Page 28 of Empire of Dark

“I didn’t even know they had found her. Before she was even born, they found her mother and kidnapped her. When Venetia came into this world, they took her and tortured her for years until I got her in my possession. They made her into a vicious, wild animal, at best. I’ve had her for five years. And in that time, I’ve tried to make her as normal as possible. I spent two years on a bloody Himalayan mountain living on rice to make her so. To right her well enough to be around people. And at that, it has only partially worked. My family made her into a monster and I have been trying to take the monster out of her. Or at least tame it, if nothing else.”

I turned to look at him. “I wasn’t supposed to meet her, was I?”

“No.”

No apology. No hiding that fact.

“So she’s been forced to creep around the castle, hiding from me at every corner?”

“Yes.” His shoulders lifted, almost in defeat. Not that Damen struck me as the sort that would ever be defeated. “I didn’t want you to meet her. The last time she met someone new…” He paused looking to the left. “The last time she met someone new she reacted poorly and tried to destroy part of my life. Nearly killed people I cherished.”

I puffed out an exhale.

His gaze crawled back to me, his words biting. “So you can imagine that teaching her to read has been last on my list of priorities.”

“Oh.”

“Oh?” His dark left eyebrow quirked up. “No apology?”

Heat started to burn my cheeks. I’d been ready to crucify him at the stake for neglecting his daughter’s basic needs, but I had been…wrong.

I swallowed hard and gave him slight nod. “I apologize. I…I met so many young people over the years at the Academy that have come in like her, without basic skills, basically neglected until they are useful as a puppet of some sort, that I…”

“Assumed?”

“Yes. And I should not have.”

He gave me a cool stare, a streak of his earlier ire sparking in his bourbon maple syrup-colored eyes. “Then you’ll forgive me if I get back to work.”

I nodded again, humiliation blazing a trail up my spine. But I held my head high. The last thing I was going to do was crawl out of here. “Thank you for the information about her. I know you did not need to share.”

“It is, as you reminded me, your home for the time being, so it seemed right that you knew.” His glare speared into me. “But I give you this warning. Stay away from her.”

My tongue stuck without words, I turned and walked out of his office.

There was more to Damen than I had imagined.

I didn’t particularly relish the thought.

Chapter Seven

{ DAMEN }

And just like that, I lost her. Lost my pathway into her mind.

I’d held Ada at a distance for the last few weeks, hoping to learn more about her—everything in her mind she wouldn’t tell me.

But when she’d barreled into my study, barreled into my space with her breath raging and her eyes wild, I’d lost her.

Snap.

Just like that.

Too close.

In that second I felt something. Felt something I never had and couldn’t identify. Like I wanted to be inside her skin in that moment to feel what was pounding through her body as she was raging into my space.

That odd feeling had shifted my center just enough to lose her. My ability to read her slipping through the quicksand under my feet.

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