Read Online The Rebel by Amelia Atwater-Rhodes - Free Book Online Page B

about them. She was hot, sweaty, disgusted by everything going on around her…and lonely.
    “If I’m gross, don’t touch me,” she snapped.
    “How are you going to learn to dance if you don’t let anyone touch you?” he challenged her. “Come on. I want to dance for the princess, but Mindi said I could only if I’d be your partner first, since otherwise no one will—”
    “I don’t
want
to dance!”
    If I cry, they’ll only tease me more. Hara will come over and give me a hug to try to comfort me, but I’m all sweaty, so she will pull away in disgust.
Hara tried to be nice—when she noticed Kadee—but she always ended up saying the wrong thing.
    “Chicken!” the boy accused. “Are all humans chicken? Was that why they didn’t keep you?”
    It was stupid, childish nonsense, but Kadee reacted in the best way she knew—a way common among serpiente. They touched all the time. They flirted. They danced. And they
fought.
    Kadee launched herself at the boy, punching, kicking, seeking fistfuls of his hair, shouting. She didn’t even know what she was shouting, just that the emotions inside her were threatening to rip her apart. If she couldn’t stand to cry in front of the other dancers, then she had to find another way to express everything she was feeling.
    Serpents fought all the time, but rarely with viciousness that could only be described as hatred. She didn’t just want to make a point. She wanted to
hurt
someone, the way she was hurt when they snickered at her attempts to dance, or called her “water snake” behind her back, or complained whenever Mindi, the children’s nest leader, told them they must work with her.
    Royal guards, who had come with Hara to the nest, were the ones who eventually grabbed Kadee’s arms and pulled her back from the now bleeding, cowering boy. They were also the ones who carried her away two months later, when the nest leaders declared she was utterly hopeless as a dancer. They didn’t care about her temper; among the serpiente,
clumsiness
was the unforgivable crime.
    Well, the first one. She would discover—and commit—others later.
    ***
    F OUR YEARS LATER
    Kadee angrily dashed the tears from her cheeks. She ducked her head when she passed one of the palace guards, hoping he wouldn’t notice that she was crying. But when she turned another corner too quickly, she nearly ran into the king’s son, Aaron. The now eighteen-year-old boy caught her shoulders, then tilted her face up.
    “You’re crying,” he said.
    When the dancers’ nest had kicked her out, no one else had wanted her, so the king had taken her in. She didn’t see him much, but his children were often around, especially at embarrassing moments like this one.
    She pulled back. “Just…being silly,” she said. That was what he would think, if she tried to explain what had happened.
    “Weren’t you with that boy…Reese?” Aaron asked. “You looked like you were having fun.”
    She
had
been having fun.
    Reese was the son of one of the guards, an awkward thirteen-year-old whose friendship Kadee had initially welcomed. He danced, of course—why did
all
serpents need to dance?—but he was widely considered to be quite bad at it, a fact he wore like a badge of pride, grinning as his famously atrocious steps brought gales of laughter from the audience.
    Reese’s brash acceptance of his own disastrous skill had made her own inadequacies seem more bearable. They were both able to laugh at their own folly. Winter had turned to spring, and for the first time since she had been taken away from home, Kadee felt that things might be okay.
    Until today.
    “He kissed me,” she said, and then bit her lip, thinking,
Stupid!
She sounded petulant, and Aaron looked amused.
    To his credit, the serpiente prince seemed to realize after a moment that this wasn’t a grinning matter. “This really has you upset, doesn’t it?” he asked, obviously unclear
why,
but willing to grant that she
was.
    Kadee had been