Page 21 of Empire of Dark
Her head went down as she reclasped the cuff around her upper arm. “It is how they mark us. The breeders.”
“They brand you? Like cattle? With a hot iron?”
“Yes.” She glared at me, daring me to say something.
I had no trouble taking that dare. “And you think malefics have issues with the boundaries of right and wrong.” I whistled out a sigh, shaking my head. “I can tell you one thing—we certainly don’t brand our breeders like that.”
“Maybe you should.” She shot back, her voice snide. “Maybe you wouldn’t need to steal away a panthenite to right your genes and balance out the world if your kind had paid more attentionto who rutted about with whom and what sort of abhorrent offspring it was creating.”
That, there was truth in.
But I would never let her know it.
“What do you know, you silly, little girl?” My words clipped out, harsh at her. “You haven’t even been out in the world in a hundred years. You’ve been squirreled away from the real world, living in a dream. You are the one that knows nothing, yet you think to pontificate on what it takes for both of our species to survive? Live in the real world. Live with the death and the machinations and the cruelty of both of our kinds for another hundred years, and then come and tell me we’ve been doing it all wrong.”
Her mouth clamped closed. Her eyes widening in shock.
Funny.
She thought I was benign. Or at the very least, overly accommodating.
She thought wrong.
I did what I did for one purpose only, and that was to breed the next generation of malefics, and if I was lucky, half-breeds—panthenite-malefics.
Ada was just a means to that end, and the sooner she understood that, the better.
She pushed herself back from the table.
I didn’t even need to ask her if she was ready to start mating. I already knew she was going to be a hard one to crack, but crack her I would.
After all, I did already know her favorite food.
Chapter Six
{ ADA }
Damen was charming. Disarmingly so. And the damn bastard knew it.
Annoying as hell.
In the last two weeks, I’d been eating with him every morning and every night—with never even so much as a nibble on a biscuit for me in between those times. I’d hoarded bottles of wine and pitchers of water from the dining table, bringing them to my room so I didn’t get dehydrated in between meals.
Extreme, yes, but I wasn’t taking any chances with the asshole.
The dining hall was a two-story behemoth of a room with fat stone walls, an arched ceiling with cathedral-like beams holding the weight of the wood, and an enormous fireplace that could fit five people standing upright within it. Black leather club chairs were angled in front of the fireplace, and an oak table commanded the middle of the room, long and wide enough to easily hold fifty people, but it only ever held the two of us. And every time I’d walk out of the dining hall with a wine bottle or a pitcher in-hand, Damen would only smile.
A self-satisfied smirk that told me, one, he thought I was ridiculous, and two, he wasn’t about to stop me. Humoring mewas too entertaining. He knew he’d wormed into my brain with the mention of drugging me—empty threat or not.
It had been infuriating that every single meal beyond that first meal we’d shared, he’d been pleasant. It was easy to be lulled into normalcy, for the lines had been firmly drawn in that first dinner. I was intent on hating his kind and denying him. He was intent on breaking me down and having me willingly in his bed.
We both knew exactly where the other stood, and it had been oddly freeing.
There had even been moments where Damen had been entertaining—funny even—and I’d slipped, my laughter cutting into the air.
It irked me to no end, those few times I had laughed with him. Not at all what I intended to do here.
Yet for as much as I wanted to hate him—as much as I was naturally inclined to hate him merely for the Folotto blood that flowed through his veins—I couldn’t.