To keep them from trembling, I clasp my hands in front of me.
I have the power. Me.
Those silent thoughts help me steel myself against the onslaught of temper I know I’m about to receive.
His brown eyes pin me in place, like a pair of needles to stick me against the door. “Where were you?”
I raise my chin. “I told you I wouldn’t stay locked up.”
All of the still silence bursts out of him at once. “I did it for your protection!” He takes a step toward me, hand slashing in the air like he wants to cut off my rebellion at its knees. “I let you out of your cage,” Midas tells me, as if I should be grateful, as if he did any such thing.
“No. I let myself out.”
Midas pauses at the look on my face, and for a moment, I know he’s remembering the way my ribbons lashed out and ripped the iron door off its hinges and threw it at him. How he was slammed to the floor, stunned beneath its weight.
“I told you I didn’t want you leaving this room.” He pulls at the bottom of his tunic and lets out a firm breath, like his determination in the matter has settled it.
It hasn’t.
“And I told you that I won’t be locked away. I promised to keep guards with me and to be careful. I’m not your pet to be kept anymore.”
Midas’s eyes darken. “You are not allowed to wander around during daylight hours, and that’s final.”
The coals of my anger begin to glow, begin to build and heat. “It is not final!”
His regard over me is a cursory sweep that hooks onto my balled fists and knotted arms. “You’re different since you came back.”
My expression goes stony. “And you were different the moment you put on a crown.”
He doesn’t like that answer, not at all.
I shake my head. “What happened to you, Midas?” I don’t mean to say it aloud, but it’s a question I keep asking myself. Was he always this way? Or like a frog put into lukewarm water, did I just not notice the slow progression of the rising temperature of his greed until I was being boiled in it?
A storm gathers on his brow. “I grew up, Auren. I figured out what I wanted, and I took it.”
“You got greedy.”
He closes the space between us until that storm of his hovers over my air and threatens to douse everything light and warm.
“Greed is relative. I saw an opportunity to make my life better. And yours.”
“You took advantage.”
A bursting scoff escapes him. “Stop with the dramatics, Auren. Stop with this rebellion. It doesn’t suit you.”
“No, the problem is that it doesn’t suit you.”
That’s the real truth of it. I’m a pet to be kept and a tool to be used, and if I do or say anything remotely individualistic, anything that he doesn’t like or control, then he wants to squash it beneath his heel like a bug.
“Enough,” he seethes, making me flinch. “You’re acting like a brat.”
I rear back at the insult. “A brat? Are you fucking kidding me?”
“Watch your tongue,” he growls, finger raised to point at my face.
My spine stiffens. “I will say what I want, and I will leave this fucking room when I like, and you can’t stop me.”
You can’t stop me