Rogue Descendant (Nikki Glass) - By Jenna Black Page 0,80

have been begging Anderson to kill her. But despite the horrors I’d seen in the last few months, becoming Liberi hadn’t stopped me from being a bleeding heart. I wanted Emma to pay for what she’d done—and tried to do—and I wanted her not to be able to hurt me again, but I didn’t want her to pay with her life. If she were tried in a court of law, she might well get a verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity. Confinement in a mental institution might be the most appropriate sentence, but I was under no illusion that it was an option.

For the first time since he’d set foot in my sitting room, something stirred behind Anderson’s eyes. I couldn’t have said what it was—the expression was gone almost before I had a chance to notice the change—but it made my heart skip a beat in primal terror. I dropped my gaze to the floor, an instinctive gesture of submission, and held my breath. I didn’t like this lifeless talking shell of his, but even that one tiny glimpse of what lay beneath had told me in no uncertain terms that the shell was the lesser of two evils. If and when Anderson unleashed everything he was suppressing, I didn’t want to be anywhere near him.

I felt his eyes boring through me for what felt like forever. I kept my own gaze pinned to the floor, and my lungs started to burn with the pressure of holding my breath.

I didn’t give in to the need to breathe until Anderson had left the room and closed the door behind him.

I didn’t get a whole lot of sleep on Saturday night, despite my exhaustion. When I lay down to try to relax, I kept obsessing about what had almost happened to me. Just thinking about it flooded my system with adrenaline. And to make matters worse, when I closed my eyes I was immediately transported into the memory of the darkness of death.

I knew from previous experience—and from talking with Jamaal about his own experiences—that my fear of the darkness would fade over time. Every night, it would be just a little bit easier. But that didn’t help me much on this first night. I wished Jamaal would come up to my room and sing me asleep as he had the first time I’d died, but it wasn’t going to happen.

Eventually, exhaustion won out over terror, though it did so not when I was lying comfortably in my bed, but when I was on the couch in the sitting room playing solitaire on my laptop. I remember waking up briefly hours later, when there was a roll of thunder so violent it made the whole house shake. My laptop slid off my lap and onto the floor, but I wasn’t awake enough to bother picking it up.

I’d fallen asleep sitting up, and during that brief period of wakefulness, I stretched myself out on the couch, clutching a throw pillow under my head. I had the brief, hazy thought that it was unusual to have violent thunder in the midst of a snowstorm, but the phenomenon wasn’t interesting enough to keep me awake. I drifted back into sleep and didn’t wake up until the sun had risen.

I was stiff from spending the night on the couch, and I didn’t exactly feel well rested. I checked my laptop and found, to my relief, that it had survived the fall. I’d have followed my morning ritual of making coffee in my room while perusing the news, except my stomach was growling at me that my granola-and-candy meal last night had been woefully inadequate.

Though the mansion felt more and more like my home every day, I didn’t feel at home enough to go downstairs in my bathrobe, so I showered and dressed before heading down to the kitchen. I’d slept in enough that for once I wasn’t the first person up and about, which meant there was already a pot of coffee brewed. I poured myself a cup, then frowned when I noticed someone had left dirty dishes in the sink. There were drawbacks to living in a house with so many other people in it. I put the dirty dishes into the dishwasher, then made myself some scrambled eggs and toast. And cleaned up my own damn mess when I was finished.

I sat down at the kitchen table with my food and coffee, taking a moment to admire the view through the