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“The night you faked your death?”

“I had to,” Alice insisted. “Fey… there’s no way the Queen doesn’t know about this, no way she didn’t sanction this. Her own twin is the head of the White Coven. They are purposefully cutting Witches off from their gifts. All to keep themselves in power. And if Dameon sent a Blade to kill Phillip, if he sent you to burn down my warehouse, they must know that someone is on to them, someone is trying to fight them. They know it’s only a matter of time, and they’ll get more desperate and more dangerous to keep this from getting out.”

Fire roared in Fey’s veins, as though in response to the challenge Dameon and the Queen posed. She could have gone her whole life without knowing this part of herself, Fey realized. Gone her entire life missing such a vital part of her, a gift entrusted to her by the Goddess herself.

“So… what now?” Fey asked, giving in to the rage that flared inside her.

“Now you know the truth. And I can unlock your shackle and let you go if you still want to. But if not? If you want to help?” Alice’s smile was full of menace. “Then we’re going to make them pay for what they’ve done.”

Fey considered it. Considered what they’d taken from her. From Joy.

“Unlock me,” she told Alice. “And I’ll help you however I can.”

Alice’s smile widened. “You and I are going to take down an empire, babe, and with you by my side, there’s nothing any of them can do to stop us.”

Chapter 48

Fey had managed to melt a few segments of the chain that held her shackled to the floor during her second Awakening, freeing herself to walk around. Still, it was a profound relief when Alice unlocked the manacle at her wrist and it dropped free.

“That was an incredibly fucked up thing to do, Alice,” Fey said, rubbing at the skin where the metal had chaffed her wrist.

“I know,” Alice answered, and to her credit she managed to look appropriately ashamed. “I know, babe. Look, I’m sorry, but… you have no idea how much we’ve sacrificed to get to this point, and if there was a chance—even just a tiny, insignificant chance—that you could have stopped us, then all of that would have been for nothing.”

“Fuck you,” Fey told her, but there was no heat behind it anymore, no venom. “You could have come to us about this. We would have helped you.”

“Really, Fey?” Alice asked, holding her stare like a challenge. “No, I need you to really think about it and put yourself in my position. Our entire job is protecting the Realm. You’re telling me, without any doubt, that you would have jumped up to help me take down the very institution you trained your whole life to protect?”

“I…” Fey stuttered and paused.

And that was it. She didn’t know, did she? If she hadn’t seen Dameon slit her sister’s throat, if she hadn’t had reason to doubt the forces behind the throne, would she have believed Alice? Would she have offered her help?

Or would she have turned against her, choosing her identity as a Queen’s Blade over her own sister?

Alice chuckled at her silence. “See?” she said. “I would have been asking you to turn your back on everything you knew and trusting that you wouldn’t just kill me outright. It was a risk, Fey, and one I couldn’t take.”

“And Joy?” Fey asked, unable to hide the bite in her voice. “You couldn’t even trust Joy? With everything she meant to you?”

She flinched and looked away, unable to hold Fey’s gaze any longer. “Even Joy,” Alice whispered in a small voice. “Fey… what do you know about our sisters from before they joined the Blades?”

Fey opened her mouth, then closed it quickly. Nothing, she realized, and that was the point. She knew nothing about their lives from before they were her sisters.

“You told me a little about your time in the army, a little about your family and who you were,” Alice was saying. “But Joy? Lilith? I know so little about their old lives. About where their loyalties really lie. How could I trust them, with so little information?”

“Lilith always said it didn’t matter,” Fey insisted. “That who we were before died the moment we became Blades.”

“And you’d be willing to bet your life on whether or not she was lying? Not even your life, Fey—would you be willing to bet the lives of everyone in this building? On this block?” Alice gestured around them. “Because they’re all in on this. Thousands of us, working together for months, some of them years, to bring an end to the Crown’s oppression. Would you be willing to bet every single life here on that?”

No, Fey realized. She wouldn’t.

“Not telling Joy… Leaving Joy… Fey, it was the hardest thing I’ve ever done, believe me. Even if we both survive this, what do you think are the odds she’ll forgive me? I lied to her. Hell, I made her think I was dead.” A single tear slipped from Alice’s eye and rolled down the dark skin of her cheek. “I had to sacrifice that, all of that, to be here. I had to throw it all away like it was nothing, when it… it was the best thing that ever happened to me. She was the best thing that ever happened to me, Fey.”

Fey glanced away, giving her sister the privacy of her own emotions as Alice’s careful veneer of strength began to crack.

“But this is bigger than me. Bigger than Joy. For years, the Queen has let them steal our powers, the power the Goddess herself gave to us. And she has to pay for that. She has to pay for the starvation in this city, for the Fallen who have been forgotten and who fell through the cracks all because she never cared about anything but her own Faction.”

“Is that why you’re working with Prey for the Crown?”

Alice almost laughed. “Yes,” she said with a smile. “Goddess bless them Fey, they were in shambles when Phillip put me in contact with them. They’re children trying to play in the big leagues. The biggest move against the Crown they’d ever made was to stage a sit in at one of the Temples.”