Delta [Epsilon #2]

Chapter Five

Azure

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I didn't trust the Luna. Not one bit. 

Kyra may have trusted her enough to go in a room alone with her, and Raina may have trusted her enough to relax at her words, but I wasn't buying it. The regal smile, the way her ice-blue eyes glittered... act. It had to be another act, just another elaborate lie. Even if it wasn't, it would be to me. I had to consider it, given everything Azriel had done.  

I fisted the ice-green sheets of my bed in frustration. Azriel. His name left a foul taste in my mouth, something to match image dark image it conjured in my mind. 

Azriel. The man who had blinded us with his charming exterior, someone who had made hundreds of people smile and swoon without knowing what he was really up to, who he really was. Nobody had any idea of what he was doing to Kyra all those weeks. Even when he displayed her before us, loud and proud of his wife, masking her misery with false smiles and glazed words. No one would ever expect him to do something so abhorrent to the likes of her, to the person he'd spoken so dearly of -- doting words that would circulate to the mouths of other swooning girls, gushing over how lucky Kyra was, how lucky she was to have Azriel. 

Lies. Foul, sick lies. And that's all he was, a lie. And yet we believed it. We ate that shit up like feral animals consuming a corpse. We ate and ate, never suspecting a thing, never allowing ourselves an ill-thought towards the man. 

Pain sliced through my heart. For too long, I knew. 

I wasn't stupid. I could see the pain in Kyra's eyes, the way they never seemed to gleam anymore. The fire, the flames that had once lived there... dead. Guttered. Reduced to nothing, all because of him. All because of the shitty things he did for her. And for so long...

Cold nausea settled in my stomach. Part of me didn't want to know whatever fucked-up shit he'd done to Kyra. Part of me, the cowardly part of me, wanted to shut my eyes and ears and ignore it, as though it had never even happened. But I couldn't, even if I tried. Kyra's dead gaze told me enough of what went on in that damned dungeon, and every time I saw that dull figure, floating around like a ghost, I was painfully reminded of how I'd failed her. Of how I'd failed to see it sooner. 

I grit my teeth. I'd never liked Kyra, at least not before all this. But one fact remained the same: I'd failed her. She endured shit I wouldn't wish upon my worse enemy, all while I just sat idly by, convincing myself for weeks on end everything was okay. Even when I knew... even when I knew something was up, that something was off. But I ignored it, and that alone was perhaps the second-biggest regret of my life.

I pushed the heel of my palms into my eyes, trying to school my breathing, to control the anger, guilt, and shame boiling up under my skin. Kyra had always assumed I was jealous of her, of her closeness to the Alpha, but she couldn't have been farther from the truth. I didn't get jealous over men. No, I envied her power. I envied what she could do with it, envied the number of lives it could save. I knew all along that, if I had had a power like hers all those years ago, I could have saved--

A sharp knock at the door had me flying upright, my head missing the silver bar of my four-posted bed by mere inches. I blinked, the light-green couch and seafoam rug swimming in my vision as I focused on the door ahead. Moments passed, and I was almost sure I'd imagined the knock until it came again, firmer this time.