Page 82 of Empire of Dark
“Lenora.”
“Len.” The nickname seeped from my lips in a whisper, my chest gone heavy.
“You know her?”
I nodded, shuffling steps to my left on legs that were quickly becoming numb. I sank onto the rock wall of a raised flower bed. “Len was one of my students at the Academy—ten years or so ago.”
“At the Academy? But she’s malefic.”
I nodded. “There are occasions where malefics are allowed to attend. Len was one of those exceptions.”
“I didn’t know that.”
I nodded. “Deals are made for reasons I don’t know. And the occasional malefic we get there—they are adults, but just barely. They’re really still kids in so many ways. Still pliable. Not set into what their blood demands of them. They don’t hate like we hate. They aren’t vicious like those that have steeped that hatred in their veins for decades or centuries or millennia.”
My head fell forward and I cradled my face in my hands. “Len—I loved her. She managed to have a kind heart in a family of brutal cutthroats.”
“Well, some of those cutthroats are dead. Eustice took out four of her cousins when he stole her.”
“Is she alive?”
“She is. And that is the only saving grace at the moment.”
My eyes in a cringe, I peeked at him through my fingers. “Intact?”
“I presume. Eustice doesn’t usually carve his initials into women until he’s done fucking them. A parting gift.”
My hands dropped from my face and I glared up at him. “Fucking asshole.”
“Yep.”
I expelled a long breath. Damen couldn’t control his brothers, even if I sure as hell wish he did. Even though I wanted to, I couldn’t blame him for their actions.
I looked away from him for a long moment, staring at a vulture circling, catching wind high beside the opposite mountain peak. “Is the Genora family an ally?”
“They are, or they were.” He shrugged. “Who knows after this? In our world, an ally flips to an enemy with the slightest whiff of a brisk wind.”
“A Poppins wind?” I quirked an eyebrow at him.
He rolled his eyes, but the frown that had marred his face since he took the phone call evened out to a grim line.
I’d take it.
He heaved a sigh. “I had a chance to kill Eustice a year ago. I didn’t take it. I should have.”
My head snapped back. “Why didn’t you?”
His head dropped, his glare on the ground as he kicked at the gravel with the toe of his boot. “He is my brother. I’ve already lost so many of them.”
I jumped to my feet, stepping in front of him. “Your brother is unhinged—a menace to humans, panthenites, and malefics alike and has killed countless people—yet he gets to live merely because he’s your brother?”
His eyes lifted to me, haunted, and I could see the regret and hesitancy weigh him down. He didn’t ask for this—for any of it—yet he’d somehow in this life become the keeper of a menagerie of demons.
His shoulders lifted. There was no excuse for his lack of action, and he wasn’t even going to try.
I took a step toward him, reaching for one of his clenched fists, and I grabbed it, gently unfurling the tight grip and swirling my fingertips across his palm. I looked up at him. “Then can I be your sister?”
At that, his eyes closed and the softest chuckle came from him, his head shaking.