just… “But I’m not one of your people.” Not anymore. Not ever as far as she knows. “You don’t have to play avenging Valkyrie for me.”
“You’re mixing up your mythologies.” She examines her nails. She’s painted them a matte beige color that looks professional and sleek. Monroe seems to change her nails a lot. That surprised me the first week, but now I suspect that doing so calms her and gives her some control when she’s feeling out of sorts.
She’s been feeling out of sorts a lot lately.
Or maybe I’m just projecting and the reason she changes her nails a lot is because she is a fickle woman who likes pretty things.
“Shiloh.”
“But why?”
She focuses entirely on me. After a pause where I find myself holding my breath, she crawls across the bed to kneel at my side and take my hand. “Because all children deserve to be protected. I can’t go back and save the child you were, but I can rain down hellfire and damnation on those responsible.” She gets a faraway look in her eyes. “Though, truly, there’s no way at least some people in that town didn’t know. They might have lied to themselves about the warning signs or looked away because it’s easier than fighting on behalf of someone being victimized, but they at least suspected.”
She’s right, of course. Someone did know. Her mother. Oh, I can’t be sure Aisling was aware of the extent of the abuse, but when she caught sight of me that single time, I was a borderline malnourished child. Obviously something was wrong, and she turned away instead of enacting that famous Amazonian justice.
What would Monroe think if she knew that?
It might drive a wedge between her and her mother. Or she might call me a liar and that would be the end of us, right here and now.
“Maybe I should burn the whole fucking town down,” she muses. “That would certainly send a message.”
I don’t mean to take her face in my hands. I really don’t. But my body moves without permission, and her skin is so fucking soft, completely at odds with the fierce violence in her voice. “Monroe,” I say, soft and slow. “You cannot burn down a town for me.” You cannot start a conflict with your own mother for me.
“I most certainly can.” She refocuses on me. “Whether or not I do it is still up for debate. My mother wouldn’t like it, but she wouldn’t stand in my way.”
Saying her mother wouldn’t like it is a giant understatement. Monroe takes my breath away. Rationally, I know she’s the enemy. No matter what I yelled at Broderick earlier, I recognize that Monroe would feed us all to literal wolves if it meant keeping her people safe. Her people that I don’t number among, haven’t for well over ten years. That is admirable from where I’m sitting, but since we’re on opposite sides of the line, it means she’s a threat.
But not even Broderick reacted this strongly to my story.
I don’t want my parents dead…I don’t think. I won’t lie and say that revenge fantasies didn’t get me through my teens and early twenties. But things changed when I joined the Paine brothers. For the first time in my life, I was able to focus on the future instead of the past.
Still…
It’s a heady thing to have all of Monroe’s not-insignificant fury and violence focused on people who hurt me. Focused on them because they hurt me. It’s enough to make me wonder what would have happened if she was the queen who noticed the child being harmed by someone in her inner circle. Maybe it’s naïve to think she would have placed that child’s safety above the petty politics that are demanded of the one who holds the throne.
Maybe… But I can’t shake the feeling that she would have reigned down the same fire and brimstone that she’s threatening to right now.
I don’t have a good response for her. I don’t even know what I want. “I won’t tell you.”
“That’s okay.” I barely have a chance to relax when she says, “I’ll ask Broderick instead.”
That’s a dead end. Broderick doesn’t know where I’m from, either. I never told him, and he respected me enough not to ask. Funny how he understood how to respect boundaries for so long, only to lose that skill the second we arrived back in Sabine Valley. I sigh. “You are something else.”
“You’re not the first one to say it. Though most