Rogue Descendant (Nikki Glass) - By Jenna Black Page 0,98
was almost . . . intimate. Was I really seeing something telling in his eyes? Or was I doing exactly what I’d feared I would ever since my conversation with Maggie and letting the power of suggestion make me see something that wasn’t there? I didn’t know, and I couldn’t afford to think about it.
“Tell me whatever it is you have to tell me,” Anderson prompted. “I can sense your urgency.”
I can’t say I was completely convinced. But he wasn’t wrong about the urgency, and it was time for me to stop stalling.
“Cyrus killed the Descendant who attacked him, but he didn’t do it quickly.” My gorge rose as I remembered Cyrus’s dispassionate account of using his power as a descendant of a sun god to slowly roast his attacker to death. “While he was suffering and dying, the Descendant raved about how Konstantin would win in the end. And he said Konstantin had used Cyrus to—” My voice choked off for a moment, and I forced myself to look up at Anderson once more. He’d put on his unreadable mask, and I had no idea what he was thinking or feeling.
“You might want to sit down,” I said, and despite my lingering fear, I felt an urge to reach out and take his hand to comfort him as I delivered the blow. It said something about what he was feeling behind the mask that Anderson actually took my advice and sat down on the bed beside me.
“What did Konstantin use Cyrus to do?”
I took a deep breath in a futile attempt to steady myself. No amount of willpower could force me to look Anderson in the face. “He used all of us,” I said. “To frame Emma. He was behind the fires, and behind my abduction. He planted the fake letters on Emma’s computer. I thought I’d had a lucky escape thanks to the car accident, but that was all part of the plan, too. He wanted the kidnapper to be caught so he would admit what he was hired to do and say he was hired by a woman. It was all a big setup so that you would kill Emma.” Never mind that Anderson hadn’t killed her with his own hands. We all knew the decision to let her die had been his in the end. And now, he would have to live with having condemned the woman he’d loved so desperately to die over a betrayal she wasn’t even guilty of.
My hand was squeezing the bedpost so hard my knuckles were turning white and my fingers were going numb. My pulse was drumming erratically in my throat, and I had to remind myself to draw the occasional breath as I waited for Anderson’s reaction. No matter what he’d promised, I feared an explosion of some kind.
The silence stretched, my heartbeat loud in my ears as I held myself tense and ready—for what, I don’t know. I finally couldn’t stand it anymore and risked a look in Anderson’s direction.
His face had a slightly gray cast to it, and his bloodshot eyes were rimmed with red. His lips were pressed together in a tight line, and I saw no evidence that he was even breathing. But when he met my eyes, there was no sign that he had turned into the automaton of the other night, nor that he was about to explode with temper. There was just pain, and a soul-deep sadness that brought tears to my eyes.
I wanted to say something to break the silence, find some words of sympathy, or comfort. Anything to break the tension, if only for a second. But there were no words.
Anderson blinked rapidly a few times, then let out a slow, hissing breath. “Do you know what the worst thing about this is?” he asked in a hoarse whisper.
I shook my head mutely. Everything about it seemed equally awful to me.
He reached up to rub his eyes, as if he could make the haunted expression in them go away. “The worst part is that this doesn’t hurt as much as Konstantin hoped it would. Because you see, Nikki, I’ve done worse.”
TWENTY-THREE
I’d been unsure of a lot of things in recent days. However, there was no uncertainty in my mind now. If Anderson had done worse sometime in the course of his long life, I didn’t want to know about it. And while he said Konstantin’s trick hadn’t hurt as much as Konstantin had hoped, it was obvious that it had