Total pages in book: 82
Estimated words: 78507 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 393(@200wpm)___ 314(@250wpm)___ 262(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 78507 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 393(@200wpm)___ 314(@250wpm)___ 262(@300wpm)
I have done something terrible today. Something that can never be undone. I’ve stained my soul, and given my mind a memory it will never be able to release.
“Do you want me to go to detention?” I ask the question as we get back to the academy.
“You can go to your room and to bed without dinner. I will inform the director that you have been located, and I am sure she will deal with you tomorrow,” Mr. Bracken says. “Go. Now.”
I have never been so pleased to be sent to my room. But when I get there, it doesn’t feel like the same place it was when I left this morning. It’s not the same, because I’m not the same.
The bed seems smaller. The books seem pointless. All that information I thought I knew and understood, it meant nothing when push really came to shove. There’s nothing in any of those pages about what to do when you kill someone and realize, really know to your core that you’re a fucking monster now.
I get into the scratchy, awful bed, I close my eyes, and I will for sleep to take me. I pray that I am exhausted enough, but every time I close my eyes, he’s there again, the dying man. He’s looking at me with a fading gaze, blood oozing from places it shouldn’t. He’s telling me he’ll never go home again, never breathe air again, never taste food, or hug someone, or even know what an awful scratchy bed feels like. He’s telling me I took something from him that wasn’t mine to take. I’m not a soldier. I’m a life thief.
It was self-defense. He would have killed you if you hadn’t killed him.
A little part of my brain tries to argue back, but it doesn’t work. They were trying to get us to surrender. I was the one who decided to fight like it was an academy drill. I was the one who plunged my sword inside him.
Eventually, I fall asleep, but that just makes the images even more real. Asleep, or awake, I am tormented late into the night.
CHAPTER 3
Darcy
At one o’clock in the morning, consequences start catching up to me. I’m asleep; well, as close to sleep as I can get. I keep waking up every few minutes from the same nightmare over and over again. The same mental picture, the same sounds.
I’m restless, hot, and guilty. My stomach is twisted into knots, physically hurting. I want to be sick, but there’s nothing in there. I want to go to the toilet, but I can’t bring myself to move. I’ve done something horribly wrong, and the worst part is I’m being trained to do that horrible, wrong thing again and again.
Why didn’t anybody tell us that killing people feels bad? I feel like that should have been covered in just one of our classes. Somewhere in between the military history of Eclipse, the general excellence of the king…
Somewhere in my freaking out, I fall asleep for a few minutes.
Big mistake.
Huge.
I wake up while it is still deeply dark, but suddenly I have the very unsettling feeling that I am not alone in my room.
The window is open.
That is how the men standing around my bed got in.
“Don’t scream.”
The order is growled in the dark.
I’m almost grateful for this. Fear erases guilt. Can’t be tormented by regret when you’re fighting for your life.
I’m not going to scream.
What I do is pull the sidearm from under my pillow and fire it at the nearest shadow. It’s an energy weapon, so it doesn’t make that much noise, but it certainly burns a hole in whatever it hits.
Unfortunately, it hits the wall, because he moved at the last moment, and another of them pushed my arm so that I’d miss.
“Fuck!” someone curses. “She’s going to fucking kill us before we get her out of here. Subdue her!”
“That’s enough, Darcy. You’re being hysterical. Calm down.”
I’m not being hysterical at all. I know far better than to be emotional in battle. If I do kill them, I’ll freak out about it later. But that’s not going to save them. I still react in the way I was trained to.
The gun is taken out of my hand, but I’ve still got the rest of my body to fight with. I kick, I punch, and I bite. I don’t get very far with any of it, because three men are easily able to restrain one woman if they really want to.
“Shhhh. Stop it. We’re not going to hurt you.”
Another voice. A familiar one, but I don’t know it. Weird.
One of them steps through the beam of light cast through the window, and I see an unholy handsome face.
I remember everything in that moment. It all comes flooding back, forcing its way through the panicked part of my mind. The hot guys. The duel. The cardinal’s guard—and the way I killed him.