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I’m about to laugh when he looks up at the last of the dim light being consumed by the night, as if he were waiting for it this whole time, and that’s it. He flips. His fingers sink into my arm. He yanks me away from the door, throws it open and thrusts me inside. Remorse flashes across his face, only a twinge before—

“Trigger time.” He slams the door shut. Me inside. Him outside.

Chapter

Twenty-Eight

The lock clicks, and pitch darkness crowds me. I blink to make sure my eyes are open. Still dark. So, so dark. It smells like wet, rotting wood and mold. I feel the walls—smooth to my left and right, and rough like the bark of a tree behind me—only inches away. I can’t spread my elbows out at my sides. A damn closet. With no way out. No light. No end. My control unravels, spiraling me into a vision. A vision without sight.

Darkness walks up me, cold and damp on bare skin. Wet, deathly kisses. All the way up my legs, my belly, my chest, my neck—then pure blackness pries open my mouth and crams itself down my throat. It spreads like roots, growing until it reaches my mind, an inescapable insistence with a silent, cruel laugh, leaking into every thought. And destroying me.

I scream.

Life slams back into me, thickening the darkness and tingling over my skin.

I bang my hands flat on the door.

“Elivander!”

My fists pound.

“Let me out!”

Only silence answers, and I can’t stop the memories from surfacing.

The small dark pantry. The hours I spent there.

The threats.You go into that forest one more time, you’ll be in here for a week.

The judgments.What’s wrong with you, child? Always asking questions. Always wandering off. Don’t you understand there’s nothing out there?

The cries,mycries. Unanswered.

“Elivander, damn you. Open the fucking door!”

He could be gone. Back underground in the castle. He could leave me here as long as he wants.

I drop to the floor, wooden planks with notches and splinters that poke through my pants. Sitting with my knees tucked and my back to a side wall, I hold my necklace and count. Out loud. Like I did as a little girl in that pantry, locked away by my foster mother. I count to a thousand, endless strings of numbers, over and over, losing track of how many times.

Hours pass.

Then I hear it. Acreakoutside the closet.

“Open this door!” I cry.

I stand up and kick it with my bare foot. Pain rips through my toes, and I kick it again. And again and again. The door rattles against the frame.

My foot stills, and my voice quiets. The dank darkness wraps me up tighter in its wispy tendrils, breathing with me.

So softly I whisper, “It’s dark in here.” Hot tears fall, and I sob. I’m so fucking sick of crying, sick of the dark and the pain and the locked doors.

“It’s dark out here too.” Eli’s voice drifts under the slightest sliver of space beneath the door, a consoling tone cracking with regret, with pain.

My chest collapses, and I wonder if that look on his face while waiting on the sofa was the pain of knowing what he was about to do, if a part of him was fighting it.

“What do you want from me?” I ask.

The softness is gone. His words strike me. “You want light? Make it.” His body flattens against the door with a swish of fabric, a whine of wood. “Use the tree.”