Alastor shifted forward, rolling his sleeves in a slow and deliberate move as he stepped among the shadows on the floor, no longer caring which were mine and which were his. “Believeme, Huntress, I learned that lesson long ago from the same man who taught you.” His voice was quiet, but it cut through the chaos like a blade. “Love doesn’t redeem monsters. It reveals them. It carves us open, laying our rot bare, and dares the world to look away.” His eyes, smoldering with a flicker of something broken, locked on to mine. “But the difference between us is I stopped flinching a long time ago.”
“The snow melts but never touches the ground,” I whispered, watching Winter trail her bloody fingers across the walls. “He promised her forever too. Promises taste like copper when they break.”
“Sit.”
My body obeyed instantly, a chair materializing beneath me as my knees buckled.
Break them all.
Break the world.
Break yourself.
“What do you see when they come?” he asked, circling me like a predator. “What voices whisper to you?”
“Stars fall through forever. Dancing in gardens that died in winter. His eyes were hazel until they weren’t. Until they burned with lies that tasted like freedom.”
Winter laughed.
“Tell me how it feels when they surface,” Alastor commanded.
“Like drowning in memories that aren’t mine, but are. Like breathing shadows that taste like betrayal. Like dancing with death over and over and over… Do you waltz?”
He stopped suddenly, head tilting as if listening to something I couldn’t hear. A slow smile spread across his face, the kind that made Winter hiss and my Remnants ripple over my arms.
“Well,” he said, straightening his tie. “This is an interesting development. Guards!”
Shadows materialized into the form of two massive figures, their edges rippling like smoke. I’d seen them before when they attacked Archer and I. Fancy. I’d gotten a sword that day. I missed my sword.
“I miss my sword.”
“Take our Huntress to her room. She has a visitor I think she’ll be very interested in seeing.” He turned to me, that cruel smile widening. “Stay there until I return. We’re not finished yet.”
“Can I eat?”
“For fuck’s sake,” he said with a huff. “Someone feed the mortal.”
My feet carried me toward the door before I could think, before I could fight. Winter followed, her bloody footprints marking our path through halls that twisted like snakes.
He’s playing games.
Always games.
Break the games.
Break it all.
The shadow guard things deposited me in my pretty, little gilded prison, taking up posts outside the door. I paced, trying to sort reality from memory, truth from lies, my thoughts from Winter’s whispers.
“Can I sword? No. Eat.”
I turned to study myself in the mirror, searching for the woman I knew was being swallowed by madness. But rather than seeing my own face, the entire reflection was filled with a thousand faces of women with the same eyes, but different expressions of pain. One of a thousand. I was only one.
When the door opened, my heart stopped.
Thea stood in the doorway, copper hair gleaming in the lamplight. “Hello, P.” She threw a handful of metal scraps from her pocket onto the floor. “You ready to bust out of this place?”
23
