Rogue Descendant (Nikki Glass) - By Jenna Black Page 0,87

in a scratchy whisper. “And you loved me, too. Until she came into our lives.” She reached out toward him briefly, then snatched her hand back as if to deny the gesture. “I could see from the moment I went back home that she’d already taken you from me. You were perfectly happy to let the monster who . . . who defiled me run free because you were too wrapped up in your new love to care.”

Sometimes I wondered if Emma inhabited the same reality the rest of us did. Until I came into her life, she’d been chained at the bottom of a pond, continually drowning and coming back to life. How she managed to twist that into her vendetta against me I’ll never understand.

“I loved you,” Emma repeated. “And you abandoned me.”

If Emma’s tears affected Anderson in the slightest, he didn’t show it. His face was stony and ice cold. “You’re the one who did the leaving.”

She shook her head. “What good would staying have done?” She was still sniffling, but there was a hard glint in her eye, a reminder of the ugliness that had settled into her soul. She was genuinely hurt by Anderson’s perceived desertion, but she was also really, really angry. At him, at me, at Konstantin, at the world in general. “I had no desire to watch another woman parade around my home like she owned the place. Like she owned my husband.”

I almost interjected a denial, but countering paranoia with logic was a pointless endeavor.

“I’ll admit I loved you once,” Anderson said. “But I don’t love you anymore. You are nothing to me.”

Emma gasped in a sob, covering her mouth with her hand as if that could somehow keep the sound contained. She was more than capable of crocodile tears, but that’s not what these were. For all the efforts she’d taken to hurt Anderson, both through Erin and through myself, I think there was always a part of her that clung to the hope that she would one day win him back. Maybe she thought that after she eliminated the “competition,” he would somehow fall in love with her all over again. She was already living in a dream world anyway, so what did one more delusion matter?

Anderson turned away from Emma and faced Cyrus. “I demand satisfaction.”

Those words sent a slash of cold dread through my chest. I’d really been hoping it wouldn’t come to this, no matter how obviously the signs had pointed to it. Emma had apparently been hoping the same, hoping his cold rejection of her love would be the only price she had to pay for her attempt to murder me.

“No!” she cried, her face going white. “Anderson, you can’t mean that!”

Anderson ignored her. I didn’t believe that all his love for her had disappeared so suddenly that no trace remained. What she’d tried to do to me was terrible, but though I knew he cared about me in an abstract sort of way, I wasn’t important to him. Considering how long he’d been alive—not that I actually knew how old he was, except that he was ancient—the time he’d known me was nothing more than a blink of the eye. Emma was important to him, and there was no way her attack against me had changed that. But whatever feelings for her lingered in his heart, he wasn’t allowing a hint of them to show.

“Are you sure that’s what you want?” Cyrus asked softly. There was what might have been genuine sympathy in his eyes, as if he, too, must be certain that Anderson was in dire pain despite the mask of coldness he hid behind.

“Anderson, please!” Emma begged. Tears were streaming freely down her cheeks now. “I admit I betrayed Erin, but the rest of it wasn’t me, I swear it.”

“Oh, so you’ll only admit to the one crime that Cyrus won’t condemn you for?” There was a hint of amusement in Anderson’s voice, but that had to be an act. Jesus, I hoped it was an act. “How very convenient.”

Suddenly, the room went black.

I don’t mean the lights went out. I mean it went black, as in a total absence of light. I’d seen Emma pull this stunt before, so I knew immediately what it was. She was a descendant of Nyx, the Greek goddess of night, and she had called this darkness to her, no doubt in a desperate attempt to escape. Adrenaline flooded my system as I remembered the darkness