Chapter 43: Just to understand
"There must be something that turned you this way."
The words hung in the air, and a thick, heavy silence descended, pressing down on the small room. Freya’s breath stalled, caught in her chest as Kael’s quiet probing sliced into the raw, frozen edges she’d spent years burying.
Her pale blue eyes narrowed, flicking upward to search his face—scanning for judgment, for pity, for anything she could use to push him away. Finding nothing she could grasp, her gaze darted to the wall, and she draped her forearm over her face, shielding herself as her jaw tightened.
"You don’t know shit," she muttered, her voice rough and gravelly, but the usual venom was absent, replaced by a faint tremor. Her fingers curled into the edge of the cot, gripping it as if it were the only thing anchoring her.
Kael leaned closer, his voice softening but steady, a lifeline extended into her storm. "Maybe not. Or maybe I do." He tapped the file with a gentle, deliberate motion, the sound a soft punctuation in the quiet. "Those kids in the alley—the ones you froze to death. They were your first, weren’t they?"
Freya didn’t respond. Her silence was a fortress, impenetrable and cold.
"It’s not proven," he continued, undeterred, "but I can tell. The overkill. Your dormant powers rose to the surface there, didn’t they?"
Her head snapped back so fast her platinum-cyan hair whipped across her shoulders, a wild cascade framing her face as her queen-like mask cracked.
"Don’t," she hissed, sitting up in a flash, her poise shattering into something feral and untamed. Her blue eyes blazed, fierce and unguarded, her breath ragged as she leaned in close—too close—her face inches from his.