Fear sliced Cecilia in half. Rainer tugged hard on the other side of their connection, but everything in her was ice-cold fear. She’d hoped he would be unconscious, but there he was trying to fight his way back to her, if only through their bond.
Vincent dropped to his knees, and she felt a blade slice into her left inner thigh. She screamed in surprise and pain.
She bucked wildly, and his hand slapped her ass hard again.
“Stop it, Cecilia.” Vincent’s angry whisper cut through her. “Stop moving! I’m not doing what you think. I’m marking your inner thigh withmy initials so that every man who ever gets between these legs will know I was here. So that you’ll never forget. Now scream your fucking head off, or I really will fuck you.”
She couldn’t understand what was happening. Confusion clouded her mind until she felt another slice of the blade, and she screamed.
“More,” he threatened.
She screamed louder. She begged him to stop.
Stella was breathless. Terrified. Split between embodied memory and distant horror.
Rainer’s love surged through their bond, mixing with his fear and her pain.
You’re not alone, it seemed to say. That broke her. She sobbed because she didn’t want to be alone, but she didn’t want him to feel her fear and pain either.
It was so cruel. Vincent wanted Rainer and Xander to think he was hurting her, and he was, but not in the way any of them had expected. Her relief was short-lived when she realized that in not doing it now, he could keep the threat of it fresh for whatever lay ahead.
Time slowed, marked by the fiery slash of his blade on her thigh and the hysterical sobs that ripped out of her. She waited for the fear to leave her, but she couldn’t stop shaking.
By the time Vincent was done with his carving and yanked her shredded skirt back into place, Cecilia’s throat was ragged from screaming, but he hadn’t done what she was afraid he would.
She told herself that she’d been through worse, but it was cold comfort. She felt dazed and unable to concentrate. The first glimmer of her goddess power flickered to life in her chest, but she couldn’t focus her mind. The pain was too bright and her fear too biting. Her skin flashed hot, then cold.
Cecilia screamed.
Stella screamed, too, in embodied agony. In grief that was new to her but old to her mother. In terror that was so cold and left her breathless.
The light of the room faded into blackness, and Stella was vaguely aware of her body. Gasping sobs rattled through her as hersenses returned. Her hip was numb against the cave floor, but she curled into a ball anyway and continued to sob.
Stella wanted to run. She wanted to escape the memory—rip it out like an invasive plant that had rooted down deep and was taking over. She wanted to bail out of the Games—to stop the horrible mess she’d set into motion.
She’d wanted her parents’ story so badly, but she’d not once considered there were such horrifying parts she didn’t know. The omission felt partly of betrayal, partly of love. It was no comfort to know her mother was whole and hale now.
Stella remembered moments when she was young—when Cecilia had crawled into Rainer’s lap, crying, and he sat heart-to-heart with her, trying to help her breathe. She’d watched her mother sitting alone on the swing in the backyard, her father watching from the window.
“I want Mama,”Stella had cried.
“Mama needs some time, Stell-bell. Let me tell you a story instead.”
She’d listened to his story and pretended to fall asleep, but she’d jump up as soon as he left the room and watch him go to her mother and whisper soothing words while Cecilia cried.
Stella remembered it so well because she’d spent so long trying to figure out which of her dolls would make her mother feel better that she’d fallen asleep in the process.
But she could not go to sleep now and wake up safe. She could not unknow what she now knew, and that was exactly what Endros had wanted. To punish her parents by making them relive this. To subject her to the same pain because there was no worse way to hurt a parent than to hurt their child.
Much as her mother made her crazy, Stella never doubted that she was deeply loved. She’d seen it in Cecilia’s teary eyes when she’d sent Stella off on this trip. Cecilia had known what she was sending her daughter into; she was already grieving it, but unable to speak a word of it.
Stella rolled onto her back and squeezed the warm memory stone in her blood-slicked palm. Her body was sore, as if she’d livedthrough that pain, the memory in her bones and muscles as much as her mind.
Endros wanted her to learn what it took to challenge powerful men. He wanted her to learn to be afraid.
Stella lay in the dirt, shattered between past and present, between her own memories that were sliding into context with the puzzle pieces she’d just received from her mother’s past.
She wanted to stand. To run from the horrible place where her life had just split between fantasy and reality. The perfect story, the history that had formed Stella, that had been so foundational in her life, was only half of a history. Her whole world was ruptured.
