I double over like I’ve been kicked in the stomach, and my mouth wrenches wide on a sob that makes no sound because I inhale it at the last second.
Darroc is out there with the princes. I don’t dare betray grief. I don’t dare make a sound that they might hear.
Daddy was my greatest cheerleader, always telling me wise things I rarely listened to and never understood. I should have taken the time to understand. I should have spent more time focused on who I was inside and less on who I was outside. Hindsight, 20/20.
Tears run down my face. As I turn away from the mirror, my knees go out from under me and I collapse to the bathroom floor in a heap. I curl into a ball, silently heaving.
I’ve held it at bay as long as I can. Grief crashes over me, drowning me. Alina. Barrons. Mom and Dad, too? I can’t bear it. I can’t keep it all in.
I cram a fist in my mouth to stop my screams.
I can’t let anyone hear. He would know I’m not what I pretend to be. What I must be to fix my world.
There I sat on the couch with him, looking at my sister in all those pictures. And each one reminded me how, when we were little, in every single picture taken of us together, her arm was around me, protecting me, watching out for me.
She was happy in the pictures Darroc showed me. Dancing. Talking with friends. Sightseeing. He’d taken so many of her photo albums from her apartment. Left us with hardly any. As if the paltry few months he’d spent with her gave him more right to her possessions than me—who’d spent my whole life loving her!
I hadn’t been able to trace my fingers over her face in front of him because it would have betrayed emotion, weakness. I’d had to lavish all my attention on him. He’d watched me the entire time with those glittering copper eyes, absorbing every detail of my reaction.
I knew it would be a deadly mistake—and the last I ever made—to underestimate the ancient, brilliant mind behind those cold metallic eyes.
After what seemed like years of torture, he finally began to look tired, yawning, even rubbing his eyes.
I forget his body is human, subject to limits.
Eating Unseelie doesn’t keep you from needing sleep. Like caffeine or speed, it wires you hard but, when you crash, you crash just as hard. I suspect that’s a large part of the reason he never sleeps more than one night in the same place. It’s when he’s most vulnerable. I imagine it must chafe, to have a human body that needs sleep after having been Fae and not needing anything for eternity.
I decide that’s when I’ll kill him. When he’s sleeping. After I’ve gotten what I want. I’ll wake him and, while he’s still feeling humanly muddled, I’ll smile and drive my spear through his heart. And I’ll say, “This is for Alina and for Jericho.”
My fist isn’t keeping my sobs down.
They’re beginning to leak around it in soft moans. I’m lost in pain, fragments of memories crashing over me: Alina waving good-bye at the gate the day she left for Dublin; Mom and Dad tied to chairs, gagged and bound, waiting for a rescue that never came; Jericho Barrons, dead on the ground.
Every muscle in my body spasms and I can’t breathe. My chest feels hot, tight, crushed beneath a massive weight.
I fight to keep the sobs in. If I open my mouth to breathe, they’ll come out, but I’m waging a hopeless battle: Sob and breathe? Or don’t sob and suffocate?
My vision starts to dim. If I lose consciousness from holding my breath, at least one great cry will explode from me.
Is he at my door, listening?
I dredge my mind for a memory to banish the pain.
When I recovered from being Pri-ya, I was horrified to realize that, although my time with the princes and afterward at the abbey was blurred, I retained every single memory of what Barrons and I had done together in bed in graphic detail.
Now I’m grateful for them.
I can use them to keep myself from screaming.
You’re leaving me, Rainbow Girl.
No—that’s the wrong one!
I rewind, fast.
There. The first time he came to me, touched me, was inside me. I give myself over to it, replaying every detail in loving memory.
In time, I’m able to remove my fist. The tension in my body eases.
Warm in memories, my body shivers on the cold marble bathroom floor.
Alina’s cold. Barrons is cold.
I should be cold, too.
* * *
When I finally sleep, the cold invades my dreams. I pick my way through jagged-edged ravines gouged into cliffs of black ice. I know this place. The paths I walk are familiar, as if I’ve walked them a hundred times before. Creatures watch me from caverns chiseled into the frozen walls.
I catch glimpses of the beautiful, sad woman slipping barefoot across the snow, just ahead. She’s calling to me. But each time she opens her mouth, an icy wind steals her words. You must—I catch, before a gust carries the rest of her sentence away.
I cannot—she cries.
Make haste! she warns over her shoulder.
I run after her in my dreams, trying to hear what she’s saying. Stretching out my hand to catch her.
But she stumbles at the edge of an abyss, loses her footing, and is gone.
I stare, stunned and horrified.
The loss is unbearable, as if I myself have died.
I awaken violently, snapping up from the floor, gasping.
I’m still trying to process the dream when my body jerks and begins to move like a pre-programmed automaton.
I watch in terror as my legs make me rise, force me to leave the bathroom. My feet carry me across the room, my hands open the balcony doors. My body is propelled by an unseen power into the darkness, beyond the protection of my crimson ward line.
I’m not functioning of my own volition. I know it, and I can’t stop myself. I’m completely unprotected where I stand. I don’t even have my spear. Darroc took it away before the prince sifted me out.
I stare out at a shadowy outline of rooftops, awaiting, dreading whatever command might come next. Knowing I won’t be able to refuse subsequent orders any more than I could this one.
I’m a puppet. Someone is yanking my strings.
As if to underscore that point, or perhaps merely to make a mockery of me, my arms suddenly shoot straight up into the air, flail wildly above my head before dropping limply back to my sides.
I watch my feet as they shuffle a cheery two-step. I wish I could believe I’m dreaming, but I’m not.
I dance on the balcony, soft-shoeing it faster and faster.