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The pounding strengthens from somewhere across the atrium.

Poett stands next to the bed, glaring down at me. “I’ve spent my whole life being warned about Hollows from Caldera, how your people could ruin us, how all you care about is taking magic from our land. The only thing that let me sleep at night was knowing the elixir kept Hollows away. Then you showed up.” He punches my chest, forcing the air out of me. “We are nothing without magic.”

The distant pounding continues, and I close my eyes, letting it become a beat in my mind, a comfort as I wait for my breath to return.

Chapter

Fifty-Three

The Centress slid into the room after Poett left me bruised and quaking. I retreated to a corner, trying to hide in the darkness of the falling night, but she picked me up off the ground.

Are you ready to stop resisting, Everielle?

That was all she said before her hands slid onto my face and unleashed her gift. Pain cracked through me, then I felt the pull on my mind. I fought to keep my memories, putting every remaining scrap of strength into holding on to the little moments I thought I didn’t care about. She slapped me across the face when I didn’t let go of a single one. I was too numb to feel it.

Poett and Jace returned over the next two days, pushing me to my limits, weakening me for the Centress’ visit each night. Everybreath is tight with pain. Every movement spurs regret. My legs and arms and stomach sting where Poett cut open the top layer of my skin in slow, torturous slices, right through my clothes. I tried not to cry out with every entrance into my flesh, but I couldn’t even muster the thought of silence when he wiped the bloody knife over the scar on my neck—too painful a reminder of where it all started.

The pounding sound always comes with the physical pain, then returns when I’m left alone, falling apart inside.

My visions of death are the only escape. How ironic that the gory end of life and crushing loss feel like a comfort compared to real pain. But the relief dissolves when my senses come to life after my visions, spiking my pain to cruel levels. I’m weak without food for three days, unable to chase that invincible high I felt in the woods before Eli found me. But I won’t let my mother ruin me. I won’t.

“I gave you a chance to cooperate, and you didn’t take it,” the Centress says, pulling my sore limbs upward and forcing me to stand. She unruffles the long skirt of her crimson dress. “I expect better from my daughter.” Her words slice past my thickened skin to the vulnerable layers beneath, and my toxic mind scolds me for letting down my mother.

“I don’t have what you want. Please let me and my friend go home. I won’t come back to Sonnet. I won’t say a word to anyone in Caldera.” I don’t care about saving anyone else right now, about elixirs and babies and doing the right thing. I can barelythink. I want it to be over. I should never have left that stone room. I should have listened to Kelter.

She blinks her beady black eyes, her hardened face unreadable. “Your home is here with me.”

Her simple statement turns my despair into outrage. “You’re nothing to me. You got rid of me. You wreck lives. You separate mothers and babies. You drug Calderans, and Cam’s death is your fault too.” She stiffens at my words, and I throw more at her. “If you weren’t forcing her to take the babies into Caldera, she’d still be alive.”And I wouldn’t be a killer.

Rain smacks down on the stepping stones of the atrium, thunder rolling.

“Cam?” Her face ices over. She clamps her hand over my mouth, shoving me back against the wall. “I don’t know who or what you’re talking about,” she says. “You’re delusional. The imbued carriages take care of everything. And I told you that I don’t need to take the babies’ magic to put back into the cycle now that I have you. They won’t have to be separated if you cooperate.” Her hand peels away, letting my shallow breaths free.

“You’re lying.”Everything’s a lie.

“Come to me, love. I’m not going to hurt you.” She pulls me against her, my head landing on her ribs.

“You already did.” I shove her away, and she lets me, taking a step back. “You used rocks to rip me open.” My chest caves in at the memory, the pain. “You put your hands on me.”

“I needed to see what you were given. I was simply gathering information. Any mother would.” She holds out an arm to me, long and elegant, beckoning, as if I would willingly go to her.

“You sent guards to beat me.” I gesture weakly to my bruised body.

“Which could have been avoided if you weren’t so stubborn.”

I let out a defeated sigh and unstick the fabric from the scab-crusted cuts on my belly, grazing my fingers over the dry blood. “What’s happening to me? Who…what am I?”

“I’ll tell you. I’ll explain who your father is. I’ll tell you everything I know about the magic he gave you and the birthmark on your chest that comes from him.”

My head spins. My father? I press a hand between my ribs, clutching my birthmark. Anotherboomof thunder rumbles the building.

She reaches for my hands. I’m too slow as I pull them away. The warmth of her skin travels up my arm, spreading through my core and out to my limbs like the magic that finds its way into me. It’s what I’ve always wanted. All the answers. All the possibilities. A mother. I’m caught, feelings smeared all over my face. How couldshehave this effect on me?

“You’re my daughter—of course I want you to know who you are.” She steps closer, her dress sweeping over the toes of my boots, and I take in her scent of wildflowers, the ones that spring up in the rare patches of sun that make it to the Calderan forest floor. The ones that I stomp flat as I make my own path. Her tall frame soars above me, and I feel like a child again, so small and helpless.

I bury the absurd ideas strutting through my mind—a mother’s shoulder to cry on, someone to confide in, someone who can’t turn their back on me. She’s not that person I invented. She’s not the mother I imagined in my head year after year, the one I fell asleep to as a child, when I still believed in hope.

She’s a fucking nightmare.