I searched the crowd, unable to stop myself from seeking one face in particular. I found him against the far wall – Benjamin Thorne, his expression carved from ice, his gray eyes burning with such hatred that it should have scorched the air between us. As our gazes connected, his lips curled in a sneer of pure contempt, though he remained in the same bowed posture as everyone else in the room, compelled by the weight of our combined auras.
The sight of him – my former abuser now forced to bow before me – should have brought satisfaction. Instead, it filled me with a strange mixture of pity and resolve. He seemed smaller somehow, his power over me dissolved not by my elevation but by my healing, by the choice I had made to trust again despite his best efforts to destroy that capacity withi
