Page 89 of Possess Me at Midnight
Seeing Sabelle react exactly as I knew she would is both gratifying and frustrating. From this, I know precisely how she’ll feel about the rest of my story.
“Five times a day. Every day, yes. When Gailene was born, my father had no use for a girl child. In his eyes, she was but another mouth to feed. She would never add to our wealth or defend our dwelling. She would never advance our family in magical politics or marry well enough to distinguish us in any particular way. So the day she was born, he tried to kill her.”
Sabelle gasps. The horror streaking across her face is unmistakable. But I’m not done.
“My mother convinced him otherwise, and because he had high hopes of getting another son on her quickly, it behooved him to keep her happy. He allowed her to keep the girl child, with the understanding that their every spare moment would be consumed in the conception of another son. But the girl was to be given no comforts. Food was only hers if there were leftovers.”
Hell, she looks at me now with a mixture of pity and horror, and it’s all I can do to keep my fist from finding the nearest wall or breaking down the damned concrete wall I’ve encased my tears in long ago.
“This…was Gailene’s room?”
I nod. “I gave her my blankets. She had none. I often gave her my food. I tried to protect her from my father’s rants and fists. Though I told him I did those things in order to become a tougher wizard, he knew I lied. He mocked me and said that no warrior of merit had such a soft heart. He said it would be my downfall and resolved to cure me of it.”
“She was a child. You were protecting her. How could he be so cruel to his own flesh and blood?”
I shrug. “My father was not a good man. He and my mother tried for many years to have another son, but after delivering two children so close together, my mother did not become fertile again as quickly as he wanted. Finally, she conceived again when I was twenty, Gailene seventeen. My mother and infant brother died shortly thereafter. Suddenly, my father’s only reason for allowing Gailene to stay in the house was dead.”
“What did he do?” She blanches. Her face says that she isn’t certain she wants to know, and I hardly blame her.
“My father, who had encouraged my friendship with Bram and others associated with the Council, ordered me away from our house.” I remember clearly the foreboding, the finality in my father’s words. I tried every excuse imaginable to stay with Gailene.
“My father promised me he would allow her to remain as long as I continued to cultivate the friendships that could return us to the glory the Rykards had known before the Social Order stripped us of our titles, wealth, and lands. For her, I made friends of many involved with the Council, but I genuinely liked your brother. I saw that his ambition to rule the Council someday was motivated by a very clear vision of leadership and equality for magickind. I was jealous of his privilege, but I supported him. I believed in him.
“But that day when I came home, Gailene was gone.”
“Your father let Mathias kill her?”
“He sold Gailene to the evil bastard. He told Mathias that he didn’t care what became of her.”
“She was seventeen!” Sabelle’s face turns an even chalkier shade of white, and perverse satisfaction fills me.
“Yes. Mathias told me her screams as he forcibly took her virginity were delectable, but she became regrettably weepy, which forced him to give her to the Anarki, who quickly used her up. Finally, Mathias had one of his minions dump her bloodied and spent corpse on the beach nearby. After days of frantically searching, I found her body.”
I still recall the utter horror of finding the one person I loved so horribly abused and callously murdered. The fury, the desolation, the sense of failure…
“And so you attacked Mathias’s compound and tried to kill as many Anarki as possible in revenge?”
“Yes.”
“Which made everyone believe you were mad. Then you tried to use your connection to Bram to secure an open Council seat so you could somehow punish Mathias?”
“Yes.”
“And when he refused, you felt that he’d betrayed your friendship because he knew how important Gailene was to you?”
I clench my fists. “Yes.”
“Oh, Ice.”
She looks as if her heart breaks for me. I don’t want her goddamn pity, just her understanding for the blow I know will come next. And maybe, though I fear it will be too much to hope for, her understanding that I will never lie to her or use her.
“What did you say to your father?” she whispers.
“Nothing. I simply killed him.”
Sabelle
Suddenly, I understand with perfect clarity in that moment why everyone believes Ice insane: demanding a Council seat from Bram at the expense of their friendship, attacking Mathias in his own lair and slaughtering a hundred Anarki alone, killing his father—all by age twenty. Put together with the fact that he’s since isolated himself, comes from a family many think beneath them, and lives in a cave, Ice makes the perfect picture of a social outcast. The Deprived’s poster boy.
