Page 61 of Savagely Mated

“Crashed a bike, hm?”

“Maybe,” she sniffs. I don’t think these tears are from guilt. I think they’re from fear. She’s afraid of the trouble she’s going to be in now that I know what she’s done. She’s not worried about being injured, or having damn near killed herself. She’s worried about me.

Rafe’s little speech didn’t convince me I’d gone too far, but this does make me think I’ve miscalculated things. I want a respectful level of fear. I don’t want her hiding things that matter. That’s counterproductive.

She lifts her eyes to me just a little. “What are you going to do to me?”

“I’m taking you home. You need painkillers and rest, and probably a doctor.”

“Are you mad at me?”

I pause for a moment, not certain how to answer that question. She’s hurt. She’s vulnerable. She’s struggling to fit into the world I am defining for her. Being angry at her will not help.

“I’m not happy you’ve hurt yourself. I don’t know it happened, but I can guess it was one of your fits of rebellious temper gone wrong.”

“It’s because you hate me,” she says. “This happened because you hate me.”

Well, of all the absolutely manipulative things to say.

“Excuse me?”

“You and the others. You… nobody is nice to me.” Her lower lip quivers.

“Darcy, you go out of your way to act in ways that make it almost impossible to be nice to you. If you want me to be nice, you can’t act like a little hellion. I had to discipline you, and now…” I sigh.

I am sure she intellectually understands everything I am saying. But that doesn’t matter because what she’s saying isn’t intellectual. It’s emotional.

“And you abandoned me.”

“What? When did I abandon you?” I am even more confused, but I assume what she’s saying is not coming from a place of logic. It’s just all hurt emotion.

“When I was little,” she says. “You knew I was here and you left me here. I know you knew because Kirin told me that’s how you worked out how to find me. You knew me. And you left me.”

She is looking at me as if I betrayed her, and for a moment, I have that gut-punch feeling of guilt that makes me wonder if I did.

“I was stuck here my whole life, and nobody cared. Ever.”

“Darcy…”

“I don’t even know how I got my fucking name,” she sobs. “Nobody remembers.”

“We’re going to talk about this,” I tell her. “But for now, I want you to put your clothes back on. We’re going.”

“Where are we going?”

“To the doctor.”

“There’s a doctor here.”

“I don’t want the academy doctor reporting this incident.”

Darcy

So he’s covering up. Not because he cares, but because there’s a plan bigger than me, that happens to need me, and it’s important I don’t fuck it up by existing too hard outside of it.

I bet we never talk about what happened when I was young, when he knew about my existence and decided to just leave me to my fate here.

Putting my clothes back on does not feel good. There’s the shame of being naked like this, of being exposed and inspected by Einar. There’s just something about the way he looks at me. Something hard in his eyes, something that appraises me on levels I can’t begin to understand.