And then, he softly placed the grape on my tongue. “It’s rotten.”
He stepped back, but the ghost of his cologne refused to leave me. I stared at the table—the silver, the sunlight, the skeletons in the silence. And my heaving chest.
“Get ready for tonight,” he murmured, already halfway to the door. “I’ll take you to see the dead.”
The air stilled. My limbs forgot how to function.
I blinked. Once. Twice. The curtains fluttered behind him like grieving women, mourning something I couldn’t name.
The sweetness in my mouth curdled. I swallowed it like a prayer gone stale.
He didn’t glance back as he left, and somehow that made it worse.
The grape’s skin on the plate caught the light like torn silk— shiny and ruined.
The dead.
Maybe he meant bodies. Maybe he meant memories.
Maybe… he meant me. Or my mother.
CHAPTER THIRTY
Elegy in Ivory
The sun had long since crawled up the sky when I stood again. Or rather, Elena made me.
Her hands were cold as they pressed against my spine, zipping the crimson gown up my back like sealing a wound. I stared into the vanity mirror, but the reflection wasn’t mine. It was hers. The girl with bloodless lips, haunted eyes, and a pulse that pulsed too loudly in her ears.
“Sit.” Elena pushed me down on the chair, guiding me to the edge of the chaise.
I sat.
She moved around me, quiet except for the occasional clink of a hairpin or snap of a compact case. Her face was blank, carvedfrom stone, not an ounce of sympathy in her eyes. Just like always.
“You look like a ghost,” she muttered, tugging a comb through my hair with no gentleness. “Fitting, considering where you're going.”
I didn’t ask what she meant. I already knew.The dead. That’s what he said. He’d take me to see the dead.
My stomach twisted violently, for I lurched forward. My knees hit the floor, and bile burned up my throat and spilt into the porcelain bowl Elena held out just in time. She didn’t flinch. She didn’t even give me comfort. Just stood there. Watching me unravel.
When I finished, she wiped my mouth with a cold cloth and said, flatly, “It’s not weakness to be afraid. It’s stupid to let it stop you.”
I clutched the edge of the vanity like it could hold me together. My vision spun, dark at the edges, my breath coming too fast. Too shallow. My hands trembled.
“I can’t—” I gasped.
“You can.” Elena's voice cut clean through the rising panic. “And you will. Because if you don’t, someone else will write your ending for you. He already is.”
I looked up, locking eyes with her in the mirror. Her gaze was sharp, not cruel but exact like a scalpel.
“Do you want to go?” she asked as something shimmered in her warm eyes. A yes or no.
My lips parted. I didn’t know what I was going to say.
The truth?
The lie?
