The Young Elites

I know who you really are. Who will ever want you, Adelina?

My fury heightens. Everyone. They will cower at my feet, and I will make them bleed.

I know who you really are. Who will ever want you, Adelina?

My fury heightens. Everyone. They will cower at my feet, and I will make them bleed.

You tried to escape from me, he says, but I found you. You have lost and I have won. I tell him that I’m glad he’s dead. I tell him to go away. But he stays.
It doesn’t matter, anyway. I’m going to die tomorrow morning

I am Adelina Amouteru, the phantoms whispered to my father, speaking my most frightening thoughts in a chorus of voices, dripping with hatred. My hatred. I belong to no one. On this night, I swear to you that I will rise above everything you’ve ever taught me. I will become a force that this world has never known. I will come into such power that none will dare hurt me again.

And just like that, the black clouds twist—they scatter into a swarm of a million moving flecks that swirl across the sky and then dive down, down, down at the crowd. A nightmare of locusts. They descend on us with merciless efficiency, their buzzing drowning out the people’s cries.

The word was that he had nearly died from the blood fever. He came out of it marked instead. Unfit to be heir to the throne. Enzo’s older sister stripped Enzo of his crown and banished him permanently from the palace, never again to set foot near the royal family.

If for some reason I can’t control my abilities, they won’t just cast me out of the Dagger Society. I know too much. A weak link in a world that wants us dead. That weak link could be me.
If I cannot pass their tests, then they will do to me what they must have done with the boy who could not control the rain. They will kill me.

As I stare silently back, I feel something powerful stir inside me—a buried fire, subdued during childhood and long forgotten. I have lived all my life in the shadow of my father and my sister. Now that I’m standing in the sun for the first time, I dare to think differently.
The broken butterfly has been made whole.

I do this because I love you, my father’s ghost whispers. You may not understand it right now, but it is for your own good. You are a monster. I still love you. I will set you right.

They are only good to me because they need me. Just like Enzo. Kindness with strings attached. Would they have befriended me if I were worthless?

“I will take back my throne soon,” Enzo whispers. “And malfettos will no longer live in fear.”

“She is nothing to me,” he snaps with a careless gesture of one hand. “Nothing more than a Dagger recruit. Just part of our plans.” The ice in his voice hits me hard. Nothing more. A rip appears on my heart.

The next morning, Inquisitors find Count Maurizio Saldana’s dismembered body nailed to his front door, his mouth suspended in a scream, his corpse burned black beyond recognition.

He kneels on the floor. Lifts the whip. Holds his breath. Then he snaps the whip over his head. The blades rake deep into the flesh of his back, ripping jagged lines across his skin. He lets out a strangled gasp as pain floods him, robbing him of his breath.
I am a deformed creature, he mouths silently, repeating the words he once said as a twelve-year-old boy, an Inquisitorin-training, kneeling before the sixteen-year-old Princess Giulietta.

“You have three days,” he says in a low voice. “If you go back on your word again, I will shoot an arrow through your sister’s neck and out the back of her skull. She’ll be lucky if that’s the first thing I do.” He smiles, his teeth flashing in the night.

His hair, black and shining, drapes across one of his shoulders in a loose, silken braid. His olive skin is smooth, flawless, glowing. The faint musk of night lilies envelops him in a veil, intoxicating, promising something forbidden.