Page 44 of One Bad Knight

“Tell them what?” I asked, taking a step back, my heel hitting the tire of my car.

His fresh, masculine scent overpowered the usual smell of rubber and concrete of the garage.

“Tell them who I am?”

Before I could respond, he went on. “Why don’t you tell them the demon you saw as a girl was real? That you were right?”

My fingers dug into either arm now, as I braced myself against his demands.

“We don’t need to talk about it,” I said, though my voice seemed fainter than I meant it to be.

Taking hold of my arms, he pulled them away from where I had them protectively crossed. “Even before I came back, did you tell them you were right? When the gates to hell opened and demons whipped around the city streets, did you point and say, look, I was right? They do exist?”

I tried to cross my arms again, but his hands captured mine. Despite the intensity in his voice, his thumbs caressed my wrists.

“What does it matter?” I asked, trying to shrug off the ugly feelings boiling up from somewhere deep inside me, feelings I couldn’t even begin to identify. But I knew if I started acknowledging them, they would swallow me whole. “My uncle rescued me from that place. I owe him everything. My family is everything to me.”

Concern lined his eyes and his tone softened. “Did they say anything? Did they turn to you and say, Kat, you were right?”

I froze from my core out, turning to pure ice. I didn’t try to convince my uncle of what happened that night. Even if he miraculously didn’t hear it from the police, or child protective services, I’d been made a mockery of in the newspapers.

Young ingénue claims demon slayed her father before he could win the Senate.

“No.” It barely passed my lips. I remembered that first night with painful clarity. Governments and military forces had to confirm the emergence of supernatural entities. An unprecedented horror had been unleashed as hellhounds and monsters made the streets run red.

I’d looked at my uncle as we watched the news together in the sitting room. His focus never wavered from the television as he sipped on his best scotch, the bottle he’d been saving for fifteen years. He drained over half the bottle that night. The world might end, after all.

I remember sitting on my hands, to keep them from trembling. Partly from anticipation, as I waited for him to acknowledge the connection. I waited for him to look at me and apologize before pulling me into his arms for a hug.

But then my anticipation turned into terror. As we continued to watch, and no one acknowledged my connection to the occurrences, I started to think I really was going mad. Maybe I had made up everything as a kid, maybe I even made up going to an institution. We never talked about it, never acknowledged it once since I came home. Maybe I was imagining what I saw on the television. Maybe my uncle and cousins were watching a news segment on the three things you shouldn’t touch in a hotel room, while I fantasized there were reports on demons and hell on Earth.

I couldn’t bring myself to comment or ask any questions, for fear I’d give myself away. Give away that I was sick in the head. Because even if I was screwed up in the head, I didn’t want to go back to the institution.

It was a text that popped up on my phone that finally saved my sanity. Viet texted to ask if I was okay. She confessed she was terrified of what would happen next and asked if were doing anything to protect ourselves from demons.

I didn’t tell her either about what happened to me as a kid, and pretended it was all new to me too.

Gatsby still held my hands, probing into me with his steely eyes.

“Why don’t you tell them, Kat?”

Fear and fury rose like a tornado inside me until I shook off his hold. “Why don’t you tell Calan and Leonidas about what you were forced to do for the Luxis? That you killed people for them?”

His expression cooled as he took a step back.

We stood there staring at each other for too long. Raw emotions twirling in the space between us. He pushed me. I pushed him. Were we toxic together?

Bear looked back and forth between us.

Finally, Gatsby said in an icy tone, “You like to be considered the perfect princess, don’t you? You’d rather white-wash over all the cracks inside you than let anyone see. Because you need to seem better than everyone else.”

I bit my lower lip. His words sliced through me. I couldn’t tell if he meant them or if he was trying to bait me. Either way, it hurt.

“I’m not better than anyone.”

“Do you need to seem perfect because that’s what you want? Or are you doing it because of your uncle? Does he deserve your fealty? Did you ever stop to ask yourself that?”

“Family is an automatic and normal cause for fealty,” I shot back. “That is something you seem to try to reject, though. You have a shared history with your brothers, but you don’t want them to see you, either. I don’t know if it’s because you fear their rejection, or you just can’t stand an ounce of vulnerability. Either way, you are no better than me.”