The same sharp, red-hot anger I’ve always felt when Crypt has made light of destroying my family twists in my gut. Voices titter in my head.
He killed us all out of vengeance. He was bitter because we wouldn’t take him in.
You should leave him in this torture.
Selfish incubus!another snarls.
"You must have had a reason,” Maven prompts in Crypt’s memory.
The prick has the nerve to fuckingsmile.“Must I have?"
Of course, he is so cavalier about ravaging my childhood in one blow. How could I ever have felt sympathy for this sociopathic murderer? Madness seeps deeper into my skull, darkening my paranoid, irritated thoughts until I sway, ears ringing.
When the ringing fades, Crypt is already speaking again.
“—keeper of Silas’s parents’ quintet was a wolf shifter with a sickness. The kind of perverted sickness of the mind that I hunt down at every chance. He enjoyed taking advantage of children, especially the children of powerful legacy families."
…what?
He’s lying,a voice snaps in my head.You know how non-fae are, lying whenever they please. He knows nothing.
You would have known this if it were true,another voice assures me.
I want to interrupt Maven and Crypt and insist that can't be true, but…the voices are wrong this time. Crypt can get inside people’s heads through their dreams and psyches. He would have seen more inside the subconscious of my parents’ keeper than I ever could have witnessed or guessed.
And what reason would he have to lie, in a private moment like this?
“...and when I was in his dreams, exploring his psyche to find the best ways to unravel him, I realized that he had his eye set on..." Crypt trails off, clearly reluctant.
Maven is undeterred. “Set on?"
"Decimus.”
My keeper’s shocked expression mirrors my own as, at long last, I finally hear Crypt explainwhyhe killed my relatives. How he did it. How he has no regrets and only targeted the ones involved in revolting practices before the rest destroyed each other or themselves as a result.
The voices in my head are screeching in fervent denial, refusing his every candid word and making it difficult to focus. But one thought floats out of reach of the tempestuous muck inside my brain: for once in my life, I understand Crypt.
Because had I known what he knew then, and had I been capable of protecting the others from something so wretched when we were all so young…
I understand.
I would have done what he did.
You’re just as hopelessly wretched,a plate-sized spider whispers in agreement as it crawls past in this memory. Either that’s a figment of my mind, or…no. I’m almost certain one was real, this time.
“Crane would never believe me if I told him that,” the Nightmare Prince finishes, drawing my attention again. “He's much more comfortable hating me for it, so I've never bothered explaining."
"If Baelfire was eight, you would have been…thirteen?" Maven checks.
"Something like that."
And I was nine.
Nine years old and completely unaware. After my parents’ keeper killed himself, my parents’ quintet kept a united frontin public even as they splintered in private. My world inverted. Gone were the proud parents so focused on our family name and my potential future as a favorite of the Immortal Quintet. Instead, their curses slowly returned to center stage. My father went mad, my mother grew uncontrollably violent, and it escalated day by day until they slaughtered each other in front of me.
I blamed Crypt for all of it. Iloathedhim.
It was your right,voices in my head insist.
