Page 44
His eyes remain on mine. “Broken you.”
The word belongs to demon households. They use it for a human who has stopped resisting, stopped bargaining, stopped claiming any part of herself as her own.
“Tell me what that means to Grolnok.”
His claws press into his palms before he releases them.
“It means cruelty applied until obedience replaces choice. A breeder eats when permitted, speaks when commanded, and submits whenever the house requires conception. Resistance brings punishment. Compliance only delays the next demand. House Grolnok is known for accomplishing that within a year.”
My fingers grow cold against the washstand.
No rumor ever gave the phrase such clean edges. Broken within a year. Not killed, not released, not allowed to become useless. Kept alive as property after everything recognizable has been stripped away.
I imagine ten years beneath that house’s authority. The calculation ends before I reach the second.
“Asmodeus would have done that because you wanted me?”
“He would have done it because my attachment gave him leverage and my refusal challenged his authority.”
“So you accepted his post.”
“Yes.”
“You let me believe you chose power.”
“Belief kept you angry. Anger kept you away from me. Distance kept the king’s bargain intact.”
His reasoning is brutal. Demon reasoning. A wound deliberately cut because the alternative was death.
“You could have warned me somehow.”
“Asmodeus promised that any message, messenger, or sign would void his protection. I believed him.”
“For ten years?”
“For as long as he ruled.”
The room seems smaller. My anger remains, but its foundation has split beneath it. Every memory I used as proof of Draxon’s ambition changes shape. His disappearance. His rise as arena-master. The years in which he passed through the lower districts without approaching my shop.
I thought each one confirmed how little I had mattered.
They were the price he kept paying because I mattered enough to threaten.
“Why tell me now?” I ask.
“The Council exposed the connection Asmodeus ordered me to bury. His bargain cannot protect you now.” Draxon’s gaze moves to the bruise at my shoulder. “And ignorance has become another weapon against you.”
He offers no plea for forgiveness. No softened version of the choice follows, nor any pretense that he made it without cost. The scrape along his arm, the grime on his carapace, and the rigid set of his shoulders belong to the present, but I can see ten years carried in the same discipline.
I want to preserve my hatred. It has kept me upright through lean winters, demon contempt, and every quiet hour when memory became unbearable. Surrendering it feels dangerously close to surrendering myself.
But hatred built on a lie cannot remain unchanged merely because it was useful.
“I am still angry,” I say.
“You should be.”
“Not only at Asmodeus.”
