Page 110 of Empire of Dark

Numb, my legs moving, I walked out of the cell. Where was Cletus’s body? His ash? Had I incinerated him so thoroughly, he was now nothing but air?

My legs kept moving. Stepping over bodies in the hallway. Up the stairs. More bodies. Maids. Footmen. Soldiers.

Out the door.

Air. Real air.

More bodies. Innocent bodies. Humans.

I walked for two miles before the bodies ended. Before they stopped littering my path.

Like a bomb had gone off and indiscriminately killed everything in its path.

And I was the bomb.

…An excruciating pain ripped through my head and I was kicked out of the ugly orange light—it scattered away from me, dissolving into a dot before I landed back in my own head.

Oriane’s hands dropped away from both my head and Ada’s, and she fell onto the floor, her body convulsing, half dead.

My eyes lifted, staring at Ada. Her anger that I’d just felt as my own through Oriane so deep and visceral I couldn’t move, could barely think.

Except for one throbbing thought.

She killed Rodo.

Rodolfo was the one trying to help her. Trying to free her.

She killedRodo.

She killed my brother, the only person that had ever loved me. Ever seen value in me.

I was staring at the one person I’d been searching a century for. Staring at the person that ruined everything good in my life long ago.

She killed him and she didn’t even fucking know what she did to me in that moment. I could see it in her eyes.

Ada’s eyes closed, her body swaying for a long moment as she heaved breaths, and then she finally opened her eyes and met my glare. “You understand now?”

“I do. I understand every fucking thing.”

She nodded, her stare locked onto mine. “It isn’t that the pain can’t escape, it’s that I won’t let it escape. It does, and it will kill everything around me.”

“You killed Lyle.”

“I had to.” She blinked, heart-wrenching pain twinging across her eyes. “There was nothing left of him but a stump. They’d shredded his limbs. Fate worse than death. Entrails ripped about. In so much pain. All because I couldn’t tell them how my skin did what it did.”

My eyes narrowed at her. “You killed him. The one that was about to help you.”

“I did. The only one that was kind to me. That gave me a sliver of hope. Even if it had been false hope.” The words came from her mouth wooden, unemotional. Not that any sane person could attach emotion to what she’d suffered—and then what she’d done—and live with it. “I did. I didn’t know what I was capable of. I destroyed everything around me without thought. Malefic. Innocent humans. Lyle. I did that.”

The door to the library opened behind her and my brother stepped into the room. Cletus looked to Ada, with just enough angle to see her profile.

Glee lit up his face.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

{ ADA }

Love.

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