Page 122 of This Dark Descent
Ari gritted her teeth, driving her fingers through the knots of her hair. “We both are.”
“What?” Mikira’s voice was small now, unsure, and Ari watched the color pale from her face as she told her about her first golem, her Saba’s death, her flight from the only home she’d ever known.
“That was an accident,” Mikira said hoarsely. “It doesn’t make you a monster, Ari. Not like him.”
Ari bit out a sharp laugh. Would Mikira say the same if she knew about Kyvin? If Ari carved Rezek apart before her, would she still defend her? This was the difference between them. Mikira still wanted to be herself at the end of all this. Ari wanted to be something more.
Something untouchable.
“It’s not what I’ve done that makes me a monster, Kira,” she rasped. “It’s that if given the choice to do it all over again, knowing what it meant—I’m not sure if I could give up this power.”
A sense of satisfaction emanated from deep within her, that other presence preening with an unparalleled delight. It’d been waiting for this. Wanting it.
Mikira swallowed tightly, and aware of it or not, she retreated a half step. It was all it took for Ari to have her answer. Mikira couldn’t know the truth of her darkness.
She couldn’t accept it.
Ari didn’t stop her as she left.
THAT NIGHT, WHILEReid and Damien were in their respective rooms getting ready for the closing ball, Ari stood at the desk and stared at the Racari. This was the first moment of solitude she’d had to truly consider what had happened yesterday during the race.
She could no longer ignore it. Her magic was straining at her control, and it was connected to this book, to the bloodstone that bound them. It hummed beneath her touch, begging her to open it, to use it, its pearlescent ribbing almost pulsing.
Do it, said the voice.
“Arielle?”
Damien stood in the doorway to his bedroom, dressed in a crisp red shirt set beneath a slate-gray waistcoat. His black jacket hung over one shoulder hooked by two fingers, and dark strands of hair curled across his brow.
She pushed the book from her mind. “You look nice.”
He stepped aside as she approached. “Not half so much as you.”
The simple compliment brought a blush to her cheeks, and she ran her fingers across his stomach as she passed.
Inside, she washed and dressed, carefully finding her way into a new gown he’d bought her. Deep sapphire accented in gold, it hugged her curves in all the right places. Her hair she left down around her shoulders, her only ornament the emerald ring Damien had given her.
She stepped out to find him curved over his desk cleaning his revolvers. For a moment she simply watched him. He worked with a delicate precision, the look on his face familiar—it was the way she felt when she crafted a golem, both enamored with her power and utterly at its mercy.
It was how she felt about him, and how he felt about her.
He looked up as she approached, his gaze taking all of her in. She let herself bask in that look of wonder.
“There’s something I want to tell you,” she said.
He set down his tools, giving her his full attention. The words rose and hovered in her throat, and she thought of her golems, of how they could come undone, exposing their true natures.
She felt like that now. Like a fruit peeled to reveal the rot underneath.
Still, she forced the words out. “I killed my Saba a year ago, and the other night, I killed Kyvin.”
She gave no excuse, no explanation. What mattered was the blood on her hands, not the reasons it had been shed.
Damien stood, and for a moment, she expected him to order her out of his home. To say she was dangerous. To say she was a monster.
Instead, he closed the distance between them. His eyes held hers with an affection bordering on reverence, and it was in that moment, her lips hovering before his, that she understood: she could destroy him if she wanted to.
If he didn’t destroy her first.
