Page 140 of In Violent Waves

Wilder smirked. “We have no books about elves,” he mimicked her.

She grimaced. “Sorry about that.”

He shook his head and smiled. “Continue.”

“I read all about the wars between your kingdoms, the different types of magics, and even your holidays. Ostara sounded exciting, and I dreamed of dancing in a ballroom.”

She sighed and closed her eyes, remembering how it felt to spin around her room in Atlantis.

“Seraphina and Marina were the only two who knew about the books. One of them tipped the maid off who cleaned my room. She found the book and the others I had stashed and turned them over to my father. I was punished, and the books were destroyed.”

Wilder ground his teeth and shifted narrowed eyes to her. “That’s dreadful.”

She nodded and sucked her lips into her mouth. “Months later, when I ran away, one of them told my father where I had gone. It’s things like that. I’ve come to realize they’re not genuine. At least, not in the sense that yours are. Maelys would have never ratted you out, and Otto or Ridge would have given you sanctuary.”

“They are good friends.”

He cast the line out again, and a cloud floated across the sun, casting them in shadow.

“Maelys tended to my back when I was returned from Igneous’ clan. Otto and Ridge refused to leave my side until I was healed and even sometime after that.”

“Your back?” Lyra questioned, sitting up straighter.

“I don’t like people knowing, usually.”

“May I see?”

He sighed and leaned forward. “Just don’t—scream.”

His words had her stomach flipping.What could be so bad he thought she would scream?

Lyra pulled the hem of his shirt up and did, in fact, want to scream. Puckered red skin in varying lengths and depths, by the coloring, crisscrossed his back in a gruesome pattern. Scars the width of her finger looked angry and swollen. While longer scars bordered on violet in color and violent in nature.

It made her chest ache and bile burn the back of her throat as she thought about what tremendous pain he had undergone.

“Who did this?” she asked as calmly as she could, but there was no hiding the tremble in her voice.

“Mainly, Igneous—the alpha. But at times, he allowed others to join in.”

She dropped his shirt and clenched her hand into a tight fist. She wanted to kill them. Kill them all for the violence they had waged across his skin.

Their experiences had been similar, although they had coped in vastly different ways. He wasn’t a monster like she had been told the elves were. Not even close.

Monsters don’t apologize or admit when they are wrong.But it was more than that; she realized his past and his father’s opinion of him were his driving force in life.

Every decision he made was weighed against it. Much like her every decision was weighed against her father’s promise of freedom.

They were two sides of the same coin.

“It makes sense now,” she said.

“What does?”

“Why you seemed so familiar to me the first time I saw you.”

He turned and grinned at her. The emotion in his gaze was unbearable as it cracked her open and threatened to spill every emotional thought she had brewing.

Lyra cleared her throat. “Um, you won’t catch any fish with that.”