Chapter 44: created for yourself
"I want to see you. The real you, under all this mask you’ve created for yourself"
Her smirk twitched—bitter, defensive—her fingers curling into the cot’s edge as if anchoring herself. But her eyes never left his, locked in a silent duel, a battle neither of them named but both understood.
"Real me?" she echoed, her voice low and jagged, a scoff scraping past her lips. A harsh laugh followed, brittle at its core. "You think you can peel back the ice and find some sad little girl to save? That’s not me."
Her words snapped—barbed, biting—but her breath hitched. Just for a second. A crack in the queen-like facade she had built so flawlessly. And Kael caught it.
His resonance hummed deeper, attuned to the grief she had buried, the shame she had sharpened into steel. "Not a sad girl," he said, his voice calm, cutting through the storm swirling in her eyes. "A kid who got crushed—then made herself a queen she always dreamed of becoming, a complete opposite version of herself. That’s what I see."
Her jaw clenched. A flicker of something wild flashed in her gaze, a warning, a desperate refusal to let him reach deeper. But she didn’t pull away. She sat still, rigid, as if bracing against a blow that never came. His words struck like a needle slipping between armor plates, unnoticed until it was too late.
"Crushed?" she spat, her voice trembling with an old, buried rage. She leaned forward, her platinum-cyan hair spilling wild over her shoulders, her carefully curated poise unraveling. "They didn’t crush me—I crushed them. Froze their smug faces, laughs, their hands, their stupid little lives. I won."
The smirk returned, sharp and victorious, but her eyes glistened. A sheen of emotion she blinked away fast, before it could betray her.
Kael’s expression didn’t change, but his resonance caught the undercurrent beneath her words. Victory—yes—but laced with something else. Something hollow. A cost she refused to name.
He nodded, slow and deliberate, leaning in just enough that his presence weighed against her, steady and unshaken.
"You won," he said, no judgment, just fact. "Took their power—made it yours. But what’s it cost you since? Hiding, fighting, locking everyone out—ruling nothing but this room. Do you even have a single person you can trust?"