Page 139 of Dance of Thorns

“You don’t!” I yell, shaking uncontrollably, shattering as my entire reality turns to dust in my mouth.

“You call mebaby!!” I hurl at him. “Orlittle bird!!”

Bane’s face is grim as he looks at me, his eyes glinting like black steel.

“Isayyour?—”

“Then say it!!” I roar. “FUCKING SAY IT!!SAY MY FUCKING NAME!!”

“YOU KNOW WHAT YOUR NAME IS!!” he roars back in a voice like thunder.

I choke as he eradicates the distance between us and grabs the front of my shirt in a fist, his eyes blazing.

He barely flinches when I reach up, grab his own shirt, and tear it open. Buttons scatter and bounce like shell casings across the ground. I barely even notice as my gaze lands like an accusation on the shiny pink crescent scar on his chest.

I slam my palm flat to his skin, and my scream shatters like frozen glass in my throat when I see it.

The branded heart across his chest and my hand.

And whatever was left of mecrumbles.

I cry out, my head flashing like lightning and rattling like thunder. Flickers of scenes I don’t and do remember smash into my mind. Emotions flay into me like knives. Memories open my veins like razors.

We fall to our knees together, my hand still pressed to his chest as his hand slams on top of mine, keeping it tight against his skin as his wide, shattered black eyes lock with mine.

“You know your name,” he chokes in a broken, haunted voice.

Acid tears stream down my face as I look into his eyes, the last of me cracking in two.

“Bane! Bane?—!”

“Your name is Lark Marchetti.”

The words scrape like daggers from his throat. His hands grab my face, holding it tightly as he presses his forehead to mine, tears rolling down our faces.

“Your name is Lark Marchetti, and I have loved you with every piece of me since the moment I met you.”

38

BANE

Nine years ago:

Fuck this place.

I know how these people see me when I walk through the halls, tainting them with my very presence.

Dynastic wealthalwayslooks down on new money. Especially when that new money took what the dynastic motherfuckers view as “a shortcut.” Never mind that these old-money shitheadsall—and I do meanall—got their money in the form of an inheritance or a trust fund.

It doesn’t matter. To them, if you’renotone of them, you never can be.

Dad’s sent me here because he wants…

Fuck, I don’t know. Partly to offset what I think he sees as the poisonous environment of being brought up in the bratva. I mean, Iwantthe track I’ve been set on. I'm eager to lead his underworld empire when he’s ready to hand it to me.

But until then, he wants me to go here, with the “normal” rich kids, unlike my friends, Roman and Laz, who are at The Pembroke School. Pembroke is another snobby pit of old-money snakes. But that place has been “corrupted” by our kind—theunderworldkind—for at least a generation or two.

Not here, though. Here, I’m the odd man out.