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Sel closed the door behind him quietly, a sharp contrast to the slamming of earlier, and fell back against it heavily.
The stolen files still lay strewn across the floor where they'd abandoned them after learning Bree's truth, and he knew he had to collect them and probably destroy them before someone else came looking for him and saw anything they shouldn't. His title, and therefore his humanity, was already hanging by a thread, and he wasn't about to let Bree become a target again due to carelessness on his part.
Not if there was a chance she might be out now.
But he couldn't bring himself to push off the door and move forward. His limbs, always feather light, hung back against the wood like lead.
The betrayal on Nick's face threatened to split him in two. One part of him still ached to see Nick in pain, no matter how he'd deny it later when that ache faded, while the other part hated him fiercely. First, dear Nicholas had been angry at Sel for cruelty towards Bree, and now he was angry for kindness? There was no winning with their spoiled brat of a king! None!
But the anger that Nick had always raised in him was an energizing force. If there had been only that anger, then Sel would have been a flurry of movement, scooping up and incinerating those damning files with aether. That anger wasn't the only emotion coursing through him, though. Of all Nick's harsh words since Bree had fled, none of them were what rang in his ears now.
"I am a selfish daughter."
He could still hear the rawness of her voice and the pounding of her heart as she said it, an angry drum that he'd half expected to burst.
He'd assumed he knew all there was to know about her because she was so bad at lying, but that raw fury tonight? That he had not seen coming. That she had been hiding well, right up until she couldn't anymore. It was like a dam had broken open, transforming a placid, simple valley into a path of destruction.
No one else ever sounded like that.
Not even in their most furious or heartbroken moments had he ever heard any of the Legendborn sound like that.
But he recognized that kind of grief. He knew it intimately, even if his own heart would never labor with such thunder.
"I am a selfish daughter, and I just had to go digging."
"I should have called you both silly and self-centered."
His own words taunted him, mirroring the shape of her self-inflicted cuts. He'd said those words a little over a week ago when he thought Bree was nothing more than a fumbling fool who'd lucked into a bit of power and thought she deserved all the perks of The Order as a result. Before he knew how deep her own motives ran. Or her pain.
He slid down the door until he came to rest on the floor, and pressed his head back against the cool wood, squeezing his eyes shut.
He despised bullies, and yet, that's exactly what he'd been, hadn't he? Every move he'd made, he'd made with utmost care and focus, determined to protect this chapter and its foolhardy king, and yet he couldn't have been more wrong about any of it. Bree wasn't a demon, and she wasn't some selfish nobody. She was a victim. A victim of his own mother's depravity. If his mother hadn't opened those gates, then hers wouldn't have gone into hiding, wouldn't have had to hide their own family's abilities.
Hot tears leaked down his cheeks, but he didn't move to wipe them.
And oh, he'd jabbed at her for that too. He'd derided her for not knowing what she was, for not having a lifetime of training in the skills of her blood, but that wasn't her fault or her family's. It was his mother's. The sin of that severing coursed through his own veins.
He'd bullied her just as badly as everyone else had bullied him, piled more pain on top of what his mother had already inflicted.
A stitch in his chest caught, and he forced himself to breath through it, to savor this lesser pain alongside the greater ones.
Maybe he deserved to have his title revoked. Really deserved it. Then he'd become in truth the demon everyone already saw him as. The demon he'd been towards Bree. The demon his mother had been.
And after tonight's display, after chasing Bree away for good, it was almost certain that Nick would follow through on Lord David's urging and revoke Sel's title.
It was a sealed deal, all but done.
The thought released the tension in him, as if putting an expiration date on his humanity relieved the pressure of dreading its loss.
Slowly, resignation filled the space that pain had hollowed out.
If he only had a short while left to be human, then he was going to make the best of it. He was going to be a better human than he ever had been.
He pushed himself to his feet and started gathering up the stolen files.