Page 96 of Empire of Dark
Hell.
My world spun fully around, yanking the last thin vestiges of gravity out from under me.
In too deep.
Too fucking deep.
Chapter Twenty-Five
{ ADA }
“You don’t know how to read, do you?” The teenage girl pointed up at the sign on the corner of the buildings.
Her friend next to her cackled, cruel, as her pinched eyes scoured Venetia up and down. “What a fucking idiot. We thought you’d be cool, but you’re nothing but a moron. It’s in English and Italian. Did school kick you out for stupidity? Do you have a small brain? Is that what you’re hiding under all that hair?”
On the street in front of me, I heard the last few comments of the teenagers in front of Venetia and my heart twisted and sank.
Sank for all the sweet teenage girls that had ever been stung by the barbs of vicious girls that had never learned that tearing others down was nothing more than a reflection of their own rotted souls.
Dammit. Venetia didn’t need this—didn’t deserve this.
She’d been so happy. So damn happy all day, going in and out of shops with me and filling her father’s arms with so many bags—stuff she bought just because it was heavy and she wanted to annoy him. Who needed solid brass door stoppers shaped like pugs? No one. But she’d asked Damen and he’d relented, then dutifully taken the bag.
He was, frankly, unable to say no to her, when all she wanted was trinkets and clothes. So seemingly normal, I’d chuckled under my breath a few times during the day.
I’d have to have a talk with him about limits and about telling Venetia “no” once in a while. As father-daughter, they’d never gone through the five-year-old stage where the child asked for everything under the moon and the parent had to say no. Limits were good for everyone.
Yet still, it’d been such a great day. Venetia had been so damn happy.
Hesitant at first, but happy.
I’d never seen it on her, and her smile had been glorious, bleeding outward to make everyone around her happy.
So happy, she grasped at a tiny slice of independence and wanted to venture off on her own to the next clothing shop at the end of the row of stores and then meet us at the gelato shop around the corner. Damen had scoffed with instant refusal, but we had both pleaded with him and he’d relented.
He went to drop off the many bags lining his arms and pick up my arm cuff from being fixed at the metalsmith, while I went into a shop to get new sneakers for our training sessions—the ones I had at the castle had nearly worn through on my pivot toe. Both of us thinking twenty minutes of freedom for Venetia could do no harm.
And now this.
Cruelty that sliced extra sharp. Cruelty from someone her own age, when she knewno oneher own age.
Her back to me, I couldn’t see her face and I was momentarily grateful for that fact. I didn’t want to see it in her, see her amber eyes going wounded, her lips pulling back in embarrassment. I didn’t want to see the pain.
I could see enough of it in her shoulders. How they suddenly drooped, hurt, beaten.
Damn those little twits.
They’d looked innocent enough—I could see why Venetia would have approached them. Instead, all she’d gotten was vicious scorn.
I felt it under my feet before I saw it, the sudden rumble under my toes. Slight at first, then vibrating under my soles until the quiver shot up through my shins to my knees.
An earthquake. But not any earthquake I’d ever felt.
Panic setting in, I looked the five feet in front of me to Venetia’s back, ready to whisk her to safety when I saw it coming from her hands.
Her hands parallel with the ground, her palms were aimed at the cobblestones of the street. A wispy green substance looked to be shooting from her palms—like light or smoke, but tinted green.
Fuck.