I toss a worn notepad toward Peighton. It lands at her feet. She stares at it, then crouches and picks it up with shaking fingers. My mother’s handwriting bleeds across every page in dark ink. Instructions. Reasons. Vengeance written like scripture. I watch the moment she understands. Her lips part.
“She told you,” Peighton says hoarsely, “to marry me. To have a child with me. Then kill us both?”
“An eye for an eye,” I agree. “Magnus slept with your mother. Blood must answer blood. The Picciano line stains ours. Mother wanted it cleansed.”
Her voice is barely audible. “Then you’ll kill yourself too?”
I smile. It feels wrong on my face. “That is part of the plan.”
Another raven strikes the window. Crack. Another. Crack. Tiny fractures spiderweb across the glass.
“Gustav,” she says. “Please. Look at me. Not at them. At me.”
She steps closer. Brave girl. Stupid girl. My girl. Our daughter squirms in my hold, making soft little noises. I look down at her, then back at Peighton.
“Gustav, you are a loving man. A father. A husband. You’re not like your mom. You can’t kill your own family.”
I snort, but unamused.
“Do you know,” I ask quietly, “how I got my burns?”
She shakes her head, eyes never leaving mine.
“My mother poured lighter fluid on my back while I slept,” I say, almost conversational. “She struck a match. I woke up on fire. I jumped through a window. The snow put me out. After that, I stopped trying to save her broken heart. I tied her to a stake and burned her like the witch she became.”
Keira gasps. Micha stiffens. Peighton flinches, but she does not back away.
I stand, leaving Vera rested against a pillow, and waltz to a drawer, retrieving a clear plastic bag. Ash, fine and gray, shifts inside. I hold it up.
“Mother,” I say softly. “She still talks more than she did.”
“Gustav,” Peighton whispers, voice rough. “Do you hear yourself?”
“Do you still think I am a loving man?” I ask her.
She looks at me like she is seeing every version of me at once. The man I was. The madman I became. The husband I tried tobe. The father I am failing. She draws a breath that shudders and straightens her spine.
“Yes,” she says.
The word hits me harder than any bullet.
“You didn’t know what love was,” she continues, voice gaining strength, “but you do now. Me. Our daughter. That is love. What you did for me in the forest, the coma, that was love. Not this. Not her.”
She points at the bag in my hand, at the ravens that are now clawing at the cracked glass. “She is a casualty of her own hate. She wants the world to hurt as much as she did, and she will kill everyone through you if you let her. Don’t let her.”
She gazes into my eyes, hope swirling behind their depths. I feel her. Through the madness, I feel her. I need her. She’s the only one who knows I’m still in here.
I barely whisper, “Peighton.”
The window explodes inward with a shatter of glass. Ravens flood through the opening like a black storm, wings beating, beaks snapping. They scream and dive, going for the smallest, weakest thing in the room.
Our daughter.
“Vera!” Peighton shrieks.
Micha and I fire into the air, shots echoing off stone as birds scatter and regroup. Keira, the closest to the baby, dives for the bed, snatching Vera into her arms, shielding her with her body. A dark shape coalesces by the fireplace. The flames roar higher, fanning up the walls, and my mother steps out of the fire, eyes black, torch in hand.
“Enough,” Sophia hisses. “I’ll finish what I started.”
