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“I warned you, Daxeel.” I let a look of hatred twist my face, a glimmer of disgust in the way I drink him in from top to bottom. “You might just break me. But you pushed and pushed—and now there is so much pain between us. I will never fall to the boots of the male who wants me dead.”

“I promised you—” He starts with a growl.

But I cut down anything he has to say.

“I don’t care!” My shout is spurred on with urgent steps closer. “I don’t care what you promised, or that you are punishing me for an old slight I have redeemed myself for. You have hurt medeeply,” and my throat thickens. “You have hurt me in the way so many others have done before you. And now it isyouwho must be redeemed.”

His mask shatters like glass, as though I smacked it clean off him. His throat bobs and he falls his weight back onto one boot; a retreat.

I move for him, an advance and nothing less. “Now it’s my turn. A fae promise from me to you.” My nails cut into the meat of my palms. I glare up at him. “We are to enter the second passage within the week. And I will starve you of my touch with every ounce of willpower I have. How it must burn inside of you, that need to hold me, scent me, love me—but you can’t.”

His eyes gleam, but not like swords he must draw and skewer me with. They gleam like oceans; like abysses and voids.

The urge to fall into them, to be lost in the worlds they contain…

My heart loves him still. But it’s broken, too.

By him.

So I leave—and he doesn’t chase.

I take the halls and the stairs straight to Aleana’s bedchamber.

But the sight of her startles me in the doorway.

A sweaty, pale skeleton, she keeps to the bed, limp on the mattress.

Melantha croons over her, using her long, spidery fingers to brush away strands of hair from Aleana’s clammy cheeks. Her faint murmurs don’t quite reach me, and so I don’t know the exact words she soothes her daughter with.

I should turn my back on their private moment and leave. But for a moment, a long beat of hesitation and horror and curiosity, I invade. I watch, study the purple bruises that smear Aleana’s legs, as though painted carelessly over her ashen complexion; and I listen to the murmurs Melantha speaks, and the wheeze that threads through Aleana’s breaths.

Silently, I draw away from the door and dip back into the shadows of the corridor. I decide it’s best to not intrude.

Aleana needs her rest.

And so I return to my hideout.

My own fatigue weighs me down with each dragging step I take through the halls of Hemlock back to my bedchamber.

But I don’t climb into the sheets.

For a beat, I stand at the foot of the bed. The dullness of my eyes is fixed on the bedstand, the piles of tomes flattening the scrolls I borrowed from the scripture room.

I move for them.

One by one, I yank and wrestle out the scrolls from the crushing pressure of the useless tomes, then I take them to the plush armchair by the window.

The Quiet’s chill is soothing as it wisps into the bedchamber from the window that Tris, I assume, left ajar. It’s a welcome caress as I curl up and unravel the first scroll.

This is how I spend the bulk of my Quiet.

While I find little that can help me, these records are interesting all the same. I read the failures of those two dokkalves on record who made it to Mother’s ear.

Both share the bloodline with Daxeel, the line of Sgail, so they must be distant relatives with centuries between them.

But they failed.

The Cursed Shadows didn’t come to be. The spiral faded and the darkness thinned.