I knew.
I pressed my lips to her brow—tender, trembling, desperate—and spoke the cruelest lie I’ve ever told. “It’s okay, Mother. You can let go now… I promise I’ll be okay.”
The truth lodged in my throat like glass. I would never be okay again.
A sob clawed its way out of me, sharp and shattering. “I’ll find Father. I’ll free him. I swear it. I-I love you…”
Her lips moved one final time. So faint. Barely audible over the fire’s distant crackle.
Her final words—“M-my d-daughter… my Q-Queen…”—were spoken with the faintest hint of cherry wine still clinging to her lips, the sweetness of her life’s work even in death.
And then—nothing.
Her eyes lost their light. Her chest stilled.
“NO!” The scream that tore from my lungs wasn’t human. It was grief made flesh. Pain given voice. The fire within me exploded outward, igniting with impossible fury, leaving me bereft and reeling.
Flames consumed my body, roaring in response to my anguish. My skin crackled with magic gone wild—my grief so deep it bent the very forces of the world around me. Lightning split the sky, crashing through the roof in a blinding white flash.
I barely felt it.
Somewhere in the haze, Zayn’s voice reached through the noise. Gentle. Grounding.
“Elara…”
A cloak settled around me. Arms wrapped around my shaking frame. I didn’t fight him. I couldn’t.
He held me like the shattered thing I was, whispering against my hair. “I got you, Peach. I got you.”
I looked up at him through a veil of tears, the smell of blood and fire thick in my nose.
And then—
Darkness took me.
Chapter Four
My eyelids struggled to open, heavy and swollen from the stream of tears that had flowed uncontrollably. I had to pry them apart as they were glued shut by grief.
The strangeness of my surroundings closed in on me, tightening my chest like a vice.
Where was I?
The walls loomed around me, a lifeless shade of gray, starkly devoid of the warmth and comfort that my home had once provided.
Home.
Mother.
Royal-Fae.
Memories surged back violently, flooding my mind like a tidal wave, each fragment sharper than the last—fury, grief, and the nightmarish flash of flames engulfing everything I had held dear.
I killed her.
The cold realization struck me like a punch to the stomach—I had killed my mother. Her words for just me to know, repeated back in my mind over and over again.
A wave of nausea filled the pit of my stomach, rising bitterly to the back of my throat. I scrambled from the bed and stumbled into the bathroom that was incongruously attached to this prison of a room.
