Page 43 of Academy of the Wicked: Year Three

One more lean forward, one more moment of terrible intimacy.

"As soon as you realize and embark on your own journey to unravel the wickedness in your bloodline, will you discover the truth."

He turns away without goodbye or blessing. His footsteps make no sound as he leaves, but each one feels like another nail in a coffin I don't yet know I'm building.

The moment the throne room doors close behind him, Father's rage erupts.

"You will not listen to such foolishness!"

His voice carries the particular fury of those caught in lies they thought buried.

"What does Father mean?" I ask, voice small and confused.

The question is a mistake.

His hand closes around my tiny arm with force that will leave bruises shaped like ownership. Mother doesn't intervene—she never does when Father decides lessons need teaching.

I'm dragged from the throne room, small feet scrambling to keep up, ceremonial robes tangling around legs too short for his pace. The corridors blur past—crystal and starlight and beauty that will soon become the architecture of my nightmares.

The punishment chamber hasn't been used in decades. Dust motes dance in shafts of light that penetrate through cracks in ancient stone. The tools remain sharp though—Fae craftsmanship doesn't dull with time, only grows hungrier.

What happens next shapes everything I become.

My eyes snap open.

The memory shatters, leaving me gasping in the strange half-light of this realm. Sweat coats my skin like shame, droplets tracing paths down temples and pooling in the hollow of mythroat. My hands shake—fine tremors that speak of adrenaline with nowhere to go.

I sit up carefully, trying not to wake the others. The motion feels wrong, and that's when I notice?—

My voice, when I whisper a curse, is higher. Softer.

I look down at hands that are smaller, more delicate. The shift happened while I slept, unconscious mind deciding which form felt safer for processing traumatic memory.

I'm Nikki now.

The feminine form I was told would only bring failure, sitting in a realm that actively hates my existence, surrounded by people who call me different pronouns than what I am depending on which face I wear.

But am I a split entity like Gabriel and Gwenivere?

The thought makes my stomach turn. I don'tfeellike two people. There's no other voice in my head, no sense of sharing space with another consciousness.

Just me, twisted into shapes that please others, performing roles written by prophecy and reinforced by punishment.

If I had a twin—if my parents really did what the Elder implied—would that twin have been male? Would he have been Nikolai, not as performance but as truth? Would he have claimed the throne without question, without the constant doubt that eats at me like acid?

Would he have been spared what happened in those years between prophecy and academy?

The memories threaten to surface—hands where they shouldn't be, words that cut deeper than any blade, the systematic destruction of everything soft in me until only sharp edges remained. I push them down with practiced efficiency.

Not here. Not now. Not ever if I can help it.

But the questions remain.

Is this practice common among the Fae?

Terminating inconvenient children to maintain single heirs?

It wouldn't surprise me.