loved it when everyone else was fast asleep, and she wasn’t surrounded by the constant hum of chatter from other people—people who had all their crap together. The night was the only time she had any semblance of peace. But tonight, it wasn’t enough.
She rubbed her hand across her chest, trying to ease the ache that had begun growing inside the minute she’d first heard Liam’s voice.
“Dammit.” Gabby growled for the hundredth time. Apparently, her vocabulary had dumbed itself down to that one word. She’d been saying it either in her mind or out loud ever since she’d met the water elementalist. How in the world was she supposed to focus on her training at Terra Academy with him around? And how was she going to keep herself from getting too close to Tara when she so desperately wanted a friend? Just admitting that to herself was beyond something she thought she’d ever do.
Somehow, in the three years she’d been at Crimson Academy, she’d managed to keep her distance from her fellow students. It was probably why she was batshit crazy—that and the fact she still carried the rage her parents had beaten into her. She’d learned a long time ago there was a certain look she could keep in her eyes that caused other people to keep their distance from her. A hardness, an edge that was easy for Gabby to maintain because her emotions had spent so much time being ground against the whetstone of her parents’ indifference. When she realized the power of that look, she’d decided to go big or go home. She owned it as much as every great psychopath throughout history had owned their crazy. And Gabby didn’t apologize for the way she was. Why should she? She’d been a kid—a helpless child when her parents had starved her, beaten her, and verbally abused her. At first, she’d so desperately wanted their love that she would do anything to try to earn it.
Gabby had cried, begged, and promised to forgive them and love them if they would just love her back. Once upon a time, she’d been a small girl with hope in her eyes. But that hope had been ripped out of her until nothing but a giant hole remained. Something had to fill that hole. That something was the crazy.
Now, her mind was a chaotic wildfire. The only time it didn’t race was when she was using her magic or training. Apparently, violence was her jam. It quieted her mind. Go figure.
As her mind filled with the memories of a childhood she’d been desperately trying to forget for nearly seven years, tears ran down her cheeks.
Gabby rarely let herself cry. Her parents didn’t deserve her tears, but the lost little girl inside of her did. So, in the quiet of the night, with everyone else peacefully sleeping in their beds, Gabby let herself mourn the things she’d lost or never had. Her innocence had been stripped away before she was five years old. The world that she should have been protected from had been welcomed into her home, and she’d been thrown right into the middle of the storm.
Her body shook as sorrow attempted to suffocate her. She tried to suck in air, but her lungs were so tight she couldn’t get anything inside.
Gabby rolled onto her side and drew her legs up, wrapping her arms around them and burying her head into the tops of her knees. She didn’t try to silence the sounds. She couldn’t have even if she wanted to. The pain was too much. She didn’t know what was going on between her and Liam. But meeting him had opened the dungeon she’d shoved all of her past into, the dark place where her pain could at least be contained. Now, the locks on the dungeon door had been broken and the emotions were fleeing like prisoners escaping the gallows. Her brief encounter with Liam had caused the magic inside of her, and something deeper, to cry out with such need that she’d had to turn to the rage to keep herself together.
But she couldn’t hold it together any longer. In order to be able to face Tara and Liam again, she was going to have to put all of it back in the dungeon and relock that shit—even tighter this time. There was no other choice. She might even have to request being removed from the training program, though it would put a hole in her pride