~Grace~
Rafe suddenly peers down at me, his fist in my hair wrenching me so high off the ground to his height that we are now eye-to-eye — and I wish we weren't. I wish I couldn't see what lives behind his stare.
That awful compression settles into my chest like a stone dropped into still water. He cocks his head, his gaze traveling down my face, down my body, with the unhurried patience of someone who has never once been denied. Then, with a gentleness even more terrifying, he sets me down.
A slip of silver hair falls across his broad shoulders.
"Do you know what separates me from your kind?" His voice is almost conversational, which is somehow worse. "I feel nothing." There's a pause, long enough to make my eyes wander to his lips. "Nothing — except what was done to my sister. Sixteen years old. Completely at your father's mercy."
The words land like shards of ice beneath my skin.
