Page 51 of This Dark Descent
“Branch,” Reid called.
Mikira threw up a hand, expecting the scrape of leaves, but found only air. When her eyes opened, she found nothing but clear space.
“You’re insufferable,” she said, though a smile tugged at her lips.
Reid smirked. “I try.”
The more time she spent with him, the more she realized just how true that was. He did try, and she couldn’t for the life of her understand why. As much as Reid wanted people to think it, he wasn’t quite so horrible as he seemed. Yes, he was as grumpy as a cat that’d had its tail stepped on, and yes he couldn’t resist making bitter, sardonic remarks about almost everything, but he also made tea for everyone at the end of a long day, and reorganized Damien’s books when he’d made a mess of them, and helped Widget onto the sofa when the little cat pretended he couldn’t doit himself. Yet he poked everyone around him with a sharp stick without care for who bit him.
You make them a shield so they can’t make them a weapon.
“Why are you such an ass all the time?” She asked it lightheartedly, both hoping he’d sense the real question underneath and simultaneously afraid of it. Getting to know him, to know Damien and Ari, hadn’t been a part of her plan. Yet she’d come to realize that despite her attempts to keep them at arm’s length, shelikedarguing with Reid, Ari was gentle and kind, and as much as he could make her nervous, Damien also made her feel like someone was watching her back.
“Why do you have the self-control of Atara before a bushel of apples?” Reid tossed the pinecone up and caught it.
“Because I spent half my life trying to be what other people wanted me to be, and they just tossed me aside anyway.”
Reid stared at her. Clearly he hadn’t been expecting a real answer. She shrugged, uncomfortable. It was the closest she’d ever come to talking about her childhood. She hadn’t even told her sisters what had happened. How one day she’d had friends, and the next she’d been completely, utterly alone.
“It started with a neighborhood boy I grew up with,” Mikira said. “At first, he didn’t mind me hanging out with him and his friends. He didn’t even mind me beating him in races. Until suddenly he did. I started losing on purpose after that.”
She thought of Ailene in the kitchen, skin bruised and eyes fierce. Of the way the world would try to control her like it had Mikira. As much as she’d tried, she couldn’t stop the way people had looked at her and whispered behind her back. She tried to curb her tongue, to be polite and respectful like they wanted, but it was like bending her bones into a new shape: she couldn’t be something she wasn’t.
“One day he tried to kiss me. I shoved him into the mud.” She flinched at the memory. “I laughed, thinking it a game, but he was furious.” Thethings he’d called her sat engraved in her memory. Bitch. Whore. Worthless girl.
“‘You’re just like everyone says you are,’ he said. ‘You just can’t keep your mouth shut.’ So I threw him into the mud again. After that, they wanted nothing to do with me.”
No matter that their mothers were royal magistrates and army sergeants. No matter that their sisters won gold in the city’s top races. They could handle strong women, so long as they still acted like they thought a woman should. Mikira’s frankness, her physicality—they were too aggressive, too much.
Reid studied the pinecone in his hand as though it might offer the secrets of the universe. “Their loss.”
Her gaze snapped to him, but he wouldn’t look at her. Surely she’d heard him wrong. That had actually sounded… nice. The edges of a smile pulled at her lips, but it quickly faded as she thought of Talyana. She’d stayed. At least at first. Then Rezek had come.
Reid tossed the pinecone again, his expression pinched. “I grew up in a mortuary,” he said at last. “I worked there most of my childhood.”
“What was that like?”
“People can be cruel when they’re in pain.” He ran his fingers along the sleeve of one forearm absently, tracing the lines of the tattoos beneath. “They only ever came to us when their world had been torn apart, and when we didn’t look at the body of their loved one and break down like them, they hated us for that too. Toss in a pale, spindly kid who looked more like a corpse himself and liked to talk about blood vessels and arteries, and, well…” He shrugged.
Mikira could picture his childhood with discomforting ease. The way he must have stood apart, turning instead to study and experiments, solitary things that couldn’t reject him. She could see how someone like that would grow thorns.
She’d done the same.
She cast a sidelong glance at him. The sunlight lent his unruly black hair a blue sheen, like the glisten on a raven’s feathers. He was still tall and lean, but far from spindly, and he held the pinecone to his chest as though seeking comfort from it.
“That sounds… lonely,” she said softly.
Reid smiled wistfully. “That’s how I first met Damien. His mother had just died, and we handled her burial.” His smile faltered, and he slowed to a halt, studying the black lines poking out beneath his sleeve.
“Ari told me what happened with Loic and Atara.” Mikira faced him. “She said it sounded like you had a history with him.”
“Something like that.” Reid tugged his sleeves down, and she didn’t press him further.
By the time they saw Atara to the stables, the clouded sky had grown dark with promised rain, and dusk had fallen. As they returned to the manor, Mikira felt oddly lighter, even with Reid griping about the mud on his boots.
“I’m taking a very long bath,” he said as Mikira pushed open the sitting room door.
A tiny white shape barreled into her. She caught it, stumbling back, and Reid caught her. They both stared at the wriggling mass of fluff in her arms.
