Lightbringer (Empirium #3) - Claire Legrand Page 0,79

to be furious.

She made her voice steady. “Remy was shot that day. Shot in the gut. He died, and I healed him.”

“Yes.”

“‘Save him, or watch him die.’ That’s what you said to me.” Eliana’s mouth soured at the memory. It was mortifying to think of her old, foolish self. “You held me. You told me you weren’t letting go of me.”

Silence. Not even a shift of weight. He was a lifeless painting, watching her unravel.

Eliana forced the words out. “I let you fuck me.”

A tiny smirk played at the corner of Simon’s mouth. “And I thank you for that. I needed it.”

His words punched her, and her stomach lurched to hear them, but she remained standing. Heat flared in her palms; she hardly noticed it.

“I keep hearing something in my head,” she said through her teeth. “At first, I didn’t recognize the voice. It was distorted, distant, and my mind’s been run ragged. But now I know it belongs to Remy. I’ve been hearing it for…” She hesitated. In her mind, days became weeks became hours. She didn’t know how long she had been hearing it.

“I don’t know why it’s happening,” she said at last, “but I’ve heard Remy say the same phrase dozens of times now. ‘Will you hurt me to get her back?’”

She searched every scar on Simon’s face, the curve of his bottom lip, the sharp line of his jaw. A bead of sweat rolled down her neck. She imagined striking him with fists of fire, what his face would betray as he burned.

“‘Get her back’,” she whispered. “Get me back. Because Harkan had taken me. It made sense to me that you brought Remy with you when you came after me. You loved me, I thought. You wanted me to be with my brother because it would make me happy.”

Eliana approached him slowly. Her gown’s heavy train trailed across the floor. “But now I understand. Now I see that you never loved me. Every time you touched me was a lie. So why, then, would you drag along my little brother when you could have moved more quickly without him?”

Simon watched her approach, his expression still as an etching.

“Because you were desperate for my power to surface,” Eliana answered. “You wanted to see more than patchy summoned fires and ships sunk by storms. You wanted to see my real power so it would awaken yours, and you knew the best way to scare it out of me.”

Three steps from him, Eliana stopped. A distant roar of anger churned in her ears. Her body ached with tension. “You shot him.”

Simon’s smirk returned. His eyes glinted, lupine. “I did. I shot him right in the gut.”

With a terrible sharp cry, Eliana lunged at him, her fist raised to strike. He shot forward to meet her, blocked her punch with his own. His fist caught her on the arm, and then the other dealt a hard blow to her stomach. Once, she would have recovered quickly from that, but weeks at sea followed by weeks in the prison of Corien’s mind had left her thin and soft.

She staggered from the blow, gulping for air, but the white-hot blades of fury blazing up her spine would not let her rest. She flew at Simon, advancing on him with wild kicks and punches, her throat raw from her screams. He trapped her in his arms; she jabbed him in the ribs with her elbow, then turned and clipped his jaw with a ferocious punch. He faltered; she kneed him in the groin.

As he stumbled, she whirled around, grabbed a vase from a table, and brought it crashing down on his head. He staggered, and when she kicked him, he flew clear across the room and collided with the far wall. Several framed paintings crashed to the floor; he slumped beside them, his face streaked with blood. On his left, the hearth simmered.

Eliana sank fast to the rug. Rage held her shaking in its grasp, turned her vision red and black. The windows cracked in their panes. On the mantle, candles became blazing spears of flame. Beyond the terrace, out in the city, a slender white tower swayed and collapsed. Distant cries of alarm floated up through the palace.

Not here. Eliana huddled in a tight ball on the floor, her clasped hands hidden against her chest.

Not here, not here. She was herself. She was a girl, a child, an infant.

Not here, not ever again. She was clean and swaddled in white. Soft