxeel, of course. I’m a fool, not a dullard.

I think when I first came to father half an hour ago, he was relieved to see me. Grateful that I came to visit him, like he has always been.

Even when I was a child and would come into the library just to play with rocks on the floor beside his desk, he would often spare small smiles on me. Never chide me, never tell me to leave. He would give me parchment scraps and quills so I could pretend to write important letters as he did, but they were just scribbles and sketched suns and trees and spidery figures.

Always glad I visited.

But that softness in his eyes vanished the moment I sat myself down and started with, “Don’t make me marry him.”

His face hardened. He didn’t tense in his chair, he slowly deflated—but he kept his silence and he listened.

Didn’t interrupt me once.

But he offered no surprise, no disgust, no comfort.

So as I sit here now in this punishing quiet, and my heartpounds viciously against my chest, and my nails cut too deep into the meat of my palms, I wait for father to speak.

I wait a long while before, finally, he sighs out words that break the quiet, “My daffodil.”

Hope surges through me. I almost choke on it.

Stiffened on the chair, I lean forward just an inch and rest my hands on the edge of the desk. My wide eyes are glued to father’s profile. I watch his unreadable face glisten like the deepest shade of mahogany under the harsh light of the glowjars.

“My child,” he says softly, then turns to face me. But his gaze is on my hands that grip the table edge. “I spoiled you.”

My lashes flutter once, twice, before my head tilts to the side. A frown wrinkles my face.

“It isn’t a regret. It was done with purpose,” he speaks as though speaking to himself. “I raised you with more care, love and fanciful, pretty dresses than I ever afforded your sister.”

At the mention of Pandora, his gaze lifts over my shoulder.

Frown still etched onto my features, I trace his stare to the entryway to the back of the offices where we’re tucked away. There, between the two bookshelves, my sister hovers.

Unease has her hands fisted at her sides, a nervous trait we share, and her uncertain brown eyes shift between father and me.

I wonder how long she’s been there.

---