He didn't look like the romanticised memory of a powerful master, nor the dashing figure she had once been blinded by. He looked like a creature that had crawled out of a swamp—a crooked, frog-like man with an arched back and skin that shimmered with an oily, unnatural grease.
His face was a map of deep, sagging wrinkles that should have belonged to a man centuries older, yet his eyes burned with a youthful, predatory hunger.
"And here I thought you were the one who spotted this weakness for him..." he hissed, his voice wet and raspy.
"You… you…" Becky's throat seized. In her dreams, she had shouted at him, unleashed a torrent of curses and sophisticated techniques she'd spent months perfecting to express her agony. She had prepared a grand theatre of revenge.
But as her gaze locked with his, every bit of her bravado collapsed. It wasn't love that paralysed her—it was a deeply rooted, ancestral fear that she had buried in the basement of her soul.
